As an addendum to my column on Eric Holder’s disastrous tenure as U.S. Attorney General, the AG was kind enough to deliver a speech on the Voting Rights Act in Austin, TX, Tuesday night. Though Holder castigated two Republican examples of voter fraud – both of which were swiftly remedied by the Justice Department – he (unsurprisingly) failed to mention any investigation into the well-documented voter fraud conducted by supporters of Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Al Franken (D-MN) during their successful bids for U.S. Senate.
Omissions aside, Holder made an all-too-typical argument: claiming for government the privilege of taking yet another activity away from otherwise responsible adults. Here’s Holder’s take:
All eligible citizens can and should be automatically registered to vote. The ability to vote is a right – it is not a privilege. Under our current system, many voters must follow cumbersome and needlessly complex voter registration rules. And every election season, state and local officials have to manually process a crush of new applications – most of them handwritten – leaving the system riddled with errors, and, too often, creating chaos at the polls.
Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems – if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century. It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling – from databases that already exist – a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections – and would protect essential privacy rights.
So Holder thinks that overburdened, cash-strapped governments can extract accurate registration data while protecting each individual’s privacy rights. (You trust, Big Sis, don’t you?) He thinks that registering to vote and casting a ballot are so important that ordinary citizens can’t be counted on to do the process themselves. And he believes, along with his liberal activist friends at the ACLU and ACORN, that the reason for low voter turnout after decades of federal approval of political map drawing, “public interest” lawsuits filling the court system, and Motor Voter laws that automatically register licensed drivers to vote is not enough government control over who votes and how often.
You’ve got to hand it to big government liberals like Holder: at least he’s consistent.
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