Voter Id Laws

The Obama administration on Monday blocked a new law in Texas that requires voters to show a photo ID, drawing fierce criticism from Republicans who say the move was aimed at boosting President Obama's reelection prospects. The Justice Department said that the law disproportionately harms Hispanic voters. "Even using the data most favorable to the state, Hispanics disproportionately lack either a driver's license or a personal identification card," Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, wrote in a...

COMPARED WITH WHAT some Americans have to tolerate on Election Day, registering to vote is relatively painless. That's partly thanks to the National Voter Registration Act , a 1993 law at the root of a case the Supreme Court will hear on Monday. The state of Arizona argues that it should be allowed to subvert the law's obvious purpose. The court shouldn't let it. In 1993, Congress looked at the "complicated maze" of often confusing and sometimes discriminatory state election rules, and it found that "unfair registration...

Regarding Jonathan Bernstein's Plum Line excerpt " Restricting the vote matters " [op-ed, July 6]: The most interesting part of this debate is how easily liberals blind themselves to their own bigoted view that people whose votes they need — blacks, Hispanics, the poor, college students and able-bodied seniors — are inherently less capable than others of obtaining state-issued photo IDs. The motives of those pushing such requirements...

SELMA, Ala. — Black leaders commemorating a famous civil rights march Sunday said efforts to diminish the impact of African Americans' votes haven't stopped in the years since the 1965 Voting Rights Act added millions to Southern voter rolls. Hundreds attended a Sunday morning brunch with Vice President Biden, and thousands gathered in the afternoon to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma's annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee. The event commemorates the "Bloody Sunday" beatings of voting-rights marchers by state troopers as the...

The June 22 editorial " A vote against voting " argued against states' new stringent voter-identification laws and said the number of documented cases of voter fraud is "tiny," implying that this is a small price to pay for easing the way of some voters who just happen not to have a valid ID. In this age of razor-thin margins and legally contested elections, it is insulting to most Americans to suggest that relaxed voter ID standards allowing even...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday vowed to be "aggressive" in challenging voting laws that restrict minority rights, using a speech in Texas to make his case on the same day a federal court was considering the legality of the state's new voter ID legislation. "Let me be clear: We will not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious rights," Holder said in the speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Frank Cole [ letters , Aug. 27] admitted that there is scant evidence of voter fraud, but he still claimed that "waiting for a problem to occur before taking action is irresponsible. " That sentiment might be appropriate for taking a multivitamin daily to ward off disease, but it doesn't make much sense for prescribing a daily dose of penicillin to someone without any evident disease that the antibiotic would attack.  Furthermore, the issue of whether voter ID requirements are onerous should not be evaluated...

Almost three-quarters of all Americans support the idea that people should have to show photo identification to vote, even though they are nearly as concerned about voter suppression as they are about fraud in presidential elections, according to a new Washington Post poll . A controversy over voter ID laws is a prominent backdrop to this year's election, with courtroom showdowns in Pennsylvania, Texas and elsewhere over voting rights and...

A new nationwide analysis of more than 2,000 cases of alleged election fraud over the past dozen years shows that in-person voter impersonation on Election Day , which has prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tougher voter ID laws, was virtually nonexistent. The analysis of 2,068 reported fraud cases by News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project, found 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation since 2000. With 146 million...

Republican lawmakers clashed with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr . on Thursday over Justice Department efforts to block voter-ID laws in several Southern states during this election year. Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee also grilled Holder over the botched "Fast and Furious" operation, in which federal agents in Arizona allowed suspected arms traffickers to buy more than 2,000 guns in order to track them to a Mexican drug cartel. Rep. Darrell...

Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling says he'll be ready to announce whether he will run as an independent candidate for governor of Virginia by March 14. Bolling, who suspended his campaign seeking the Republican nomination for the state's top job in November, said he has not yet made a decision , but that it is a "50-50 proposition. " "We're putting together the information we need to make a final decision," Bolling said when asked about his self-imposed deadline. "One way or the other, we will have that...

RICHMOND — Amid fierce partisan debates over how, when and in which districts Virginians can vote, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II is working to assemble a rare bipartisan coalition to decide who gets on the ballot. Cuccinelli, the likely Republican nominee in this year's gubernatorial race against presumptive Democratic choice Terry McAuliffe, has become one of the more polarizing figures in commonwealth politics. Beloved by conservative activists and disliked by many...

W HEN IT COMES to democracy and election transparency, Greg Abbott, the attorney general of Texas, is apparently taking his cues from post-Soviet autocrats like Russia's Vladimir Putin and Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev. Like Mr. Putin, whose election czar called international election monitors in Russia "spies," and Mr. Nazarbayev, who threatened to bar monitors altogether, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, is deeply discomfited that a few of them will be in the Lone Star State on Election Day. He is threatening to ...

A South Carolina voter-identification law does not discriminate against African Americans but must be delayed until next year because it would cause too much confusion at polling places so close to Election Day, a federal court ruled Wednesday. In a unanimous ruling , a special three-judge panel found the law, which requires voters to display one of five types of photo identification, would not harm African Americans and was not enacted with discrimination in mind. ...

The price of one bona fide, registered American vote varies from place to place. But it is rarely more than a tank of gas. Indeed, as a rising furor over voter fraud has prodded some states to mount extensive efforts against illegal voters, election-fraud cases more often involve citizens who sell their votes, usually remarkably cheaply. In West Virginia over the past decade, the cost was as low as $10. Last year in West Memphis, Ark., a statehouse candidate used $2 half-pints of vodka . At the high...

Michelle Obama used a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation on Saturday night to urge delegates to register voters and encourage African Americans to turn out in November's election. Speaking in Washington at the foundation's annual Phoenix dinner, the first lady likened turning out the vote to the civil rights struggles of previous eras. "Make no mistake about it, this is the march of our time," Obama told the audience at the Walter E. Washington...

The price of one bona fide, registered American vote varies from place to place. But it is rarely more than a tank of gas. Indeed, as a rising furor over voter fraud has prodded some states to mount extensive efforts against illegal voters, election-fraud cases more often involve citizens who sell their votes, usually remarkably cheaply. In West Virginia over the past decade, the cost was as low as $10. Last year in West Memphis, Ark., a statehouse candidate used $2 half-pints of vodka . At the high end, corrupt...

OSTENSIBLE JUSTIFICATION for a spate of Republican-sponsored voter ID laws — which would require voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polls — has been the threat of voter fraud, specifically, in-person voter impersonation. It has seemed likely, given the absence of evidence of such crimes, that the threat was overstated. Now we know for sure: Such fraud virtually never takes place. Listening to Republican advocates of voter ID laws, you'd think that impersonations at the polls are the biggest danger to...

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Tuesday called for more hearings on whether a new Republican-backed voter-ID law can be implemented this fall without disenfranchising voters who currently lack the needed photo identification. The decision drew sharp rebukes from two of the six justices. They said it was already clear that some legitimate voters could not secure the needed ID in time for the election. "I have heard enough about the Commonwealth's scramble to meet this law's requirements," wrote Justice Debra...

Cheryl Ann Moore stepped into the state's busiest driver's licensing center, got a ticket with the number C809 on it and a clipboard with a pen attached by rubber band, and began her long wait Thursday to become a properly documented voter. Six blocks away, inside an ornate and crowded City Hall courtroom, a lawyer was arguing before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that the state's controversial new voter ID law would strip citizens of their rights and should be enjoined. Just outside, on...