Our own Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbot explains above what happened in the Texas Voter ID case last week. Pay close attention to the details he gives on his prosecution of Voter ID fraud in his office alone. The Voter ID law approved last year here in Texas, and signed into law by Gov. Perry, was blocked by Obama’s Justice Department. THE DOJ said it unfairly impacts minority voters, even though similar Voter Id laws in Indiana and Georgia have proven to actually increase minority voting, and Indiana cleared legal challenges up to the Supreme Court. A three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., heard the Texas case last week. A ruling is expected by next month. The Justice Department was not able to prove that any voters were disfranchised by the law. There are at least 15 other states with similar laws passed or pending, so this could effect them as well. But once again, it will probably end up in the Supreme Court, even though in 2008 the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision upholding the Indiana law Voter ID law (requiring voters to show a picture ID to vote).
In addition to the Justice Department hiring a wildly liberal data analysis firm, their lead lawyer was also wildly partisan. Read the details of that here, but here’s the best part from the experts:
The expert hired by the state, University of Texas Professor Thomas Sager, analyzed the DOJ’s list of those who supposedly lack photo identification and found:
•More than 57,000 of the voters were listed as “deceased” in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver’s license database.
•More than 290,000 of the voters are over the age of 65 — and therefore able to cast mail-in-ballots without having to show any photo identification.
•More than 260,000 voters are listed as “in suspense” on the Secretary of State’s Voter Registration List because they had moved or left the state — and therefore are ineligible to vote.
•More than 450,000 were successfully matched to state-issued photo identification records — an obvious, plain, and grievous “error” by DOJ.
The last mistake proved to be quite embarrassing to DOJ on the first day of trial. Two of the individuals listed by the Justice Department and its collection of “experts” as not having a photo ID included Texas Election Director Keith Ingram and his wife, both of whom have Texas driver’s licenses, as Ingram testified on the stand. DOJ and Ansolabehere also made other mistakes that led Sager to conclude that more than 1.45 million voters were incorrectly listed by DOJ as not having an ID.
The embarrassment didn’t stop there.
On Tuesday, the chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, Rep. Trey Martinez Fisher (D-San Antonio), who led the opposition to voter ID in the Texas House, was put up as a witness by the Justice Department. In cross-examination by Texas, Fisher had to admit that the statements he had made in the midst of the legislative debate that his 74-year old mother would be unable to vote because she didn’t have a Texas driver’s license were untrue. Not only did she have a license at the time Fisher made that false claim, she renewed it last August.
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Texas had another expert, Prof. Daron Shaw, conduct a representative survey of a sample of the voters that DOJ claimed had no ID. He found that 73 percent reported they actually had a Texas driver’s license. The survey also showed that 39 percent had passports and 18 percent had military IDs. Once the voters over age 65 who don’t need an ID to vote were eliminated, the survey revealed that 1.9 percent of whites, 0.96 percent of Hispanics, and 1.23 percent of blacks will have to obtain a free photo ID. Shaw concludes that “there is no statistically significant difference in ID possession rates amongst whites, blacks, and Hispanics” contrary to the false claims made publicly by DOJ (his report also showed that Catalist’s race-matching data is largely flawed – only 68 percent of voters that the Ickes firm claimed are African-American self-identified as black).
And if you didn’t or couldn’t see the video above, on the list of those without ID in Texas listed by the Justice Dept were President George Bush, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Phil Gramm. What a joke.
Bottom line? When the Justice Department or liberal pundits throw out numbers on how many do not have ID, it’s bogus.
Although this might seem like a cut and dried case, there are three judges on this panel and two were appointed by Democrat Presidents. Rosemary Collyer, was appointed in 2002 by President George W. Bush. The other judges hearing the case are David Tatel, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and Robert Wilkins, appointed in 2010 by President Obama. So, things don’t look good for Texas sadly, despite all the embarrassment of the DOJ. We shall see if partisanship overrules justice. I’m not hopeful.