Feds on wrong side of voter fraud

The Obama Justice Department is once again outrageously infringing on states’ rights in its move to block a new voter identification law in Texas, following a similar move that was made regarding a new North Carolina law.

While the Justice Department claims the laws are discriminatory and cause “disproportionate harm” to Hispanics and other minority voters, the true and brazen purpose behind the department’s position is obvious: to provide minorities, regardless of their citizenship or their legal status as voters, unfettered access to the polls.

It is a move that clearly creates huge potential for voter fraud, all for the purpose of stuffing ballot boxes for Obama and other Democrats. In our opinion, it is a move that screams, “We want to make it easier to cheat!”

But that’s not the way the Justice Department sees it. Officials there recently declared that the laws requiring voters to have photo identification will somehow disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Hispanic voters.

It is a ridiculous claim, one that completely disregards how ominously easy it is for LEGAL voters to be disenfranchised by voter fraud.

How would you like to show up at the polls and find that someone has already stopped by and voted using your name? You wouldn’t be allowed to vote, and the fraudulent vote couldn’t be disqualified because of voter secrecy rules.

How about if someone uses the name of a recently deceased person who has yet to be removed from voter rolls? Of how about if some unscrupulous person travels from one polling place to the next, casting multiple ballots under multiple IDs?

A videographer named James O’Keefe was able to document just that, secretly filming a colleague who entered multiple Vermont polling places where election officials offered up ballots without asking for ID, even when he offered to  provide it.

Voting is such a high responsibility that an obligation to provide photo identification should be understandable and acceptable to anyone, particularly when the purpose is to protect the legitimacy of elections.

It should be highly insulting to minority voters that the federal government considers them to be somehow incompetent or unable to obtain photo identification either in the form of a driver’s license or a free voter identification card that would be available in Texas.

All citizens, after all, must have identification to cash a check, to buy alcohol, to board an airplane, to drive a vehicle and many other pursuits that are far less important than casting a legitimate vote.

Just as it has with 26 states opposing federal health-care reform and an Arizona immigration enforcement law, the Obama administration has aligned itself against states with valid interests to protect the integrity of their election. This flies in the face of both the principle of federalism and the constitutional restraints of the 10th Amendment.

Montana has its own voter identification requirements, thank goodness, and just last year nearly a dozen states pursued voter identification legislation. But the administration appears not to care. Let’s hope that a court will uphold common sense, decency and the Texas and North Carolina voter identification laws.