Many, perhaps most, civil rights groups and their followers in the Democratic Party regard the requirement of photo voter ID’s and other measures of fighting vote fraud as little, if anything, more than racist attempts to suppress the black vote.
John Fund, in a superb article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, persuasively disagrees.
Don’t blacks have I.D.’s too?
Because of Racism many Black Afrikans do not have proper birth records in the South
How could fund not be persuasive (aside from the fact that he usually is) on this issue?
It seems to me self-evident that opposing voter-fraud is neither racist or unwise, and one wonders why this is even an issue except that the left is willing to use even the lightest figs of arguments to protect their raw interests and rally their base.
Of course, the great irony of “voter-fraud” is that anytime someone on the right does something that arguably through a most contorted stretch impacts black voters, they are guilty of such fraud. Hence, MCRI is guilty, merely by raising the issue and putting it on the ballot (of course, some thing figs of argument were created about the how, but it would have required the grandest conspiracy in human history to achieve).
That may have been a significant issue 40 years ago, but anyone who wants an ID today, records or not, can get one. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t reform our system of identification, to make it more secure, less liberty intrusive, and more fair. There may be a couple of older minorities who face the problem you cite, and we should find a way to accomodate them (pretty easily done by law). That doesn’t mean throw out the baby with the bathwater and say no id should be required at all.
Voter ID’s and Voter Fraud are spurious bait and switch arguments by conservatives. Voter ID’s do absolutely NOTHING to prevent fraudulent absentee ballots, which by the way, are the most likely form of voting shennanigans.
It’s a slight of hand trick to obfuscate the REAL issues of voter suppression–vote caging, false felon purges, paper-free electronic voting machines, etc, of which the first two, disproportionately affect African-Americans.
This silent party is over, and even though the mainstream corporate media still covers up these issues, the word is out on these schemes. I seriously doubt that the MCRI received the memo, however.
–Cobra