Voter suppression is real in the U.S.
Published 4:11 pm Tuesday, December 15, 2015
By James Peca
Conservatives firmly believe in voter fraud. This obsession smacks of conspiracy theory. Like all conspiracy theories it begins to unravel once you start looking at it closely.
Voter fraud is where a person pretends to be a legitimate registered voter. The problem with voter fraud begins with the question of how does one do it?
To impersonate a voter you’d have to have the name of a registered voter, know which precinct he votes in, then hope the person being impersonated hasn’t already voted or will not vote. Then the impersonator would have to go to another precinct with another registered voter name and do it all over again.
All this while hoping he’s not caught as voter impersonation is a federal offense that carries a penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Even if he got away with it, how many votes would need to be stolen to actually affect an election? Hundreds if not thousands.
They would have to bring people in buses just to affect a local election let alone a statewide or national election. Loyola University Law School professor Justin Levitt, who investigated “any specific, credible allegation” of voter impersonation fraud, found a total of “about 31 different incidents” since 2000 of in-person voter fraud out of over one billion ballots cast.
Voter suppression on the other hand is real.
Republicans know that time and demographics are not on their side. They need to keep their base of aging white people voting them into office while passing laws making it difficult for minorities and seniors to vote.
On June 23, 2012, Pennsylvania Republican Majority Leader Mike Turzai said to the Republican State Committee that Pennsylvania’s recent voter identification law would “allow Governor [Mitt] Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania” in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. You can check it out on YouTube.
According to a report by MSNBC, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed suit against the State of Alabama’s enforcement of a 2011 voter ID law, claiming that the state “seeks to disenfranchise thousands of African American and Latino voters” — all in the name of “curing” a voter fraud problem that does not exist.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that a strict voter identification law in Texas discriminated against blacks and Hispanics and violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Voter ID laws are designed to rob people of their constitutional rights and should be abolished.
James Peca is a retired US government analyst living in Farmville. His email address is jep315@gmail.com.