Against the backdrop of the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, President Obama recently addressed a favorite subject for calculated ignorance. The president lamented that civil rights abuses continue in new laws designed to prevent poor and minority voters from casting their vote. His implicit target: Voter ID legislation, such as the Wisconsin law the Supreme Court sustained last week.
Yet from Georgia to North Carolina, the most recent state with voter ID to release turnout data, black voter turnout remained the same or increased after these states passed voter ID laws, revealing the opposite of racially-motivated voter suppression. Persistent Democratic pummeling of voter ID reform exposes a surpassing devotion to political advantage over minority justice.
Many Democrats blame the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder for new discrimination threats arising from voting reforms. The decision declared unconstitutional the Voting Rights Act’s Section 4(b) coverage formula, which determined the nine states and parts of six other states subject to Section 5’s requirement for federal preclearance of election law changes. Section 4(b) rested on 40-year-old turnout statistics that, if updated, would have shown black turnout equal to or higher than white turnout in most cases.
The Department of Justice pre-cleared Georgia’s voter ID law six years before Shelby. The ACLU, the NAACP, and other organizations sued unsuccessfully in federal court, claiming the law disenfranchised the “large number” of Georgians who could not obtain a photo ID. The plaintiffs proved neither that any person would be “prevented from voting” nor that the law “unduly burden[ed] minority or elderly voters.” Despite a massive public education campaign advertising easily obtainable, free photo IDs, Georgia issued voter ID cards to a mere 0.23 percent of registered voters in 2008, a presidential election year. Meanwhile, turnout for black Georgians increased 42 percent in 2008 from 2004 and 44.2 percent in the 2010 congressional election from 2006.
Texas and North Carolina also challenge the voter suppression myth. After Texas passed its 2011 voter ID law, minority turnout in some rural counties increased by almost ten times in the 2013 off-year election versus the 2011 election while turnout in most of the minority-dominated urban counties almost doubled. North Carolina’s election law reform included a 2014 “soft rollout” of a photo ID requirement. Belying the reform’s characterization as a modern poll tax, black voter-age-population turnout rose to 41.1 percent in the 2014 election from 38.5 percent in November 2010.
As the Heritage Foundation’s Hans A. von Spakovsky wrote, “If President Obama really believes his State of the Union claim that the right to vote is still ‘being denied to too many,’ he should give Attorney General Eric Holder a serious dressing-down.” The DOJ did not initiate a single disenfranchisement suit in 2014. During the president’s tenure, the DOJ filed only three cases related to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits race- and color-based voter discrimination. Overturned, soon to be overturned, or initiated under the Bush DOJ, none of these suits justifies President Obama’s rhetoric.
Only political motives can explain the president’s failure to recognize trends in increased minority voter turnout. Like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pouncing on the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown shootings as examples of black “martyrdom” and endemic police racism, President Obama and his party profit from inciting racial hatred. It’s easier to promote income redistribution, universal healthcare, and federal regulation of state elections as victories against privileged, white oppressors. It’s simpler to animate a voting block when each vote assails injustice.
An even uglier abuse of the Democratic minority voting base underlies voter ID opposition. As Artur Davis, former member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in defense of Alabama’s voter ID law, the “most aggressive contemporary voter suppression” is “the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.” New York Democratic operative Anthony DeFiglio, implicated in a 2011 voter fraud case, described forging absentee ballots as a “normal political tactic” that “targeted” people living “in low-income housing” because they would be “less likely to ask any questions.” Voter ID laws complicate stealing the votes of the poor, the anonymous, and the deceased.
If only those who cheered President Obama’s Selma address could have heard him speak the truth that voter ID legislation empowers minority voters through justice and transparency. The courageous men and women who marched across the Selma Bridge did not bleed for equality so their political leaders could manipulate and cheat them. When will our first black president stop abusing their legacy?
