Once Again with the Lies about Voter Suppression

One of the enduring battle cries from the Obamacrats in the last few years is that Republicans are engaging in voter suppression; the evil GOP is trying to keep minorities from voting through the use of photo ID requirements and other restrictions on registration and voting. The charge is a total phony; photo ID laws combat fraud and have been in place for quite some time here in Connecticut. No sane person would ever claim that Connecticut was trying to reduce the Democrat vote. Now the focus is shifting to registration.

The Washington Post had an article yesterday which carried the huge headline "Voter registration down among Hispanics, blacks". According to the WaPo, steps taken across the country coupled with the recession have reduced the number of blacks and Hispanics registered to vote by about 7%. The discussion in the article makes this reduction sound like a diabolical plot at voter suppression. While acknowledging that registration always falls in the years after a presidential election until just before the next one, the WaPo laments photo ID laws, restrictions on who can do registration and how the process must work and the like. Of course, many of those modifications in the registration process arose after the discovery after the 2008 election that groups like ACORN had turned in large numbers of phony registrations.

The article seems to support the contentions of the Obamacrats that efforts have been made to suppress minority voting, until you get to one sentence stuck in the middle of the twenty-third paragraph of the article. "Among whites, registrations dropped 6 percent to 104 million." So what the article is actually telling us is that among minorities registration dropped by just under 7% and among whites it dropped by 6%. So there is almost no difference by racial or ethnic group in the drop in registration. Indeed, if the WaPo had done its homework, it would have found that among the group of voters who are newly qualified to vote for the first time in 2012, the percentage of Hispanic or black voters is substantially higher than it is in the electorate as a whole. This difference alone is large enough to account for the slight difference in the registration declines.

Let me say this clearly: contrary to all the alarmist statement in the WaPo article, demographic changes alone can account for the tiny difference in the number of unregistered voters by racial or ethnic group. There has been no voter suppression. There has been no attempt at voter suppression. This is another of the bogus claims like the "war on women:.

It is a despicable attempt by the Obamacrats to divide the country along racial lines. Some day, these folks need to remember that there are no black Americans or white Americans; there are only Americans. The sooner that the Obamacrats live that sentence rather than just mouthing it, the better we will all be.