Tag Archives: Photo ID

News

Federal court reinstates anti-voter-fraud law in Wisconsin, Democrats hardest hit

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If it’s not close, they can’t cheat. And in Wisconsin, they can’t cheat anyway.

National Review reports:

Voter-ID opponents have suffered another stunning blow.

On Friday, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved the injunction that had been issued against Wisconsin’s voter-ID law by a federal district court in April. The court told Wisconsin that it “may, if it wishes (and if it is appropriate under rules of state law), enforce the photo ID requirement in this November’s elections.” In reaction, Kevin Kennedy, the state’s top election official, said that Wisconsin would take all steps necessary “to fully implement the voter photo ID law for the November general election.” The appeals court issued its one-page opinion within hours of hearing oral arguments in the appeal.

As I explained in an NRO article in May, the district court judge, Lynn Adelman, a Clinton appointee and former Democratic state senator, had issued an injunction claiming the Wisconsin ID law violated the Voting Rights Act as well as the Fourteenth Amendment. Adelman made the startling claim in his opinion that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2008 upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law as constitutional was “not binding precedent,” so Adelman could essentially ignore it.

However, that was too much for the Seventh Circuit. It pointed out, in what most lawyers would consider a rebuke, that Adelman had held Wisconsin’s law invalid “even though it is materially identical to Indiana’s photo ID statute, which the Supreme Court held valid in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008).”

It was also obviously significant to the Seventh Circuit that the Wisconsin state supreme court had upheld the state’s voter-ID law in July, since the three-judge panel cited that decision, Milwaukee Branch of NAACP v. Walker, too. In fact, the appeals court said the state court decision had changed the “balance of equities and thus the propriety of federal injunctive relief.”

In other words, there was no justification for striking down a state voter-ID law that was identical to one that had been previously upheld by both the Supreme Court of the United States and that state’s highest court.

[…]This is also another big defeat for Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced in July that the Justice Department would be intervening in this lawsuit. The Department lost a lawsuit that claimed South Carolina’s voter-ID law was discriminatory in 2012, and a federal judge recently refused to issue an injunction against North Carolina’s voter-ID law in another lawsuit filed by Justice.

This is a big win for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who faces a tough Democrat challenger backed by powerful unions in November.

 

News

College student discovers election fraud in Indiana’s 2008 primary

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From Fox News.

Excerpt:

Shocking election fraud allegations have stained a state’s 2008 presidential primary – and it took a college student to uncover them.

“This fraud was obvious, far-reaching and appeared to be systemic,” 22-year-old Ryan Nees told Fox News, referring to evidence he uncovered while researching electoral petitions from the 2008 Democratic Party primary in Indiana.

Nees’ investigation centered on the petitions that put then-senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the ballot. As many as 150 of the names and signatures, it is alleged, were faked. So many, in fact, that the numbers raise questions about whether Obama’s campaign had enough legitimate signatures to qualify for a spot on the ballot.

“What seems to have happened is that a variety of people in northern Indiana knew that this fraud occurred, and actively participated and perpetuated the fraud, and did so on behalf of two presidential campaigns,” according to Nees.

Prosecutors are now investigating. The scandal has already led to the sudden resignation Monday night of Butch Morgan, chairman of the St. Joseph County Democratic Party. He denied any wrongdoing, saying he looks “forward to an investigation that will exonerate me.”

Nees, a junior at Yale University, served as an intern in the Obama White House last year and supports the president’s re-election. But as an intern at the non-partisan political newsletter Howey Politics Indiana, he delved into the Byzantine and complicated world of petition signatures and found reams of signatures that he says appeared to be written in the same handwriting, some apparently copied from previous petitions.

This is why we need to have a mandatory government-issued photo ID presented by anyone who wants to vote. But Democrats oppose voter identification laws.

Excerpt:

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, saying that voter fraud in the U.S. is almost nonexistent, vowed Thursday to “get photo IDs into the hands” of people in states with Republican-sponsored voter-ID laws.

“Republicans across the country have engaged in a full-scale attack on the right to vote, seeking ways to restrict or limit voters’ ability to cast their ballots for their own partisan advantage,” said Rep. Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat. “Democrats refuse to stand by and watch this happen.”

This year, 17 states controlled by Republicans have approved tougher laws to prevent voter fraud, some including measures that require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls. A total of 31 states now require voters to show a photo ID, and similar laws are pending in Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Republican officials say the new laws have been necessary in light of recent examples of voter fraud linked to the Democratic Party and its supporters, such as the now-defunct group ACORN, which was responsible for an estimated 400,000 fraudulent registrations in 2008.

Other recent examples of voter fraud include a case in Wake County, N.C., where three voters were charged in August with voting twice in the 2008 presidential election, and a member of the executive committee of the NAACP in Tunica County, Miss., who was sentenced in April to five years in prison for fraudulently casting absentee ballots. She was convicted of voting in the names of six other voters, as well as in the names of four dead voters.

[…]Mrs. Wasserman Schultz dismissed evidence of past voter fraud as isolated.

The truth is that Democrats get a huge boost from voter fraud, probably in the neighborhood of 3-5%.

Commentary

Is it “racial discrimination” to ask someone for a photo ID before they vote?

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Does Obama want a fair vote on these results?
Can Obama get re-elected based on these results?

From National Review.

Excerpt:

Once you get past the race-baiting, you will find that opponents of voter ID generally rely on two arguments, equally specious: 1) There is no need for photo ID, because there is no voter fraud in the United States; 2) This is a deliberate effort to suppress the turnout of minority voters, who often don’t have photo ID. Liberals keep repeating these false claims despite the fact that they have been disproved both in the courtroom and at the polling place.

[…]The claim that there is no voter fraud in the U.S. is patently ridiculous, given our rich and unfortunate history of it. As the U.S. Supreme Court said when it upheld Indiana’s photo-ID law in 2008, “Flagrant examples of such fraud . . . have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists.” The liberal groups that fought Indiana’s law didn’t have much luck with liberal justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the 6–3 decision. Before being named to the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens practiced law in Chicago, a hotbed of electoral malfeasance . . .

[…]Election data in Georgia demonstrate that concern about a negative effect on the Democratic or minority vote is baseless. Turnout there increased more dramatically in 2008 — the first presidential election held after the state’s photo-ID law went into effect — than it did in states without photo ID. Georgia had a record turnout in 2008, the largest in its history — nearly 4 million voters. And Democratic turnout was up an astonishing 6.1 percentage points from the 2004 election, the fourth-largest increase of any state. The black share of the statewide vote increased from 25 percent in 2004 to 30 percent in 2008, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. According to Census Bureau surveys, 65 percent of the black voting-age population voted in the 2008 election, compared with only 54.4 percent in 2004, an increase of more than ten percentage points.

Read the full refutations of those two arguments in the post, currently the second most popular post on National Review. This is a very, very good article, and it references the relevant studies.

If it’s not close, they can’t cheat. Remember that in 2012.