Supreme Court Opens Doors For Voter Photo ID and Early Voting Restrictions Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was a special provision that allowed the federal government to have a discretionary control of state voting laws in areas where there was historically voter discrimination against minorities. This provision was aimed mostly at southern states and certain counties in other states. The Act spells out certain criteria to define which states or counties would come under the special provision of Section 5. The Obama administration has used Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to stop states from passing election laws that required photo IDs or that regulated or restricted the time and dates of early voting. Attorney General Eric Holder used it nullify voter ID laws passed in Texas and South Carolina prior to the 2012 elections. Since Obama took office, at least 30 states have tried to pass some kind of voting law to require a valid photo ID or to restrict the number of days available to early voting. Obama and his henchmen have used Section 5 to attack every one of those laws and squash the states’ rights to enact them. They claim that the laws, especially in a number of southern states, are discriminatory against blacks because they are less likely to have a photo ID and they are more likely to vote in early elections than white voters. Passing such laws were deemed by Holder to be intentional means to suppress the votes of poor blacks in order to boost Republican advantages at the polls. However, the US Supreme Court disagreed with President Obama and Attorney General Holder when they just rendered a 5-4 decision to strike down Section 5 of the Voter Rights Act. In his opinion on the ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: "The coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems. Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions." Obama is already calling on Congress to update the formula used to determine voter racial discrimination so that Section 5 can once again be applied. With the partisan divide in Congress, I don’t expect this to be rectified any time soon, which would allow states like Texas and South Carolina to once again enact their voter ID laws. Naturally, all of the civil rights and minority groups are up in arms over the decision of the court and claim that this will allow more racial discrimination at the polls. But I really wonder how they justify their claims. Most of the poor blacks they are referring to receive some type of government assistance in the form of food stamps or other welfare programs. Everyone that I know that receives any form of government aid has to have some form of identification, many require a photo ID. I personally know someone who gets food stamps and Medicaid and they had to have a photo ID to get them. So why is it discriminatory for a state to require someone to have a photo ID to vote, but not discriminatory to require a photo ID to get government aid? The only discrimination I see in requiring a photo ID to vote is that it discriminates against voter fraud, which is one of the pillars of the Democratic Party and probably how some of their people have been elected, including Barack Hussein Obama.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 23:40:23 +0000
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