NC Lawmakers Agree to Allow Exceptions to State’s Controversial Voter-ID Requirement

This comes ahead of a federal trial to determine the constitutionality of North Carolina’s election law. Meanwhile, the state’s NAACP is keeping up the pressure.

Voters enter Cotswold School in Charlotte, N.C., Nov. 4, 2014. 

DAVIS TURNER/GETTY IMAGES

North Carolina lawmakers passed legislation June 18 that would allow voters without photo identification to cast provisional ballots, the News & Observer reports. The General Assembly sent the measure to Gov. Pat McCrory for his signature.

The proposed change would allow voters to declare a “reasonable impediment” to explain not having a photo ID. It establishes eight possible reasons, such as not having a birth certificate or lacking transportation to get an ID.

This change comes nearly two weeks before a federal trial on the constitutionality of the state’s voter-ID rule and other provisions in a controversial 2013 election law. A federal court in Winston-Salem, N.C., is scheduled to hear arguments on the law on July 5. The sweeping overhaul is set to take effect in 2016. The News & Observer reports that it’s unclear how the new measure would affect that case.

Advocates of strict voter-ID requirements, which have swept through the South, say they’re necessary to prevent voter fraud. But opponents argue that it’s a ruse to suppress voter participation among minorities, the poor and the young—traditional Democratic voters.

The News & Observer says that yesterday’s rule change drew “quick criticism” from conservatives, while opponents were “lukewarm.”

Via: The Root

Continue Reading....

DEM. REP. SAYS PROPOSED VOTER ID LAWS ARE ‘THINLY VEILED ATTEMPTS’ TO ‘SUPPRESS THE VOTING RIGHTS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS’

Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last week asking him to review two proposed voting measures she claims are designed to “suppress the voting rights of African Americans and other minorities.”

“I am concerned about restrictive legislation concerning voter photo identification and the reduction of early voting days pending in the Ohio legislature, and seek your assistance,” Fudge wrote in her letter.

Rep. Marcia Fudge. (Image source: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The legislation, S. 238 and H.B. 269, would reduce the number of absentee voting days by six, prohibit pre-paid absentee ballots from being mailed to every voter and require individuals present a form of photo ID to vote.

“I believe both of these proposals are designed to systemically restrict the access of eligible Ohioans’ to the voting booth, particularly minorities, students and the elderly,” Fudge said of the proposals.

Via: The Blaze

Continue Reading....

Voter turnout in Texas nearly doubles under new ID law

The first Texas elections under a contentious new photo ID law drew interesting conclusions for an off-year election that normally draws a low amount of voters.

There were nine proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution, and the number of votes tallied was nearly double what it was in 2011. Democrats and civil rights groups have long argued that voter ID requirements suppress turnout, particularly in poor and minority communities.

All nine measures were approved during this election, and dealt primarily with taxes and state budgets, according to Ballot Pedia.

Taxes and state budgets were also the most popular ballot measures for 2011, but the voter ID law had not been passed during that election.

Statewide, an average of about 672,874 Texans voted on those 10 constitutional amendments in 2011. In 2013, the number of votes cast in Texas reached 1,099,670.

In Hidalgo County, which is 90 percent Hispanic, just over 4,000 voted in the constitutional amendment election in 2011. In 2013, an average of over 16,000 voted according to the Texas secretary of state’s office.

Greg Abbott, the Republican attorney general and likely governor nominee, stated that critics of the voter ID law had “run out of claims” about those struggling to vote without an ID.

That hasn’t stopped opponents of the voter ID law from continuing their mission to get the law thrown out. The Houston Chronicle reports that the Justice Department, civil rights groups and U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey have filed a federal lawsuit to get the law overturned.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading....

Right the First Time - Judge Richard Posner’s mistaken change of heart on voter ID

The Left’s well-oiled propaganda machine is in overdrive again. Partisan law professors and the liberal media are trumpeting Judge Richard Posner’s “admission” that he regrets the majority opinion he wrote upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law.

Posner wrote the opinion in 2007 for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. It was affirmed the following year in a Supreme Court opinion penned by liberal justice John Paul Stevens.

What has the Left atingle now, however, is Posner’s new book, Reflections on Judging, in which he writes:

I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion (affirmed by the Supreme Court) upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo ID — a law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Posner said that he now thinks that the dissenting judge in his case was right and that “if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.”

Richard Posner is a well-known jurist and a prolific author. The question, however, is whether he made a mistake back in 2007 or whether he is making one now.

I vote for the latter. Posner apparently has been reading the press releases of voter-ID opponents like the Brennan Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and mistaken them for “widely regarded” evidence that voter-ID laws are abusive.

In the Huffington Post interview, Posner said that the Seventh Circuit “did not have enough information.” This, he maintains, illustrates a basic problem: that as “judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate.” 

Via: NRO
Continue Reading.....

The Wrong Conversation on Voter ID Laws

Last week, President Obama's Justice Department filed suit against the state of Texas over Texas' new voter ID law. It wasn't surprising, but it's the latest salvo by progressives to delegitimize the effort by many states across the country to pass voter integrity laws.

One of those laws, signed by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory recently, was written about last week by Phyllis Schlafly - and she defended the measures that would cut down on early voting, party-line voting, and institute voter ID requirements.

Progressive writers have seized on Schlafly's column and other conservatives' comments on voter ID laws to be a trend in which, as Kevin Drum writes, "conservatives are finally admitting what voter suppression laws are all about." Drum was following what was written by Steve Benen, and the theme was picked up by Jamelle Bouie. Progressives think that what conservatives are earnestlyafter is the suppression of voting demographics that are unfavorable to Republicans.

That's wrong, and it's wrong for an obvious reason. Conservatives are genuinely concerned about voter fraud nationwide. The typical response is that voter fraud is not a big deal (something that is contentious, obviously). If voter fraud is not a legitimate issue to be concerned with, progressives have done a lousy job of doing the convincing. The impetus for voter ID laws is not voter suppression - it's ensuring clean and fair elections. And this is not to mention that the arguments about who would be disenfranchised by such laws are egregiously trumped up by progressives.

Via: Townhall

Continue Reading....

Progress in North Carolina

New clean-election standards and a law protecting unborn children have Democrats’ heads spinning. 

Democrats are terribly upset with Republicans in North Carolina: Having won the state house, the state senate, and the governorship, along with nine of thirteen U.S. House seats in the last election, Republicans in Raleigh are acting like they run the place.

The Republicans’ most controversial piece of legislation is a new voter-identification law, which Democrats are treating as the Second Coming of Jim Crow. Such is the low bar for controversy in the early 21st century: The new law simply requires that voters present a state-issued photo ID such as a driver’s license or the similar ID that the state issues to non-drivers. Other forms of identification not subject to the same documentation and security standards — such as student IDs and work IDs — are not acceptable under the new law. It is really something to watch the Democrats treat a trip to the DMV as an unbearable burden: Under Democratic initiatives, everything from a trip to the doctor’s office to opening a business requires or will require running a bureaucratic gauntlet indistinguishable from a trip to the DMV. Such trips are therefore properly regarded as educational: There is nothing that quite so perfectly attunes one’s senses to the ineptitude and hostility of a Democrat-dominated bureaucracy as a visit to the driver’s-license counter. Little wonder the Democrats object.

The absence of state-issued identification is not a bar to voting only — it marginalizes people from much of modern life, restricting their ability to travel or access financial services. If there are really that many in North Carolina who cannot get a state-issued ID, then the solution is to help them to do so.

Via: National Review Online

Continue Reading.....

Liberal activist group wants to destroy Republican Party, send it ‘the way of the Whigs’

A new liberal super PAC is openly calling for the destruction of the Republican Party because, as the group’s founder argues, the GOP is “no longer a viable political party interested in debate and exchange of positive ideas.”

Cesar Ruiz, the founder of new political action group Haphak America, said his organization’s “mission” is to “expose that the sole national purpose of the Republican Party is not to act in the interests of American citizens, or even of its party members, but to defeat a sitting, duly elected president.”

Because he thinks the GOP only stands for defeating President Barack Obama and nothing else – what he says is a “self-serving purpose” – Ruiz thinks the Republican Party “should [be] disqualif[ied] … as a viable representation of the people it purports to serve.”

The PAC leader says he thinks the “Republican Party needs to go the way of the Whigs and make way for the emergence of another political party intent on working on the behalf of the American people.” The demise of the Whig Party before the Civil War made way for the creation of the Republican Party.

Ruiz said his group plans to use media and grassroots organizers to achieve its goal – and he said the organization will use “the very ruling that Republicans created through the Supreme Court ruling of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and use all legal resources at its disposal to create a positive and significant political change in all 50 states by 2016.”

“Complete reversals of previously long held positions of the Republican Party have made this goal of winning the presidency at all cost obvious,” Ruiz added. “The party has abandoned long held values and implemented obstructionist policies that have assisted in the crippling of the economy, resulting in millions of jobs lost.”

Ruiz said, too, that the GOP has “become a subversive element by manipulating voter ID laws and rulings through their systematic strategy to disenfranchise 5 million voters, evident most recently in 3 key battle ground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, using these tactics to regain power.”

Via: The Daily Caller

Continue Reading...