Moreover, minority voter turnout has actually increased in states that have implemented voter ID laws. In Georgia, for example, which enacted a photo ID law in 2008, the number of African-American voters has increased more than ten percent after the new law went into effect.
Given all that, it’s not surprising then to find that voter photo ID laws have engendered widespread bi-partisan and bi-racial support, evidenced by a December 2011 Rasmussen poll which found 70 percent of likely US voters believing that voters “should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to cast their ballot.”
Yet, neither popular will nor common sense appears to sway Attorney General Holder who, days before the DOJ rejected the South Carolina voter ID law in December, said we must “call on our political parties to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success.”
The reality, of course, is that voter ID laws have nothing do with racism and everything to do with winning elections, in particular the re-election of President Obama.
Democratic Representative Donna Christensen of the Congressional Black Caucus made that point when she said in January that voter ID laws “whether racially based or not, is a direct attempt to not only undermine the election process, but a specific attempt to derail what surely would be and ought to be the re-election of Barack Obama.”
For his part, Democratic Representative Charles Rangel said he wasn’t sure if the voter ID laws are being advanced due to “the color of the President” or because Obama “received record-breaking participation by the very same people that they’re making it difficult to vote.”
So, given those two comments, it wasn’t too surprising when Judicial Watch recently announced that documents it had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the DOJ and Obama White House partnering with ACORN-affiliated Project Vote on a national campaign to use the NVRA to register a key voting demographic for the Obama 2012 re-election campaign: recipients of public assistance programs.
To that end, since 2008 Project Vote has been using the threat of DOJ lawsuits under Section 7 of the NVRA — which relates to welfare office voter registration obligations — to pressure officials in various states to change policies and procedures to increase voter registration among public assistance recipients, such as those who receive food stamps, welfare and unemployment.
Since 2008 Project Vote and ACORN (now renamed the Affordable Housing Centers of America) has successfully pressured officials in Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, New Mexico, and Colorado to implement these new policies. In the case of Colorado, those changes have led to the state having four times the national average of invalid voter registration forms.
It should be noted that Project Vote and ACORN have both been linked to massive voter registration fraud with at least 70 ACORN/Project Vote employees having been convicted of voter registration fraud in a dozen states since 2006.
Moreover, a 2009 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report found approximately one-third of the 1.2 million new registrations turned in by Project Vote and ACORN in 2008 to be fraudulent.
Not surprisingly, despite those allegations, the Obama administration failed to pursue a criminal investigation against these groups, claiming they had broken no laws but had merely engaged in “questionable hiring and training practices.”
That 2009 decision coincided at the same time the Obama Justice Department refused to go forward with a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panthers who were videotaped carrying clubs and baseball bats, shouting racial slurs and issuing threats to intimidate Philadelphia voters during the 2008 election.
So, given the Obama administration’s lackluster commitment to ensuring the integrity of the electoral system, its stance on preventing the enactment of photo ID laws led Judicial Watch President Tom Fritton to recently conclude, “President Obama and the Holder Justice Department evidently have no interest in clean elections this year,” adding, “This is a recipe for voter fraud and stolen elections.”
Unfortunately, it’s a recipe that continues to faithfully serve and nourish the electoral prospects of the Obama administration.
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