The jokers at the Heritage Foundation are upset over the Department of Justice's refusal to go along with South Carolina's new voter ID law. Okay, one joker at Heritage, Hans von Spakovsky, formerly a county GOP leader from Georgia and formerly a DoJ official. For several years, he's been a purveyor of the idea that Democrats are engaging in widespread voter fraud that could be cured with strict photo IDs being required of anyone who wants to cast a ballot. Eight states, including South Carolina and Texas, passed laws this year requiring voters to have government-issued photo IDs.
In case you've missed this story because of the holidays, just before Christmas, the Obama administration announced it will not allow a new South Carolina law requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID before they can cast a ballot.
"According to the state's statistics, there are 81,938 minority citizens who are already registered to vote and who lack DMV-issued identification," Thomas E. Perez, the chief of the department's civil rights division, said in a letter to South Carolina officials. He referred to a driver's license issued by the state Department of Motor Vehicles, the most common form of photo identification.
The action was taken under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act passed to root out Jim Crow practices that kept African Americans from voting. To make changes in their voting laws, jurisdictions that have in the past discriminated against citizens in this way must get “preclearance” from either the DoJ or the federal district court in Washington, D.C. To obtain approval, those jurisdictions have to prove any changes will not negatively affect minority voters.
In response to the Justice Department's action, Michael Waldman, Executive Director at Brennan Center for Justice, said:
“This is a great day for voting rights in America. The Justice Department has followed the law, nothing more and nothing less. The Department affirmed that federal law cannot tolerate election statutes that make it harder for minority citizens to vote. It properly analyzed the effect of this specific law on South Carolina’s minority voters as required by the Voting Rights Act. Now the Department should subject other state laws to similar scrutiny.”
Katie O’Connor, a staff attorney with the ACLU Voting Rights Project, which, together with the Brennan Center and other civil rights groups had sought the DoJ's intervention in South Carolina, said:
“This law shows why the Voting Rights Act is still needed to combat voter suppression. This is the first time in 17 years the government has stepped in to block a voter ID law. It was the right move at the right time.”
That wasn't the reaction in official South Carolina circles. Announcing she would fight the DoJ's action, Republican Gov. Nikki Haley said:
"The president and his bullish administration are fighting us every step of the way. It is outrageous, and we plan to look at every possible option to get this terrible, clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process and our 10th Amendment rights," Haley, a Republican, said in a statement.
The 10th Amendment has been a rallying cry for a new emphasis on states' rights that hasn't seen its like since segregationists fought the federal government to suppress the civil rights of the black population half a century ago.
Enter Spakovsky. He wrote earlier this week that the numbers of would-be voters without government-issued photo IDs in South Carolina are too small to matter. Statistically insignificant. As if it doesn't matter if it's just a few thousand citizens out of a few million who are unjustly kept from voting. He called the DoJ's move ideologically motivated and driven by the "racial paranoia of the Democratic National Committee and the NAACP." The decision to stop implementation of the law pending its review is, Spakovsky wrote, "a naked effort by [Attorney General Eric] Holder to undermine election integrity," a move that could affect the outcome of the 2012 election.
That breathless accusation amounts to claiming that Holder and the civil rights coalition that includes the Brennan Center and the ACLU are conspiring to abet what has been Spakovsky's take for a long time: that Democrats encourage voter fraud by making it easy for Democratic-leaning voters who want to cheat to do so.
As Rutgers University Prof. Lorraine Minnite, the author of The Myth of Voter Fraud, has written, the attack is typical Spakovsky:
Hans von Spakovsky's repeated reference to an obscure 27-year old Brooklyn grand jury report as the best evidence of the contemporary scourge of voter impersonation fraud is a kind of fraud itself. Instead of evidence of fraud, he gives us evidence of the propaganda being used to distort the truth about fraud. As good as it is, however, the propaganda about voter fraud can't conceal everything. The lack of concern among voter ID proponents like von Spakovsky for the likely ill effects of these new laws on the electoral participation of vulnerable citizens lacking the requisite ID makes the ugly politics of the ongoing voter ID campaign all the more apparent.
The shorter version: Spakovsky's claims are bullshit. Suppression of the votes of vulnerable citizens—the poor, the elderly, students, historically discriminated against people of color—is an ongoing, relentless campaign of right wingers. If one thing doesn't work, they try another. Attorney Gen. Holder has justifiably slipped a stick into their spokes. It's no surprise to hear them squealing about it.