The Far Left is making an unprecedented two-track move to derail
states’ efforts to protect the integrity of the ballot box for this
November’s elections. While the Department of Justice (DOJ) is
blocking state efforts, liberal activists are taking this issue to
the United Nations as a human rights violation.
Attorney General Eric Holder is invoking Section 5 of the
Voting Rights Act (VRA) as giving him the power to block Texas’
voter-ID law, which simply requires that voters show that they are
who they say they are before they cast a vote to influence an
election outcome. This is the same argument Holder made to block
South Carolina’s voter-ID law, a move that has landed him in
federal court.
Section 5 of VRA was designed to allow DOJ to have
oversight of southern states that had been characterized by
widespread voter suppression half a century ago, a move the Supreme
Court upheld in 1966 as being authorized by the Fifteenth Amendment
to the Constitution only due to the extraordinary racial tensions
at the time, but that would not be constitutional once American
society progressed beyond such struggles.
(In fact, a lawsuit is currently pending before the D.C.
Circuit federal appeals court challenging the constitutionality of
Section 5. So there’s a good chance that provision will no longer
be on the books two years from now.)
In 2008 the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana voter-ID law
that is even more robust than the statutes from Texas and South
Carolina. But Indiana is not subject to VRA Section 5, so Holder
claims the law allows him to block two of those states, even though
he knows he can’t touch the third.
But while these domestic fights are underway, the NAACP is
taking the issue of voter-ID laws to the United Nations Human
Rights Council (the successor to the Human Rights Commission),
claiming that such ballot-box integrity measures violate the human
rights of racial minorities under international law.
So they go to the United Nations. Specifically, to a body
tasked with protecting human rights. Just to be clear, the nations
comprising this supposed champion of human rights include
dictatorial and authoritarian regimes like China, Cuba, and
Russia.
Let’s give the NAACP credit; they went to the undisputed
experts on this subject. They’ve taken this issue of ballot-box
integrity to nations that know all about voter fraud and rigging
elections, because they do it all the time. Maybe these nations
could even provide pointers, as Vladimir Putin’s “election” makes
crystal-clear that some of those nations have written the book when
it comes to subverting the democratic process.
As we’ve written for
Yale Law & Policy Review, the right to vote
includes the right not to have your vote diluted by fraudulent
votes. And as citizens, each of us has a duty to comply with
reasonable measures to ensure that our elections are free and fair.
In that vein, even liberal Justice John Paul Stevens agreed with
moderate and conservative Supreme Court justices that voter-ID laws
are constitutional.
But instead the Obama-Holder Justice Department has a
different philosophy of voting rights and our Constitution, and
their allies have gone to notorious violators of human rights and
the democratic process in a transparent political bid to discredit
political opposition as this administration pursues a
disturbingly-divisive political agenda going into the 2012
election.
