The Elephant in the Living Room

On Wednesday, July 12, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition featured a story on efforts to require photo IDs for voting. In his report, reporter Ari Shapiro explained the basic positions of proponents and opponents, saying that those who support photo ID laws claim that such laws are necessary to “prevent fraud,” while opponents insist that the purpose is to “prevent voting.”

For example, NPR quoted John Greenbaum, of the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under the Law, as saying that the photo ID efforts are a “thinly-veiled attempt to suppress the poor minority vote.…It appears that some people have made a political calculation that if they can prevent certain types of voters from being able to vote, that is in their best interest.” He went on to say that, in Georgia, as many as 1 in 3 elderly blacks do not have a photo ID of any kind. (Slam! Bam! Down goes the race card and the old folks card! Two birds, one stone!)

Then, of course, NPR turned to an organization that can always be counted on to stooge for the Democratic Party. They interviewed Dan Corman of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), a lawyer who is fighting photo ID proposals in Arizona and Georgia. Corman raised the specter of the ultimate bogeyman, saying that it can “cost a lot” to obtain a photo ID, and warning that some may even find it necessary to “travel out of state” to obtain the necessary documentation.

Finally, NPR’s Shapiro proclaimed that, “What makes all of the arguments a little surreal is that there is no good scientific data to support either side. So voter ID advocates can’t demonstrate a fraud problem that has to be solved.” 

A much-used metaphor about ignoring the obvious speaks of “the elephant in the living room.” What the Shapiro report did was to ignore an entire herd of elephants in the living room. The only way he could possibly have prepared his report was to first decide where to go for the “scientific data” and then proceed to avoid those sources at all costs.

The evidence of widespread fraud is all around us, in every election, to say nothing of countless acts of violence and intimidation – rifles and shotguns fired into Republican offices, party offices stormed and ransacked by AFL-CIO “brown shirts,” campaign workers assaulted, equipment and documents destroyed, massive absentee ballot fraud, etc., etc. It is America’s dirtiest little secret. 

But the most telling portion of the NPR report was a single phrase from Shapiro’s interview with the AARP lawyer. Corman is quoted as saying, “Republicans worry more about the integrity of the process, while Democrats worry more about people having access to the process.”  

(Translation: Republicans worry about being able to lock their doors to keep their possessions from being stolen, while Democrats worry that burglars will be unable to get past all of their deadbolts and alarm systems.)

The grand implication of Corman’s statement is the unavoidable conclusion that Democrats simply do not care about the integrity of the system. Democrats are interested only in herding as many uneducated, uninformed, entitlement-seeking, and even room temperature voters into the voting booths as possible. And if they can find a way to induce those people to vote, not once, but two, three, or four times, so much the better.

It has taken many years of frustrating effort to get the fraud issue onto the national agenda, but now that it is finally being openly discussed and debated, what is so surprising is the brazenness with which Democrats oppose the idea of photo IDs and the layer upon layer of creative lies they’ve devised to mask their true purpose.

Listening to the brazen defenses of liberals and Democrats, one is forced to wonder just how far they will go in order to win and hold power. Is there some level of fraud and violence beyond which even they will not venture? Having observed them in action, up-close, for more than forty years I cannot imagine where they might draw such a line.

If Shapiro were a competent reporter he might have thought to ask, “Okay, let’s say we get Republicans to drop the idea of requiring photo IDs. Would you then be in favor of, say, a $1,000 fine and a mandatory one-year prison sentence for anyone found to be voting more than once, or voting in the name of another person, living or dead?”

The responses to that question would have been worth the price of admission. It might even have made listening to NPR time well-spent.