Bradley A Smith at Law & Liberty
reviews Richard Hasen's Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.
But if voter ID
laws don’t prevent much fraud, Hasen provides no reason to believe that voter
ID laws inhibit much voting, either. He has harsh words for the Supreme Court’s
2008 decision in Crawford v. Marion
County Election Board, which upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, calling it “a
terrible precedent,” but he never shows that it has led to “voter suppression.”
Smith is no fire-breather. He lays out a strong simple case.
The way I read this might be my own confirmation bias, but it seems that the author has written a book to confirm his own bias. Of course Voter ID laws cut down on duplicate voting and voter fraud. That's why it's a common practice in other countries, as well as the good old purple finger. We should be doing both here.
ReplyDeleteBut I suspect, as many do, that the real fraud takes place at the counting stage. And, no surprises here, that seems to be where the Democratic Party has the most resistance to close scrutiny.
So it boils down to this: If voter fraud is such an extremely rare occurrence, why is it that every effort to accurately measure it, every effort to update the voter roles to remove the dead and re-located, every effort to audit the voting role system, every effort to impose tighter controls to ensure accuracy at no cost to voter convenience - met with complete stubborn refusal by Democrats? And why is it that true stories of voter fraud by Precinct officials dies with a whisper after minimal coverage and comment?