GOP To Push Stronger Voter I.D. Laws, Says ‘Voter Fraud Is Real’

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus repeated his party’s commitment to stronger voter identification laws, saying that the GOP would not give up the fight against voter fraud.

“I think that we need to make it easy to vote, hard to cheat, and I think that that’s a mantra that we ought to shout from the rooftops all over the country as a Party,” Priebus told conservative bloggers on a conference call on Thursday.

Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) Chairman David Norcross said that voter fraud issues were very real, despite complaints from liberals that it is largely a phantom problem. Cross cited several cases where states had found thousands of ineligible votes after elections were already over.

“Voter fraud is real, this is not anybody’s imagination,” Norcross said. “The Milwaukee police department reported some detailed fraud in the 2004 presidential election in Wisconsin. The Colorado Secretary of State found last year that 5,000 non-citizens voted in their Senate race, which was decided by a close margin. And probably all will remember Minnesota in 2008 when more ineligible voters were identified than the margin between the winning and losing Senate candidates.”

Norcross also pushed back against the argument that strict voter I.D. laws depress poor and minority turnout, a claim made famous by Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.), who said such laws would “literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws,” a reference to the racist segregation-era laws that prevented southern blacks form voting.

“And as for people who don’t have photo I.D., American University Center for Democracy in Election Management found recently that 99 percent of eligible voters posses the proper I.D.,” said Cross. “Really, the purpose for this call is to make sure that we preserve this initiative, keep it going, and that we protect voter I.D. and the rights of legitimate voters,” Cross said.

Representative Todd Rokita (R-Ind.), formerly Indiana Secretary of State, said that after Indiana issued a voter I.D. law, it saw turnout go up, not down, charging that attacks against voter I.D. laws were “the sky is falling” arguments.
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