17 Dec 2011 4:43 pm
The GOP Debunks It's Own Voter Fraud MythMore DNC bulls***.As SCOTUS noted, it's effectively impossible to prosecute voter fraud WITHOUT voter ID laws. That's why even many Democrats are now supporting them, as does 80% of the country.Do laws that require citizens to present valid identification to vote create an undue hardship? Worse, are they racist? Artur Davis used to think so. He represented Alabamas 7th Congressional District from 2003 to 2011 and was an active member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He vigorously opposed voter ID laws.But now he has changed his mind. In a commentary in the Montgomery Advertiser, Mr. Davis says his home state of Alabama did the right thing in passing a voter ID law and admits, I wish I had gotten it right when I was in political office.As a congressman, he says, he took the path of least resistance, opposing voter ID laws without any evidence to justify his stance. He simply lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation.Today, however, Mr. Davis recognizes that the most aggressive voter suppression in the black community is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt. A region in Alabama known for its dark, rich soil, the Black Belt comprises some of the poorest, predominantly black counties in the state. In 2008, I wrote a case study about a federal voter-fraud prosecution in one of those counties.Greene County is 80 percent black, and the median household income of residents is only just above the poverty line. Incumbent black county officials had stolen elections there for years, perpetrating widespread, systematic voter fraud. The Democratic incumbents were challenged by black Democratic reformers in 1994 who wanted to clean up local government.Voter fraud ran rampant that year. Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice won 11 convictions of Greene County miscreants who had cast hundreds of fraudulent votes, often by stealing the absentee ballots of poor voters. Mr. Davis knows that 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 because, as he notes in the Montgomery Advertiser, Ive heard the peddlers of these ballots brag about it, Ive been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident this has changed at least a few close local election results.http://www.washingto...idea-after-all/