NAACP begs United Nations to block US voter ID laws

**Posted by Phineas

Because efforts to ensure electoral integrity are, per the UK’s Guardian newspaper, all a racist plot:

The largest civil rights group in America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is petitioning the UN over what it sees as a concerted efforted to disenfranchise black and Latino voters ahead of next year’s presidential election.

The organisation will this week present evidence to the UN high commissioner on human rights of what it contends is a conscious attempt to “block the vote” on the part of state legislatures across the US. Next March the NAACP will send a delegation of legal experts to Geneva to enlist the support of the UN human rights council.

The NAACP contends that the America in the throes of a consciously conceived and orchestrated move to strip black and other ethnic minority groups of the right to vote. William Barber, a member of the association’s national board, said it was the “most vicious, co-ordinated and sinister attack to narrow participation in our democracy since the early 20th century”.

In its report, Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP explores the voter supression measures taking place particularly in southern and western states.

Fourteen states have passed a total of 25 measures that will unfairly restrict the right to vote, among black and Hispanic voters in particular.

Note that highlighted sentence, by the way. That’s apparently not a quote from the NAACP’s report, but the words of “journalist” Ed Pilkington parroting the party line of the anti-voter ID Left as if it were established fact. Not that UK papers make any pretense of objectivity, anyway (in that regard, they’re more honest than US papers), but it would be nice if Pilkington and his colleagues would at least try not to be little more than hired flacks.

Back to the NAACP, it might surprise you to learn I have a small amount of sympathy here. Very small, but it’s there nonetheless. A lot of tricks were pulled under Jim Crow, such as literacy tests and other swindles, to cheat Blacks of their right to vote. So I can sympathize with a reflexive suspicion on the part of the average Black or Hispanic voter.

But the leadership of the NAACP surely knows better. We present ID for all sorts of things, from buying groceries with a check to picking up items being held for us. If we can do that when writing a check at Wal-mart, why not when doing something far more important, such as voting? And if the law is applied equally to all, where’s the discrimination?

(And don’t tell me poor minorities can’t afford state identification cards. In California, it’s $26 — or $7 under certain circumstances. If someone can’t afford that, they have more pressing problems than needing to vote.)

We have a serious and growing problem with vote-fraud in the US (1), with the spread of “reforms” such as same-day registration and voting, the increased use of mail-in ballots, and the resistance to requiring identification all contributing to the problem. Both John Fund and Christian Adams have written books about this that should leave American’s concerned about the honesty of our elections very worried. ACORN, an organization closely aligned with the Democratic Party and President Obama, was recently convicted of voter-registration fraud.

(I’ll mention what Fund points out: registration and vote fraud are largely Leftist and Democratic schemes, as they seek to enlarge the pool of voters who lean their way. Republicans in the past have more often resorted to intimidation tactics to restrict that same pool.)

Presenting valid identification is a simple way to cut down on fraud. The leaders of the NAACP, the Democratic Party, and the various anti-identification groups all know this, so there’s only one real reason they oppose voter ID laws: they want to make fraud possible.

As for the United Nations Human Rights Commission… Don’t make me laugh. Moe Lane points out the UN’s lack of legal and moral authority. If that’s not enough, consider this: among the members of the UNHRC are those paragons of free elections, China, Cuba, Libya, Russia (2), and Saudi Arabia — the last of which did not even allow women to vote until this year.

Somehow, I doubt we need them to tell us how to run fair elections. In fact, over our history we’ve done a damned fine job correcting the problems that did exist.

And we especially don’t need the NAACP, the Democratic Party, and the voter-fraud advocacy industry sullying the legitimate defense of legitimate civil rights with cheap plays of the race card.

RELATED: Ed Morrissey and Bruce McQuain.

via Election Law Center

Footnotes:
(1) For example, the Washington State governor’s race in 2005.
(2) Hey, Russia just had parliamentary elections! How’d those go? Yeah, we need their help.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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