The liberal media that loves to babble about “vote suppression” largely ignored a key report last week concluding that voter ID laws do not, repeat, do not, deter eligible people from voting.
On the flip side, an ongoing case in North Carolina helps show that conservative concerns about the fraud-inducing possibilities of a practice known as “vote harvesting” are probably quite valid.
First, the report. It comes not from some right-wing outfit, but from the acclaimed, neutral National Bureau of Economic Research. To cite the report’s summary, “we find the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications and cannot be attributed to mobilization against the laws, measured by campaign contributions and self-reported political engagement.”
(The report also found the laws don’t have an impact on fraud, either, but that’s a question about efficacy, not about alleged discrimination or vote suppression. Whether ID laws are necessary is a different question than whether they are harmful. This report gives a firm answer of “no” to the latter.)
This clear refutation of the idea the ID laws somehow “suppress” black turnout shows again just how dishonest and destructive the political Left has been in hyping up racial tensions over the idea that ID laws are racially motivated. Specifically, the report found that even photo ID requirements “do not decrease the participation of ethnic minorities relative to whites.”
Then again, we should have known that already. ID supporters have long noted that black voter turnout actually increased after ID laws were implemented in several states. The Supreme Court has found such laws constitutional. And black former Democratic congressman Artur Davis of Alabama has openly and rightly ridiculed the idea that an ID card should be seen as oppressive, while arguing that it can help deter rampant vote fraud in black neighborhoods that “cancels out the votes of [black] citizens who are exercising their rights.”
(Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill told Congress a week ago that absentee vote fraud especially still happens “frequently.”)
On the other hand, voting “reforms” widely advocated on the Left actually can promote voter fraud. The practice of “vote harvesting,” which involves having untrained people aggressively collect absentee ballots and submit them often at the last minute and with inadequate safeguards, is used widely in California and some other states, almost always to the advantage of Democrats.
But as writer Bruce Bialosky notes in a Feb. 10 column at Townhall, we have an example of the obvious dangers of vote harvesting in the last remaining undecided 2018 House race in the country, in North Carolina: “A political operative who had worked for both parties was engaged by an inexperienced Republican candidate who won election to Congress in a close race where the number of ballots in question could have changed the outcome. In North Carolina ballot harvesting is illegal, but it appears that some Democrat ballots were picked up by door-knockers,” and possibly mishandled by the Republican operative.
In Orange County, Calif., meanwhile, some 250,000 (!) votes were “harvested” just on Election Day itself, but there is “no infrastructure to pursue testing as to how or whether this process was manipulated or fraud was part of the process.”
Vote fraud is real. Vote harvesting promotes it and should be stopped. Voter ID may deter it and should be embraced.
