Leaders of the NAACP were in Geneva this week, taking this issue to the United Nations Human Rights Council for support, claiming that such ballot-box integrity measures violate the human rights of racial minorities under international law.
The centerpiece of NAACP’s campaign, “Stand For Freedom Pledge,” includes a appeal for “[t]he United Nations to investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.” Officials from the NAACP are presenting their case against US voter ID laws arguing to the international diplomats that the requirements disenfranchise voters and suppress the minority vote.
This supposed champion of human rights include dictatorial and authoritarian regimes like Communist China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia (where women are completely banned from the voting booth), three of the world’s 17 most repressive regimes according to the Washington-based democracy watchdog. So is Saudi Arabia. Cuba and China are one-party dictatorships, they would know more about the “growth of democracy” than the US. This is the NAACP’s model of justice?
Of the council’s 47 members, 12 rank as “not free” and another 14 as “partly free” in annual rankings by Freedom House.
“We are hoping they will come over here, look at the impact of these laws, look at the intent, and actually render their recommendations about what actions we should take with regard to these laws,” said NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, during a media conference call on Thursday.
The Obama administration joined in 2009, reversing its predecessor’s policy of shunning the council.
Hans von Spakovsky, a voter fraud expert and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation . Spakovsky, who supports voter photo ID laws, says it is a hypocritical and meaningless waste of time to present a case against American electoral laws at the UN forum.
"The UN allowing this to take place under their roof makes them, unfortunately, complicit in what really is a publicity stunt by the NAACP, and I think it wastes their time, when they should be going after real and sustained human rights abuses like the things going on in horrible places, like North Korea," says Spakovsky.
The UN has no legal jurisdiction over the American electoral system it is unclear what action the U.N. body may take in response to the NAACP visit.
While the NAACP is launching its international campaign insisting Republicans are suppressing the minority vote, the Obama administration has recently moved to block South Carolina and Texas from enacting their voter ID measures.
Attorney General Eric Holder is invoking Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, claiming it gives him the power to block Texas’s voter ID law, which simply requires that voters show that they are who they say they are. Holder has blocked South Carolina’s voter ID law, landing him in federal court.
Section 5 of the VRA was designed to give the Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight of southern states decades ago. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 1966, ruling that it was authorized by the Fifteenth Amendment, only because of the extraordinary racial tensions at the time and widespread voter suppression, noting that Section 5 would not be constitutional once American society had progressed beyond such struggles.
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz openly accused Republicans of trying to rig the 2012 elections by passing voter ID laws in December saying, Republicans would "literally drag [the U.S.] all the way back to Jim Crow laws,” and requiring ID is “literally just throwing a barrier in the way of someone who’s trying to exercise their right to vote.”
Schultz claims there is little voter fraud, and “ you’re more likely to get hit by lightning than you are to see an instance of voter fraud in this country” and Republicans are imposing laws all over the country, acting voter fraud is rampant, and it’s ridiculous."
Voter ID proposals are pending in thirty two states and eight states have passed voter ID laws in the past year. In 2008, the United States Supreme Court upheld the voter photo ID law enacted in Indiana.
Seriously, is it really that difficult to get an ID America?
The
states provide such identifications for free, and in some cases, voters can
cast provisional or absentee ballots that do not even require a photo ID.
Although Democrats insist that little or no voter fraud is occurring, at least 55 former Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) employees or associates have been convicted of some form of voter fraud in 11 states and organizations like Acorn aren’t out to register voters to the Republican party.
Project Veritas, sting artist James O’Keefe’s and his team , have verified hundreds of accounts of voter fraud. Project Veritas has gone to polls in and requested ballots in the names of the deceased.
“Some of them died a few months ago, some of them died a few weeks ago,” he said. “We found many, many people who are both dead and registered to vote. How is it that dead people are voting? Someone’s committing fraud.”
In many cases, ballots were handed over by the poll workers without any skepticism and only in one case did a poll worker realize that the investigator wasn’t the person the ballot was meant for — because the woman giving out the ballots knew the dead person in question. In one instance, the sting artist told a poll worker that he voluntarily wants to show his ID, but the female poll worker responds that “the state says we’re not allowed to ask for identification.”
Are liquor stores and clubs also ‘turning the clock back to the days of Jim Crow’?
The Democrat argument opposing voter ID law is inherently racist. Democrats must think that minority, young, and elderly people are morons incapable of playing by the same rules as everyone else. Really, are Democrats suggesting that people of color are too ignorant or lazy to get an id card?
Why is the GOP letting liberals get away with this – changing the subject of voter fraud using a successfully propaganda strategy of branding Republicans racist?
Republicans bringing back the days of Jim Crow really? How can that be if Democrats are the Party of Jim Crow?
Every time a Democrat makes a rhetorical claims that Republicans are racist, the Republican Party needs systematically to call them out.
The Democrat Party would be significantly weaker if they didn’t constantly rely on race-bating tactics and identity politics.
If Democrats lose just five percent of the black vote Democrats would be in perpetual electoral jeopardy.
The states provide such identifications for free, and in some cases, voters can cast provisional or absentee ballots that do not even require a photo ID.
Perhaps the real reason Democrats are make a big fuss about merely enforcing that people identify themselves before they vote is because they believe they can’t win elections fair and square?
Voter integrity rules are long overdue to prevent fraud. The Democrat party is making an unprecedented move to derail states’ efforts to protect the integrity of the ballot box for this November’s election, and if Democrats have their way, the right to cast a meaningful vote might be just a memory.