All the News That Fits We Print

Published June 5, 2015

Responding to a New York York Times editorial is a bit like killing mosquitoes with a fly-swatter: very annoying and much too easy, but sometimes it has to be done. Especially when that editorial appears as a “news” item, like the page one, column six story on June 4, 2015.

Entitled “Democrats Wage a National Fight Over Voter Rules,” the Times column was subtitled “G.O.P. Sees Lawsuits on IDs and Access as a Campaign Ploy” and featured, above the fold, a gleefully-smiling Hillary Clinton looking her best in a blue suit with her hands clasped in front of her almost in prayer.

Now let’s get a few things out of the way up front:

First, along with most of the Democratic Party and the “mainstream” media (but I repeat myself), the Times is so in the tank for Mrs. Clinton that it’s not even worth complaining about. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Times editors gotta support the Democrat for President. It is what it is.

Second, we really do have a problem with illegal ballot-stuffing in this country, and the problem is largely with voters who vote Democrat. I have witnessed it myself as a poll-watcher in Chicago and Milwaukee going back almost forty years, and Hans van Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation (about whom more will be said later), among others, has documented any number of proven cases. As Spakovsky points out, an estimated 25% of illegal aliens – or, if you prefer, “undocumented immigrants” – have sufficient “documentation” (or lack thereof) to have voted at least once since they’ve been in this country. Some of them don’t even know it’s illegal.

Third, the potential for illegal voting today is massive, particularly in swing states. Wood County in Ohio, a swing state in the past two presidential elections, had only 98,213 residents of legal voting age in 2010, for example, yet has between 106,258 and 108,014 registered voters, largely Bowling Green State University students and professors who had long since left town. In the swing state of North Carolina, 35,750 voters in 2012 had the same first and last names and birth dates as people who voted in at least one other state, a statistical near-impossibility. (Given North Carolina’s 6.5 million registered voters and the number of days in a year, that number should have been no higher than 100.) Without voter ID, each such vote or registration is potentially fraudulent.

Fourth, any sentient American of voting age has the resources, intelligence, and opportunity to obtain a valid photo ID. Except for the tiny fraction of the population that literally sleeps on the streets — many of them white males and most of them mentally ill — the poor in America live well beyond the means of most people on earth, with roofs over their heads, food in their pantries, and money on their SNAP cards, not to mention televisions in their homes and cellphones in their purses and pockets.

The idea that a meaningful number of eligible voters cannot afford a photo ID or are too stupid to know how to get one insults both the voters and the taxpayers. Just four weeks before the 2014 midterm elections, for example, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services solicited bids for vendors to handle a “surge” of up to 9 million photo ID cards “to support possible future immigration reform initiative requirements.” A government that can fund photo identification for currently undocumented immigrants can surely see to it that those few, if any, eligible voters who don’t already have valid photo ID’s can get one.

So any number of states, primarily with Republican legislatures, have enacted positive voter identification laws that would require proof of citizenship and a photo ID, yet Democrats are suing to stop them. As the Times reports, suits have already been filed in the afore-mentioned Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina, and may soon be filed in Georgia, Nevada, and Virginia, almost all of which “have growing African-American or Hispanic populations” critical to Democratic success at the polls.

“The G.O.P.,” the Times says on p. A18, “is calling a court effort a campaign ploy,” which it obviously is. And it quotes Mr. Spakovsky, but is quick to label him a “Republican … at the conservative Heritage Foundation.” The Heritage Foundation, which I also support, makes no bones about preaching conservative values, but when it comes time to refer to the left-of-center “Brennan Center for Justice” at NYU, the Times labels it “nonpartisan.”  Actually, the Heritage Foundation is a nonpartisan institution as well, but the Times either doesn’t see it that way or prefers not to mention it.

Either way, the Grey Lady’s partisan political slip is – as always – showing.