Voter Fraud and Voter I.D.

Dr. Thomas Sowell

by Dr. Thomas Sowell: One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting.

Reporter John Fund has written three books on voter fraud and a recent survey by Old Dominion University indicates that there are more than a million registered voters who are not citizens, and who therefore are not legally entitled to vote.

The most devastating account of voter fraud may be in the book "Injustice" by J. Christian Adams. He was a Justice Department attorney, who detailed with inside knowledge the voter frauds known to the Justice Department, and ignored by Attorney General Holder and Company.

One of these frauds involved sending out absentee ballots to people who had never asked for them. Then a political operator would show up -- uninvited -- the day the ballots arrived and "help" the voter to fill them out. Sometimes the intruders simply took the ballots, filled them out and forged the signatures of the voters.

These were illegal votes for Democrats, which may well be why Eric Holder sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil.

As for race-based "voter suppression," amid all the political hysteria, how many hard facts have you heard? Probably none that supports that claim. Widely available free photo identification cards mean that poverty is no barrier to voting.

Since blacks and whites both have to show photo I.D. for everything from cashing checks to getting on a plane, why has requiring a photo I.D. for voting caused such shrill outcries?

Unfortunately, this is part of the cynical politics of promoting as much racial polarization and paranoia as possible, in hopes of getting more black voters to turn out to vote for the Democrats.

Nothing is too gross when promoting racial hysteria in an election year. Veteran Democrat Congressman Charlie Rangel from Harlem declared that Republicans "don't disagree -- they hate!" According to Rangel, "Some of them believe that slavery isn't over and that they won the Civil War!"

Republicans did win the Civil War. That's why there is no more slavery. It was a Republican president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It was a Republican-controlled Congress that voted for the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery.

In the 1960s, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If we are going to talk about history, let's at least get the facts right.

Only an utter ignorance of history, in this era of dumbed-down education, could allow demagogues like Rangel to get away with the absurdities that abound in election year politics.

Images of lynching and Jim Crow laws that made blacks sit in the back of buses are used against Republicans, even though the "solid South" was solidly controlled by Democrats during that era.

Bull Connor, who turned police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators, was a Democrat. So were other Southern segregationists. In those days, you could go hundreds of miles through the Jim Crow South without seeing a single Republican official. That is why political observers called it "the solid South."

Perhaps the biggest voter fraud of all is the fraud against black voters, by telling them bogey man stories, in order to try to get them to come out on election day to vote for Democrats.

The most cynical of these bogey man ploys is Attorney General Holder's threats of legal action against schools that discipline a "disproportionate" number of black boys. Unless you believe that black boys cannot possibly be misbehaving more often than Asian American girls, what does this political numbers game accomplish?

It creates another racial grievance, allowing Democrats like Holder to pose as rescuers of blacks from racist dangers. The real danger is allowing disruptive students in ghetto schools to destroy the education of other black students -- in a world where education is the only hope that most ghetto youngsters have for a better life.

Sacrificing these young people's futures, in hopes of gaining some additional black votes today, is as cynical and fraudulent as it gets.
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Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social commentator, and author of dozens of books. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and degrees from Columbia University and Harvard University. He is a retired professor of Economic and presently is a Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Visit his website with list of other articles.

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