Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General: ID Laws Aren’t Significant Obstacle to Proper Votes
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently delivered a speech at the LBJ Library in which he criticized state laws that strengthen the integrity of elections and seemed to question whether voter fraud is really a problem. In a remarkable twist of irony, Attorney General Holder also praised President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s efforts to ensure the “integrity of” the democratic process.
Commending LBJ for preserving electoral integrity turns a blind eye to history. As Johnson biographer Robert Caro detailed in his latest book, LBJ’s political career was fueled by voter fraud. Johnson’s 1948 election to the U.S. Senate hung on the late discovery of “200 new votes cast in alphabetical order and all in the same handwriting six days after the polls had closed.”
Texas sued Holder in federal court because he refused to allow the state to implement its 2011 voter identification law. Under the law, voters must present photo identification issued by the State of Texas or the federal government in order to vote at a polling place. Voters who are disabled or older than 65 are eligible to vote by mail, which means they need not have identification in order to vote. Any Texan who lacks a photo identification can obtain an Election Identification Card from the state at no charge.
Holder objects to the Texas law despite the fact that the U.S. Justice Department approved a similar Georgia law in 2005 and urged the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Indiana’s voter ID law in 2008. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring voters to show a photo ID is perfectly constitutional and that the law was “amply justified” by Indiana’s interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.