I Don't Have VOTER ID; Can I Still Vote?

Obama administration has “launched an all-out war on voter ID laws” to bolster the president’s re-election chances. 

Ken Blackwell

A Republican activist, Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, asserts that voter ID laws offer a “reasonable safeguard” to protect against voter fraud and ballot-box stuffing.


Blackwell, who was secretary of state in Ohio from 1999 to 2007, also has been mayor of Cincinnati, undersecretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the George H.W. Bush administration, and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He now is vice chairman of the Republican National Committee's Platform Committee and a senior fellow with the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU). 






The ACRU has launched a new campaign called Protect Your Vote, an effort to protect states’ rights to require voters to present ID cards at the polling place.

The liberal war on voter integrity has now morphed from partisan hypocrisy to parody. It is bad enough for the Obama administration and its cheerleaders in the media to falsely brand the effort by various states to require citizens to present a picture ID when they go to vote as a revival of Jim Crow laws. But the NAACP has reduced that controversy to satire by asking the United Nations Human Rights Council to weigh in on the matter at an upcoming conference on minority rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

This is the same UN Council that is comprised of some of the worst human rights abusers in the world, which includes China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. The idea that Americans would ask a group whose members are countries that not only restrict voting rights but lack even the façade of democratic rule to take a stand on U.S. laws is beyond absurd. It seems never to have occurred to the partisans at the NAACP that there is something humorous about regimes that deny all of their citizens any say in governance standing in judgment on an actual working democracy. The arguments arrayed against voter ID laws by the Obama administration and those seeking to create a race issue where none exists are already weak. But by involving the UN, the NAACP has exposed itself to some well-earned scorn.


Laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls are common-sense measures to prevent fraud and corruption and to ensure that each year’s election returns accurately reflect the will of the people. With the attack led by the Obama Justice Department on voter ID laws across this country, ACRU has decided to mount a counteroffensive to protect the integrity of ballot boxes all across our country.

Although Attorney General Eric Holder’s actions are purportedly to prevent minorities from being disenfranchised, the reality is that these actions are nothing more than a crass political move with the purpose of ensuring that President Obama gets re-elected. The Justice Department recently blocked a new photo ID law in Texas and halted South Carolina’s law in December. 

Egyptians voter ID card

More than 30 states have tried to put in place a common-sense measure of voter ID so that people are assured that voters are who they purport to be, and voter IDs are commonplace in our culture. After all, you need an ID for a driver’s license, for boarding an airplane, receiving a passport, purchasing alcohol or checking out a library book. So to use it to safeguard the integrity of the voting process at the voting station is  a common-sense measure . 

We've just witnessed voting in Egypt at the end of January. I watched as Egyptians offered voter ID cards to say, I am who I purport to be. This is not a matter of saying there is voter fraud that’s run rampant, but we do have enough anecdotal evidence. We all know the horror stories of ACORN in 2008 and 2010. So there is enough evidence to suggest that we need to put things in place to protect this from going crazy.

The UN Human Rights Council is itself a standing mockery of the entire cause of human rights not just because it is comprised of tyrannies who routinely practice the atrocities the council is supposed to combat, but also because it devotes the vast majority of its time and effort to attacking Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. The UN’s obsession with delegitimizing Israel has long since crossed the line into anti-Semitism. But the world body’s lack of interest in doing something about China’s abuses in Tibet, the plight of women in the Arab world or the suppression of dissent in Cuba and China is just as outrageous.

The internationalization of the voter ID issue is also particularly inane because most developed countries, including the democracies, require citizens to have ID cards as a matter of law.

It should also be remembered that the argument that voter ID laws disenfranchise minorities is a thinly veiled attempt to incite racial distrust at the expense of a good government measure. The notion that there is something discriminatory about requiring voters to properly identify themselves in a nation when such photo IDS are already required for all airline travel and many other routine measures is absurd. The best that Attorney General Holder could do when overruling Texas’ voter ID law last week was to cite the fact that approximately 94 percent of Hispanics have such documentation as opposed to about 96 percent of non-Hispanics. Interestingly, there was no mention in the complaint about any disparity between African-Americans and other citizens even though we are told voter ID laws target the poor.

Justice John Paul Stevens

The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that voter ID laws were legal. That 6-3-majority opinion was written by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens who wrote, “there is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters.” Stevens also noted “we cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters.” That is especially true because the states that have passed or considered voter ID laws have made provisions to give such cards free of charge to the tiny minority of citizens who don’t already have them.

The Obama administration isn't really this stupid, they really know that to get government services and access requires these very same IDs and they understand that these States also have instituted free of cost IDs. This is merely an extension of Critical Race Theory that we have heard so much about lately. Critical Race Theory claims that since racism is embedded with the core structure of society and cannot be expunged through any means racism must be addressed by punitive counter-racism for the benefit of the discriminated parties. So therefore, the administration is pursuing a goal of allowing Blacks and Hispanics to commit voter fraud in an effort to "equalize" the political playing field. The same thinking is behind the DOJ prosecution of "White" perpetrated voter intimidation and their pass when Blacks are accused of the same. This is merely the tip of the iceberg, the most visible. This mindset is filtering down to every level of the Justice bureaucracy and to every sort of crime. Expect to see more excuses for crimes perpetrated by minorities and more prosecutions for vaguely defined "hate" crimes by "Whites.