Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) doesn’t buy the Left’s rhetoric that showing an ID to vote somehow constitutes voter discrimination.
The Senator spoke at the Louisville Forum in his home state this week, according to WFPL radio. He told the crowd that voter discrimination is no longer as prevalent in American society as it used to be during the civil rights movement — and that the push for voter ID is not unreasonable.
“I don’t see a problem with showing your driver’s license to vote,” Paul said. “I also think that some people are a little bit stuck in the past when they want to compare this. There was a time in the South when African-Americans were absolutely prohibited from voting by selective applications of bizarre and absurd literacy tests. And that was an abomination, that’s why we needed the Voting Rights Act, but that’s not showing your ID.”
Supporters of voter ID legislation argue there are plenty of simple, everyday things that require an ID and presenting identification in order to vote does not discriminate. Paul told the audience this week that comparing the push for voter ID to Jim Crow laws was unfair to those who fought for civil rights in the ’60s. He also said that voter discrimination is no longer as prevalent in American society as it used to be during the civil rights movement.
“The interesting thing about voting patterns now is in this last election African-Americans voted at a higher percentage than whites in almost every one of the states that were under the special provisions of the federal government,” he said. “So really, I don’t think there is objective evidence that we’re precluding African-Americans from voting any longer.”
Overall voter turnout was higher for blacks in the 2012 election than it was for whites, as the Associated Press reported. And when the Supreme Court made its recent decision on Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, they cited statistics from the Census Bureau that showed the states affected by the outdate preclearance criteria actually had higher — or at least very similar — black voter turnout than white voter turnout in 2004.
Proponents of the VRA say those statistics just prove the success of the law, and the necessity of preventing voter ID laws. But they certainly haven’t convinced the Kentucky Senator of that.
(h/t POLITICO)
