Holder's voter ID fraud

The AG invents fears of ballot suppression.

The Obama Administration's re-election mobilization continues: Witness Eric Holder's attempt to play the race card and perhaps twist the law in a campaign against voter identification laws.

In the Attorney General's telling, the movement in the states to require voters to show some ID is a revival of minority disenfranchisement a la Jim Crow. A growing number of minorities, he said in a speech last week, are now worried about "the same disparities, divisions and problems" that beset the country in 1965 and "many Americans, for the first time in their lives . . . now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up" to the promise of democracy for all.

If you haven't heard about this national crisis, perhaps that's because you don't travel in Mr. Holder's political circles. He is merely repeating the howls of groups like the NAACP and the George Soros-funded Brennan Center, which claim without evidence that voter ID laws hurt minorities.

The NAACP even petitioned the United Nations this month for a human-rights ruling on what President Benjamin Jealous called a "tidal wave of assaults on the right to vote." He meant in America, not Cuba or North Korea. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued to challenge a voter ID law in Wisconsin.

Mr. Holder's remarks are especially notable because they come as the Justice Department is reviewing voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina for "preclearance" under the Voting Rights Act. The states' plans require voters to present photo ID like a driver's license or passport to vote, a measure endorsed by the Commission on Federal Election Reform headed by President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in 2005 to protect the integrity of the ballot.

Mr. Holder says the Civil Rights Division led by Thomas Perez will review the policies and impartially "apply the law." If that's true, Mr. Perez's job should be easy: In 2005, Justice approved a nearly identical law in Georgia. In 2008's Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court likewise ruled 6-3 that an Indiana law requiring photo ID at the ballot box was constitutional.

The court's liberal lion, then-Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote for the majority that Indiana's law "is unquestionably relevant to the State's interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process." Indiana offered free voter ID cards to all citizens, so the inconvenience of picking up an ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles wasn't an undue burden and was reasonably balanced by the state's interest in reducing fraud, Justice Stevens wrote.

That isn't good enough for Mr. Holder, who says his department's priority is to "expand the franchise." But expand it for whom, exactly? The vast majority of voters already have the necessary photo ID, which they need to get through airport security or register for a grocery-store savings card.

Plaintiffs put up by liberal lawsuit shops routinely claim that ID laws endanger the rights of hundreds of thousands, but lawsuits in Indiana and Georgia were dismissed because they couldn't produce a single eligible voter who'd been turned away due to the ID requirement. Turnout has risen in states that have passed the voter ID laws, with no adverse impact on minorities.

In his speech, Mr. Holder highlighted historical attempts to keep voters away from the polls to "gain partisan advantage." But in a case of more recent history, in 2009, Mr. Holder's department dropped a voter intimidation case against the Black Panther Party, in which members stood outside a polling place brandishing nightsticks and threatening voters. Civil-rights lawyer Bartle Bull saw the Panthers in action and called it "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen."

Thirty states now require some form of ID at the polls, and one goal of Mr. Holder's attack is to intimidate other states that want to toughen their laws. He's probably also signaling that Justice will strike down the Texas and South Carolina statutes. This would please the Democratic Party's left while not-so-subtly inventing a threat of Republican racism to drive minority turnout in 2012. Mr. Holder's voter ID alarums are one more reason he's earning a reputation for politicized, partial justice.