There have been a lot of charges made lately by Democrats that Republicans want to suppress the black vote by passing voter identification laws. There is no mention of the fact that you need a driver’s license or such to enter a federal building, board a plane, case a check, etc., but that’s another story. But occasionally, when charging people with racism, inconvenient facts get in the way.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted a story today showing that when Georgia became the first state in the nation to enact voter identification laws, the black and Hispanic voter turnout increased. From 2006 to 2010, voting by black and Hispanic voters increased dramatically, outpacing population growth for those groups over the same period.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also posted an article today dealing with the same subject.
The The Atlanta Journal-Constitution article reports:
Under Georgia’s law, an in-person voter who arrives at the polls without a photo ID may cast a provisional ballot. The provisional ballot is counted only if the person returns with proper identification by the Friday following the election.
Records show that since 2008, 2,244 provisional ballots were cast by voters lacking photo ID. Of those, 658 returned with an ID and 1,586 did not — meaning their votes did not count.
That disturbs Laughlin McDonald, director of the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the original plaintiffs who challenged the law.
“If one person is deprived of their right to see their vote count, that’s a violation of the Constitution,” McDonald said.
I guess I have become a little cynical of late, but I am not thoroughly convinced that the 1,586 voters who chose not to return with identification were legal voters. Just a thought.
There is no way to prove that voter fraud was stopped by voter identification laws. However, we can show that the laws do not suppress votes. In terms of stopping fraud, one blatant example of voter fraud was found in Houston, Texas, by a group called True the Vote. (See rightwinggranny.com) When True the Vote examined the voters registered by a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who had previously worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they found that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. I don’t know if 23,000 votes is enough to change the outcome of an election, but this clearly seems to be an example of voter fraud.
Anyway, hooray for voter identification laws–the keep our elections honest!
