Why The Left Doesn’t Care About Voter Fraud

This week, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released video showing a young white man entering a polling place in Washington D.C. to vote in the presidential primary.

He walked up to the desk and asked a poll worker for the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder, and gave Holder’s address. The worker began to hand him the ballot, at which point the young man said he wanted to show his identification. “You don’t need it,” the poll worker replied. “It’s all right. As long as you’re in here, you’re on our list, and that’s who you say you are, you’re okay.”

The tape broke huge, with Matt Drudge championing it at the top of the Drudge Report. And sure enough, the Department of Justice, which sometimes plays to Drudge’s tune, responded with ire and outrage: “It’s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones.”

Except, of course, that wasn’t the point. O’Keefe wasn’t voting fraudulently; he was showing the public how easy it would be for someone with bad motives to vote fraudulently. And the DOJ knew that – it would take a full-on fool not to understand that point.

But the DOJ has no interest in that point. It is far more interested in leaving loopholes for voter fraud than in filling in those gaps.

Their stated motive for opposing voter ID is that increases the possibility of racial bias. As the Associated Press recently reported, “Liberal groups have said the requirements are the product of Republican-controlled state governments and are aimed at disenfranchising people who tend to vote Democratic – African-Americans, Hispanics, people of low-income and college students.” The Justice Department, in attempting to stop the implement of Texas’ new voter ID law, cited the same rationale, explaining that “Hispanic voters in Texas are more than twice as likely than non-Hispanic voters to lack a driver’s license or personal state-issued photo ID.”

Why this should be true is anyone’s guess. It is certainly not due to institutional racism – if it were, then the state would be sued on a regular basis for violating the Civil Rights Act. There are two forms of photo-issued ID in Texas: driver’s licenses and simple identification cards. Both are available through simple applications. Voters must register to vote. Why shouldn’t they also have to register to receive an ID beforehand?

And it isn’t expensive to get an ID, either. An original driver’s license in Texas costs $16; a six-year extension costs $25. A photo ID costs $6. It costs less that a decent Carl’s Jr. meal to register for identification.

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