Is it placing an undue burden on somebody to present identification at the voting booth?

We must give a driver’s license or some other form of ID to cash a check. This isn’t because bank tellers harbor some hidden animus.  They just need to know we are who we say we are.

Don’t you want your vote protected from somebody else’s pretending to be you and voting for the candidate you oppose?

Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t see the recent state laws requiring IDs to vote in quite this light. He issued a statement yesterday saying that such laws hurt minorities. Politico reported:

“It is time to ask: What kind of nation and what kind of people do we want to be? Are we willing to allow this era — our era — to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended?” Holder said in a speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas.

Well, here is the kind of country I want to be: the kind that protects the right to vote from voter fraud. Letting people vote without presenting an ID opens the door to voter fraud, a serious moral issue at all times, but a serious electoral issue in close elections.

Holder urged people to “speak out” and “raise awareness” of what is at stake with the requirement that voters show identification.   

If you really want to raise your awareness of what is at stake, I highly recommend J. Christian Adams’s book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. Adams is the veteran DOJ lawyer who resigned after the Holder DOJ refused to prosecute members of the militant New Black Panther party who brandished a nightstick and made racially-charged remarks at a voting booth in Philadelphia on the day of the 2008 presidential election.

Adams reports on how the lawyers he describes as political activists who happen to work for DOJ’s Voting Rights Division turn a blind eye to voter fraud or intimidation. The abuse of absentee ballots is one of the key ways voter fraud is perpetrated. Requiring IDs would not do away with absentee ballot fraud, but it would vastly reduce the potential for fraud in general.

It would seem to me that Mr. Holder should want to support these laws to ensure that minorities don’t have their votes stolen. And—really, Mr. Holder—isn’t it sort of offensive to believe that minority voters can’t get it together to present IDs?

I call that insulting, Mr. Attorney General.