JOHN FUND
HOW THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION THREATENS TO UNDERMINE OUR ELECTIONS
AS A FORMER community organizer who later taught classes in voting rights at the University of Chicago, President Barack Obama should be a fierce protector of the integrity of our electoral system. Indeed, as a U.S. senator from Illinois, he introduced a bill in 2 0 07 to increase the criminal penalty for voter intimidation. “Both parties at different periods in our history have been guilty in different regions of preventing people from voting for a tactical advantage,” he said at the time. “We should be beyond that.”
He was right to be concerned. A Rasmussen Reports survey in 2008 found that 17 percent of Americans believe that large numbers of legitimate voters are prevented from voting. A slightly larger number, 23 percent, believe that large numbers of ineligible people are allowed to vote. That means 2 out of 5 Americans effectively believe our elections aren’t free and fair.
Such cynicism is borne out by the widespread evidence that has accumulated over the past few years proving that the basic fairness of our elections is under assault from all sides:
028 The radical organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and other voter-registration groups have been frequently caught putting fraudulent names on voter rolls.
028 A growing number of residents in states such as New York and New Jersey have homes in Florida and other states with milder climates and wind up registering and voting in both places.
028 Legitimate and longtime voters sometimes find their names removed from registration lists by inaccurate purging.
028 “Mickey Mouse,” “Mary Poppins,” and “Dick Tracy” are just some of the names showing up on registration lists along with many real individuals who are not eligible to vote.
028 Arbitrary decision making is on the increase in very close elections, as the Florida 2000 presidential recount and the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota demonstrate. There is growing uncertainty as to who is entitled to cast ballots and whose ballots should be counted.
These and other problems cry out for repair. But now that he is in the White House, President Obama, far from using his new powers to restore Americans’ faith in their elections, has moved in exactly the opposite direction. The full story of how this presidency has further undermined our election processes provides a disturbing look into one of the most significant threats our democracy faces today.

JUSTICE LETS THE NEW BLACK PANTHERS WALK

Bartle Bull couldn’t believe his eyes. The former civil-rights lawyer had been arrested in the South during the 1960s. He once forced local officials in Mississippi to remove nooses that were hanging from tree branches outside polling places. But until election day 2008 in Philadelphia, he had never seen a man brandishing a weapon blocking the entrance to a polling place. And now he can’t understand why the Obama Department of Justice has dropped its case against the New Black Panther Party, the hate group (according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League) whose thugs he saw threatening potential voters with truncheons when they tried to vote.
Bull, who was once Robert Kennedy’s New York presidential campaign manager and is a former publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, has moderated his politics, going as far as to join Democrats for McCain in 2008. It was in that capacity that he traveled to Philadelphia on election day. When he visited a polling place at 12th and Fairmount, he found two men dressed in black combat boots, black berets, and black uniforms, blocking the door. One was brandishing a large police-style nightstick.
McCain volunteers called the police, and media filmed the whole incident. The police ordered the armed man to leave but did not take away his weapon. But one of his colleagues didn’t go quietly. Minister King Samir Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, yelled at onlookers, “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!”
In March 2009, Bull got a call from Christian Adams, an attorney with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who asked him to provide an affidavit about the incident to support a civil-rights lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and three of its supporters, one of whom, Jerry Jackson, is an elected member of Philadelphia’s 14th Ward Democratic Committee and, as recently as spring 2009, has served as an official poll watcher in a local election. Bull said he would, provided that the Justice Department follow through on the lawsuit to the very end.
The lawsuit was filed, and when none of the defendants answered it, a federal court in Philadelphia rendered a default judgment against the defendants. Bull was astonished, therefore, when the government reacted by suddenly dropping charges against the New Black Panther Party and the two defendants. Another defendant was given only the mild sanction of being barred from displaying a weapon near a polling place for the next three years.
A Justice Department spokesman issued a terse statement saying only that the department made its decision “based on a careful assessment of the facts and the law.” Career Justice Department attorneys told Bull that they were appalled by this inexplicable failure to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Those near the case believe that the decision was politically motivated – a signal sent, according to Bull, that “intimidation against poll watchers challenging the fraudulent voters registered by ACORN” may be permissible.
Hans von Spakovsky, a former official in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President George W. Bush, told me he was shocked by the department’s turnaround in the Philadelphia case: “Imagine if the defendants had been white and been intimidating voters and Justice had dropped the case. There would have been a political earthquake.” In the wake of the Justice Department’s action, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights voted on Aug. 7 , 2009, to send a letter to the department expanding its own investigation and demanding more complete answers. “We believe the Department’s defense of its actions thus far undermines respect for rule of law,” its letter stated.
Bull plans to keep the issue alive. “When he took office, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that America was a nation of ‘cowards’ when it comes to race and that he was going to make civil-rights cases a top priority,” he told me. “But who are today’s ‘cowards’ on race? This kind of double standard is not what Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy fought for.”
Indeed, Justice’s behavior in the Black Panther case may have emboldened the radicals running the organization to think they had immunity.
In April 2012, the family of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood-watch member who shot a black teenager in Florida and came under fierce criticism from many minority groups, released a statement upbraiding the Justice Department for not responding to incendiary threats by the New Black Panther Party. They included ultimatums to the Sanford, Fla., authorities, saying they wanted Zimmerman arrested “dead or alive.” The NBPP also placed a bounty on his head and called for an army of vigilantes to track him down and effect a citizen’s arrest. It also said it planned to “suit up and boot up” and prepare for the next stages of the “race war.”
“The Zimmerman family is in hiding because of the threats that have been made against us, yet the DOJ has maintained an eerie silence on this matter,” the family’s letter stated. “These threats are very public. If you haven’t been paying attention just do a Google search and you will find plenty. Since when can a group of people in the United States put a bounty on someone’s head, circulate Wanted posters publicly, and still be walking the streets? . . . Why, when the law of the land is crystal clear, is your office not arresting the New Black Panthers for hate crimes?”
Throughout all this, the Justice Department remained silent. At least its behavior toward the New Black Panthers appears consistent: ignore evil, see no evil, do not respond to evil.

PLAYING WITH THE NUMBERS: THE 2010 CENSUS

The national census – supposedly an objective counting of every inhabitant of a country – has always taken place with politics lurking in the background. Jesus was born in Bethlehem because the Romans insisted that Joseph and Mary go back to the town of their birth to be counted for tax purposes. The 1937 Soviet census was annulled because it showed a sharp drop in population resulting from the famines and killings of the Stalin era; a “correct” census was held in 1939 after the administrators of the first one had been shipped to the gulag.
Obama began his term making clear that even the 2010 census was becoming a political football. In February 2009, GOP Sen. Judd Gregg withdrew his nomination to head the Department of Commerce partly in response to the administration’s decision that the director of the Census Bureau would no longer report to the commerce secretary but to the White House. Gregg was upset at the prospect of political operatives using computer models and “sampling” techniques to adjust the census count upward on “underrepresented” groups. The Philadelphia Inquirer called the proposed move “a threat to the fairness and accuracy of the census.”
Liberal groups have long believed that up to 8 million members of minority groups and the homeless were not picked up in the 2000 census. To make up for these supposedly “missing people,” sampling-based adjustments would be used to add people to the actual count all the way down to the neighborhood and block levels. Those “adjusted” numbers would have real political significance because they would redraw congressional and state legislative districts to allocate federal money.
In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that sampling could not be used to reapportion congressional seats among the states. But the court left open the possibility that sampling could be used to redraw political boundaries within the states. My sources inside the Census Bureau tell me that, assurances from Obama appointees to the contrary, sampling is about to make a comeback.
The problem with sampling-adjusted numbers is that they don’t add up. In theory, statisticians may be able to generally identify the number of people missed in a head count, but they cannot then place those abstract “missing people” into specific neighborhoods, let alone blocks. Starting in 2000, the Census Bureau conducted three years of studies with the help of many outside statistical experts and concluded that “adjustment based on sampling” could damage census credibility. Rather than “enfranchising” minority groups, as its proponents piously claim, such a procedure exaggerates their numbers. “The adjusted numbers told us the head count had overcounted the number of Indians on reservations,” former Census Director Louis Kincannon says. “That made no sense.”
Robert Gibbs, the Obama administration press secretary, insists that “historical precedent” exists for the White House to ride close herd on the census, but every living former Census director supports a pending bill in Congress to make the Census Bureau an independent agency and further insulate it from politics. Even the liberal San Francisco Chronicle was appalled at the White House power play: “Allowing Obama politicos like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel – a top House Democratic strategist in his prior life – anywhere near the census adding machine is . . . a Chicago-style setup that should worry any voter.”
When President Obama met with Sen. Gregg at the White House the day before Gregg’s withdrawal, Obama could have simply told him he hadn’t known of the White House power grab and claimed that the Census Bureau would continue to report directly to the commerce secretary. But he didn’t, and that refusal played a major role in Gregg’s decision to withdraw. It was clear to him that in having to decide between his vaunted new “politics of transparency” and the left-wing pressure groups, Obama had chosen to side with the liberal base of his party.
Luckily, the political furor over the White House’s takeover of oversight of the census seems to have had a beneficial effect. The census ended up proceeding along traditional paths, and no evidence surfaced of undue political influence over the process. But that doesn’t excuse the Obama administration’s initial ham-handed moves or nullify the concerns that were expressed early in the process.

NULLIFYING THE LAW

The Justice Department’s charge – applying the law in an objective manner without political consideration – often involves a delicate balancing act, since political appointees set the department’s policies and priorities. But the Obama Justice Department appears not even to have tried for balance and fairness in the brief time Obama has been in office. Instead, as its approach to voter registration shows, it has clearly and consistently chosen to misinterpret and misapply election laws for what appear to be political motives.
The federal 2002 HAVA requires states to coordinate their voter registration lists with other databases, such as Social Security records and driver’s license lists, and to “verify the accuracy of the information provided on applications for voter registration.”
Georgia, for instance, moved to comply with this federal requirement by passing a law in 2008 setting up a verification procedure that included checking to see if the potential voter was a citizen. (It is against both federal and state law for noncitizens to register or vote.) Georgia consulted with career Justice Department employees in 2008 in writing its rules.
Its program worked well. Using existing databases, Georgia flagged 4,000 potential noncitizens and sent them letters asking them to verify their citizenship status. More than 2,000 failed to comply, making it likely many were indeed not eligible to vote.
Minority turnout in Georgia was hardly affected by the new rules. In fact, from 2004 to 2008, Hispanic turnout increased by 140 percent, and black turnout increased by 42 percent. But on May 29, 2009, the Obama Justice Department used its power under the Voting Rights Act to veto Georgia’s verification law. It claimed it would have a “disparate impact” on minority voters. The evidence? It cited findings that Asians and Hispanics were supposedly “twice as likely to appear on the list” of potential noncitizens as whites.
Of course, there is a ready explanation for this. Only 35 percent of Hispanics and 58 percent of Asians in Georgia are citizens. Although no evidence has been presented that anyone was prevented from voting in 2008 because they were improperly listed as noncitizens, the Justice Department’s veto of Georgia’s law held.
The Justice Department’s about-face on citizenship requirements isn’t the only case in which it has demonstrated a troubling double standard. Missouri, to use another example, has a long record of conflict with the federal government on the issue of bad registration records. At the time of the 2008 election, for instance, more than a dozen Missouri counties had more registered voters than the number of adults over the age of 18. Under the Bush administration, the attorney general had gone before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and won a ruling to force the Missouri secretary of state’s office to clean up its registration lists. But in March 2009, the Obama Justice Department dismissed this lawsuit – its own lawsuit – without explanation. As in the case of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case it would abandon two months later, the Justice Department had effectively already won but nonetheless decided to surrender its victory. What kind of prosecutors act that way? The answer appears to be, highly political ones.
“The Justice Department is charged with securing the integrity of the voter registration process,” notes von Spakovsky. “In just the first year of its time in office, this administration appears to be moving as fast as it can to evade those responsibilities.”

BULLYING A SMALL TOWN FOR PARTISAN PROFIT

In November 2008, the city of Kinston, N.C., voted to make local elections nonpartisan, meaning they didn’t want candidates to be known by their party affiliations. Since all but nine of North Carolina’s hundreds of jurisdictions follow the same procedure, the move was hardly controversial – until the Justice Department stepped in and overruled the voters’ decision.
The move to nonpartisan elections clearly had minority support. It passed with a two-thirds majority in an election in which minority turnout was high because Barack Obama was on the ballot. Out of Kinston’s 15,000 registered voters, 65 percent are black. A majority of the black-dominated precincts in the town voted for the change. Two of the five members of the City Council are black, as was the town’s mayor until recently.
But none of that mattered to the Obama Justice Department. Even though there was no evidence that blacks faced any barriers to registration and voting in Kinston, Justice blocked the change to nonpartisan elections. Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Kinston is one of about 12,000 cities in the nation in which changes in voting procedures are subject to the Department of Justice’s oversight.
Attorney General Holder’s assistant attorney general, Loretta King, authored the DOJ’s letter of dissent, arguing that the legislation’s “effect” would be strictly racial and that removing the partisan cues in municipal elections would have a discriminatory effect on black voters because “it is the partisan makeup of the general electorate” that allows the winner of the Democratic primary to win in the general election. Justice was concerned that changing to nonpartisan elections would “likely eliminate the party’s campaign support” for black candidates.
But the Voting Rights Act is supposed to protect voters, not particular political parties. The fact that blacks are a controlling majority in the city and can control election outcomes when they turn out to vote, as well as the fact that black voters themselves voted for the change, was essentially deemed irrelevant by Justice. It was no surprise that this racially biased decision was issued by King, who was instrumental in the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party case. (She has since retired from Justice.) Of course, the Civil Rights Division’s action rests on the presumption that blacks simply cannot be trusted to make their own decisions as to which individual candidates to support and will be presumed to vote against their own self-interest unless candidates on the ballot have the “right” party label. In short, the Justice Department “knew” for whom Kinston’s black community should vote, and it certainly couldn’t be Republicans. This approach to enforcement stands the Voting Rights Act on its head and is anathema to all our constitutional requirements for fair elections.
As Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, put it: “Kinston reinforces the message to black voters and to potential black candidates, in order to be represented in this country, you have to be voting in the majority black district, and as a candidate, you have to be elected from a majority black district, because whites are too racist.”
Several residents of Kinston and a candidate filed suit against the Justice Department in federal court in the District of Columbia, claiming that DOJ’s objection was wrong and that parts of the Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional. They had to sue because Kinston’s Democratic town officials, who could have contested the objection, failed to do so. As Democrats, they were happy that the citizen referendum had been voided. The citizens lost at the district court level and appealed the decision. In a very interesting development, however, the Civil Rights Division suddenly notified Kinston in January 2012 that it was “reconsidering” its objection to the nonpartisan referendum, even though there had been no request by the town of Kinston for reconsideration. Only a week later, it withdrew its objection, making a laughably false claim that there had “been a substantial change in operative fact.”
One of the “changes” claimed by Justice was that the voter registration rate for blacks in Kinston was now 65.4 percent. Yet this was an increase of only 0.8 percentage points over 2008, when the registration rate was 64.6 percent and black voters overwhelmingly approved the referendum!
The only real “change in operative fact” was that it looked as if the Kinston lawsuit was headed for the Supreme Court. The facts in the case were so bad from the point of view of the Justice Department – and made the political manipulation of the VRA by the Civil Rights Division so visible – that Justice clearly wanted to withdraw its objection in order to convince the appeals court that the case has been mooted and should be dismissed, avoiding a decision on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.
The original Justice letter has been exposed for being patronizing and self-serving, but it raises a larger issue. The cynical manipulation of federal power to benefit one political party over another underscores that the only real source of refuge from these political machinations is the Supreme Court. Here’s hoping that the court will someday soon decide the fundamental issues involved in the Kinston case – the arbitrary power the Justice Department has over so many states and cities in which there is no recent evidence of racially discriminatory voting practices.

BLOCKING VOTER ID BY ALL MEANS AVAILABLE

There is no question that every individual who is eligible to vote should have the opportunity to do so. It is equally important, however, that the votes of eligible voters are not stolen or diluted by a fraudulent or bogus vote cast by an ineligible or imaginary voter.
The evidence from academic studies and actual turnout in elections is also overwhelming that – contrary to the shrill claims of opponents – voter ID does not depress the turnout of voters, including minority, poor, and elderly voters. The real myth in this debate is not the existence of voter fraud, which is a real problem; the real myth is the claim that voters are disenfranchised because of voter-ID requirements.
Voter ID can prevent and deter not just impersonation fraud at the polls but also voting under fictitious voter registrations; double voting by individuals registered in more than one state or locality; and voting by illegal aliens. There are examples of all of these types of fraud that can be reduced or deterred with voter-ID requirements.
As the Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, said in 2005:
The electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters. Photo IDs currently are needed to board a plane, enter federal buildings, and cash a check. Voting is equally important.
Carter knows the issue of voter fraud well. His first election in a Democratic primary in Quitman County, Ga., in 1962 was stolen by voter fraud that local residents said “had been going on on election days as long as most people could remember.” He had to go to court to get the election overturned and ended up winning the general election. The culprit responsible for stealing the primary election was later convicted of voter fraud in a previous congressional election.
As Carter learned, voter fraud exists, and criminal penalties imposed after the fact are an insufficient deterrent to protect against it. In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the 2008 case upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law, the Supreme Court said that despite such criminal penalties:
It remains true, however, that flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists, that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years . . . that . . . demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.
The denizens of the left were very surprised that the majority opinion in Crawford was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, a stalwart liberal, rather than one of the conservative justices. But the ACLU’s cries that voter fraud is a myth did not find any acceptance with a justice who practiced law in Chicago, a city with one of the worst records of electoral malfeasance in American history.
Chris Matthews, a former staffer to Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and current MSNBC host, knows the score.
When the topic came up on his show, Hardball, Matthews admitted that this type of impersonation fraud has “gone on since the ’50s.” He explained that people call up to see whether you voted or are going to vote, and “then all of a sudden somebody does come and vote for you.” Matthews knows that this is an old strategy in big-city politics: “I know all about it in North Philly – it’s what went on, and I believe it still goes on.”
Given this record, the decision by the Obama Justice Department to block voter-ID laws in several states is deplorable and smacks of blatant partisanship. Over the course of the 44 presidents who have served this country, the U.S. attorney general has routinely been accused of playing politics, but the extent to which Eric Holder has practiced the art form is head-spinning.
Take his March 2012 decision to reject Texas’s voter-identification law on grounds that it would hurt minorities.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez wrote to the Texas director of elections to inform him that the state’s voter-identification law, which passed last year and requires voters to present one of several listed forms of ID at the polls, violates Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The decision follows Justice’s rejection of South Carolina’s voter-ID law in December, which the state is fighting. Texas will do the same.
The Justice complaint is based on a mind-numbing and arcane discussion of identification “datasets” used by the state. Texas, Justice says, didn’t adequately explain its system’s “disparate results” and “declined to offer an opinion” as to which data were “more accurate.” Cross lawyers with statisticians, and what do you get? An endless morass, which will run past the November 2012 election.
When the Holder Justice Department objected under Section 5 to South Carolina’s voter-ID law in December 2011, it very noticeably did not mention is prior approval of Georgia’s more restrictive photo-ID law. South Carolina will allow an individual without an ID to vote if he has a religious objection or a “reasonable impediment” that prevents him from getting a free photo ID. In fact, DOJ was ignoring inconvenient facts and clear legal precedent in making its claim that South Carolina’s law is discriminatory. Given its prior approval of Georgia’s voter-ID law, it would have had a hard time explaining its objection to South Carolina.
The South Carolina objection was driven by the radical, left-wing ideology that has been behind almost all the law-enforcement decisions made by the Justice Department during the Obama administration. In fact, South Carolina’s comparison of its voter-registration list to its DMV driver’s-license records – once adjustments were made for individuals who were deceased, had moved to other states, or were mismatched – showed that only 1.2 percent of registered voters did not already have a driver’s license. Yet the Justice Department still objected based on the nonsensical claim that minority voters were less likely to have a photo ID.
In 2008 in the Crawford case the Supreme Court ruled that a similar Indiana law requiring photo ID did not impose an undue burden on voters. The Justice Department approved a Georgia voter-ID law in 2005. But now Obama, Holder, Perez, the NAACP, and the American Civil Liberties Union claim that minority voters are being consciously suppressed and that Republicans are trying to gain a partisan advantage with voter-ID laws.
In a December 2011 speech on voter ID, Holder warned that “we will examine the facts, and we will apply the law.” He called voter-ID laws “unnecessary” and said the fraud they are designed to prevent is almost nonexistent.
It’s certainly true that in-person fraud at polling stations can almost be a perfect crime. If someone votes in the name of a dead person still on the rolls, that individual is unable to complain. No one would know what happened absent a confession on the part of a perpetrator. As Chris Matthews pointed out, in many voter-fraud “hotspots,” a list of “usable” names that people can vote in the place of is often readily available to those tempted to commit fraud – along with cash payments to encourage the practice.
Just how easy voter fraud can be was demonstrated in April 2012, when conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe sent an assistant into a Washington, D.C., polling place where Eric Holder had been registered for 29 years. After establishing that Holder was on his list, a poll worker was ready to hand over his ballot and specifically told O’Keefe’s assistant that no ID was needed. The assistant left before actually casting the ballot. O’Keefe has demonstrated the same vulnerabilities in state after state without ID laws.
In a sign of the hypocrisy that drives the Justice Department, anyone who wants to make an appointment with the attorney general or the head of the Civil Rights Division to discuss an objection to South Carolina’s voter-ID law as “discriminatory” had better bring their government-issued photo-ID card. No outsider can enter the main Justice headquarters building, situated between Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues in Washington, without a photo ID. And to those who would argue that voting is a constitutional right, so is speaking to government officials. The First Amendment specifically protects the right of the people to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

FOR THEY ARE JOLLY GOOD FELONS

Felony disenfranchisement laws keep an estimated 5.3 million Americans who have felony convictions from the polls, including 2.1 million who no longer are in prison. Here, the Obama administration has shown admirable restraint in not proposing its own federal legislation on the issue. But it has also steadfastly refused to take a position on bills pending in Congress that would do just that, and leading civil-rights advocates say they are convinced the Obama administration would quietly sign such a bill.
At present, standards regarding felons’ access to the ballot box vary greatly. Maine and Vermont let jailbirds vote from their prison cells. A total of 34 states and the District of Columbia automatically allow felons who’ve served their time in prison to vote. Eleven states restrict the right of felons to vote after their sentences are served, while 35 states prevent parolees from voting. A total of 30 states bar those on probation from casting ballots. Legislation likely to be introduced would “rationalize” these disparate laws.
It’s easy to understand why “felon enfranchisement” is a liberal issue. In a 2003 study, sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza found that roughly a third of disenfranchised felons had completed their prison time or parole and would thus have their vote restored under such a bill. While only a bit more than a third of felons are African American, an overwhelming majority lean toward one political party – Democrat. In presidential races, the two scholars estimated that Bill Clinton won 86 percent of the felon vote in 1992 and a whopping 93 percent four years later. Voting participation by all felons, Uggen and Manza estimated, would have allowed Democrats to win a series of key U.S. Senate elections, thus giving the party control of the Senate continuously from 1986 to 2004.
There is some evidence that felons already swing elections even in states where many of them are barred from voting. The Seattle Times found that 129 felons in just two counties, King and Pierce, voted illegally in the photo-finish race for governor in Washington in 2004, which Democrat Christine Gregoire won, coincidentally, by 129 votes.
The issue of felon voting might be a little broken, but a federal law won’t fix it. We should leave the matter where the Constitution intended it be lodged – with the states. “If you’re not willing to follow the law, then you can’t claim a right to make the law for everyone else. And of course that’s what [felons] are doing when [they] vote,” says Roger Clegg of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity. “Why should the federal government step in and determine a one-size-fits-all policy on felon voting?”

CONCLUSION

Americans are aware that their history includes painful examples of discriminatory hurdles to voting. They instinctively and justifiably resist anything that smacks of exclusion and oppose any attempt to create artificial barriers to voter participation. They also intuitively understand that when improperly cast ballots are counted or outright fraud countenanced, their civil rights are violated just as surely as if they were prevented from casting a ballot by a thug with a swagger stick.
Citizenship requires orderly, clear, and vigorous procedures to ensure that the integrity of our elections – and voter confidence in them – is maintained. “The more clearly rules are settled in advance, the better elections we will have,” says Brad King, a former state elections director of Minnesota. “What we don’t want is the designed sloppiness that a few politicians allow to seep into our system through ambiguity and vagueness.”
We also don’t want the unequal application of the law, something that the Obama administration’s early actions signal might be happening. Shying away from pursuing election cases even when the evidence is literally handed to prosecutors on videotape (the New Black Panther Party case) is troubling. By not enforcing laws mandating accurate and complete voter-registration lists, the Obama administration is devaluing the most basic covenant between citizens and state. The impact on our system of self-governance is similar to what would happen to our economic system if the Treasury Department evinced no interest in containing the number of counterfeit bills circulating in the economy.
Nor is it only partisans making such claims. Chris Coates, a career Justice Department official who had been honored for his work in civil rights by the ACLU and the NAACP, was forced out as chief of the Voting Section of Justice by the Obama administration for insisting that the laws be applied without partisan or racial considerations. He found the record of Obama political appointees very troubling in that sense.
In 2010, Coates testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Julie Fernandes made it clear in meetings with his office that the Obama administration was interested only in filing “traditional types” of voting-rights cases that would “provide political equality for racial and language minority voters.” Coates testified that everyone in the room understood what that meant: “No more cases like [the New Black Panther Party] case.”
Coates also testified that in another meeting with Voting Section staff, Fernandes said the Obama administration was not interested in enforcing the provision of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to maintain voter registration lists by regularly removing ineligible voters – for instance, the names of voters who have died or moved away.
Coates further testified to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that he sent a memorandum to Fernandes and the Front Office in which he recommended opening investigations of eight states that appeared to be in noncompliance with the list-maintenance procedures of the National Voter Registration Act. He did not get approval for the project, and the Obama administration never filed a single suit to enforce this provision of the NVRA. Prosecutorial discretion does not allow prosecutors “to decide not to do any enforcement of a law enacted by Congress because political appointees determined that they are not interested in enforcing the law,” Coates testified. “That is an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”
Coates testified that King, Fernandes, and other lawyers within Justice violated their oath to faithfully execute the law when they selectively enforced the Voting Rights Act based on the race of the victim and the perpetrator. “For the Department of Justice to enforce the Voting Rights Act only to protect members of certain minority groups breaches the fundamental guarantee of equal protection and could substantially erode public support for the Voting Rights Act itself,” he told me. “Selective enforcement of the law, including the Voting Rights Act, on the basis of race is just not fair and does not achieve justice.”
If we do not demand that the Obama administration and its allies in Congress abandon schemes and policies that further undermine confidence in our electoral system, we are headed for crises that will shake our electoral system and will make us look back on the disputed presidential vote of 2000 with something like nostalgia.