Attorney General Eric Holder, during an event today honoring Martin Luther King Jr., told assembled South Carolinians that proponents of the state voter ID law failed to prove it did not have “a racially discriminatory effect,” as he implied that the law reflected “overt or subtle” racism.
“In jurisdictions across the country,” Holder said according to the prepared remarks, “both overt and subtle forms of discrimination remain all too common,” noting also that he had heard from South Carolinians who now fear “that some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance.”
Saying that the United States had not “reached the Promised Land” with respect to civil rights, Holder told his audience how the Department of Justice disapproved of recent state laws. “We recently objected – under Section 5 [of the Voting Rights Act] – to a South Carolina act that sought to impose a more restrictive photo identification requirement on voters in this state; and another that sought to change the manner of selecting members of a local school board,” he said. “[W]e concluded that [South Carolina] had failed to meet its burden of proving that the voting change would not have a racially discriminatory effect.”
Holder also suggested that the voter ID law would not have a significant impact on voter fraud. “Indeed, responsible parties on all sides of this debate have acknowledged that in-person voting fraud is uncommon,” he countered.
Dick Harpootlian, chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, has accused his state legislature and governor of attempting to revive segregationist laws. “This is Jim Crow — we’re going backwards in this state, and not forward, and that’s because of [South Carolina Governor] Nikki Haley and the Tea Party folks that don’t want to try to convince folks of color to vote for their candidates,” he said to Al Sharpton, in criticism of the voter ID law.
