Freedom Line Blog

In what should be seen as a tremendously significant development on the Voter ID front, former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, a (black) Democrat from Alabama and long one of the “good guys” on the left-of-center side of things (smart, honest, thoughtful, etc.), wrote this week in the Montgomery Advertiser that he now supports a requirement (as passed in Alabama) for a voter ID law in order to fight voter fraud.

The money paragraph:

Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too-mentally-impaired to function, cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights — that’s suppression by any light. If you doubt it exists, I don’t; I’ve heard the peddlers of these ballots brag about it, I’ve been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident it has changed at least a few close local election results.

This is a big development. It completely contradicts the Obama/Wasserman-Schultz/Bill Clinton narrative that voter ID laws are somehow an evil plot to suppress votes. Instead, ensuring honest elections, as Davis writes, are the best way to fight AGAINST vote suppression.

There will be much more to say on this subject, including Artur Davis’ brave stance, in the coming weeks. But I didn’t want to let this week go by without highlighting it — especially since Davis will be my guest on my weekly radio show this coming Thursday night on 106.5 FM, WAVH, in Mobile, at 8 pm Central time. When the time comes, you can listen online here.

Davis, is should be said, has good reason for his views. He has seen, and rightly objects to, massive vote fraud in Perry and Hale Counties in Alabama, some of which is recounted in the great new book by J. Christian Adams, Injustice, blasting Eric Holder’s lawless Justice Department.

Anyway, please do listen in next Thursday night. And stay tuned to this space as well, because this is a subject that needs more attention.

In a recent Freedom Minute video, we chronicled the decline in basic standards of decency and civility amongst America’s political class. And one of the examples we cited was Florida Congresswoman (and newly-installed DNC Chairwoman) Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Here’s one of Wasserman Schultz’s greatest hits, prompted when a television interviewer recently asked her about the Republican push to require photo identification at the polls in order to combat voter fraud:

[I]f you go back to the year 2000, when we had an obvious disaster and – and saw that our voting process needed refinement, and we did that in the America Votes Act and made sure that we could iron out those kinks, now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally – and very transparently – block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant.

Even the verbally incontinent chairwoman had to walk this one back, later explaining that “Jim Crow was the wrong analogy to use.” But while such thoughtless mistakes can be expected from the congenitally inept Wasserman Schultz, former President Bill Clinton doesn’t have that excuse. Here’s what Clinton told a group of young liberal activists gathered in the nation’s capital today, according to Politico:

“I can’t help thinking since we just celebrated the Fourth of July and we’re supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Clinton said at Campus Progress’s annual conference in Washington.

“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” Clinton added.

If Clinton wants to bask in the adulation of being an elder statesman, he ought to begin acting like one. He knows that saying Republicans across the nation want to suppress the vote is a baseless attack on the character of decent men and women. Republicans want to suppress voter fraud, a goal that Democrats profess to share (in practice, however, they’ve done little to effectuate it).

Debating the means by which we attain that end is an utterly justifiable pursuit. But tarring the opposition to score cheap applause from the Daily Kos’s farm team? That’s just not presidential. Of course, why start now?

If you follow the debates over whether voters should be required to present a photo ID at their polling place, you’ve probably heard the standard Democratic refrain before: there’s very little real voter fraud out there and voter ID policies are just a cynical Republican plot to suppress turnout amongst key Democratic constituencies. As is the prevailing tendency, however, liberal rhetoric is now being undermined by stone cold facts.

Last week, the U.S. House’s Administration Committee heard testimony on a Colorado study that used the 2010 election to put claims of scarce voter fraud to the test. The results, as The Hill reports, were shocking:

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, told the panel that his department’s study identified nearly 12,000 people who were not citizens but were still registered to vote in Colorado.

Of those non-citizen registered voters, nearly 5,000 took part in the 2010 general election in which Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet narrowly defeated Republican Ken Buck.

Colorado conducted the study by comparing the state’s voter registration database with driver’s license records.

We applaud our Democratic friends for their efforts to increase voter turnout. We just wish they’d stick with legal voters.