California Conservative

Keith Ellison is taking his anti-voter ID campaign all the way to the Supreme Court. Specifically, he’s filed a brief with the court stating that a photo ID card is a variation of a poll tax.

Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the only Muslim in the U.S. Congress, has filed a brief with the Supreme Court in a voter proof-of-identification case that he says disenfranchises black voters.

Ellison urged the court to strike down an Indiana law that requires a person to have a photo ID to vote. Last month, he introduced legislation that would ban the requirement in federal elections.

Ellison, a first-term congressman, filed the brief with the support of all the other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including presidential candidate Barack Obama, a Democratic senator.

“In America, our right to vote is a sacred right, and a moral obligation,” Ellison said in a statement Thursday. “We must do everything that encourages, fosters and facilitates everyone’s ability to exercise that right. While photo IDs seem harmless, they are in fact the modern day poll tax.”

Ellison’s rants notwithstanding, he couldn’t be more wrong. Requiring a photo ID to vote is the only way to prevent voter fraud. Here in Minnesota, part of the election law requires election workers determine a voter’s residential status. Here’s what the relevant portion of Minnesota Election Law says:

200.031 DETERMINATION OF RESIDENCE.
Residence shall be determined in accordance with the following principles, so far as they may be applicable to the facts of the case:
(a) The residence of an individual is in the precinct where the individual’s home is located, from which the individual has no present intention of moving, and to which, whenever the individual is absent, the individual intends to return;
(b) An individual does not lose residence if the individual leaves home to live temporarily in another state or precinct;
c) An individual does not acquire a residence in any precinct of this state if the individual is living there only temporarily, without the intention of making that precinct home;
(d) If an individual goes into another state or precinct with the intention of making it home or files an affidavit of residence there for election purposes, the individual loses residence in the former precinct;
(e) If an individual moves to another state with the intention of living there for an indefinite period, the individual loses residence in this state, notwithstanding any intention to return at some indefinite future time;
(f) Except as otherwise provided in this section, an individual’s residence is located in the precinct where the individual’s family lives, unless the individual’s family is living in that precinct only temporarily;

Keep in mind that photo ID’s prevent organizations like ACORN from perpetrating widespread voter fraud:

But the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide
and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says
is the “worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history” of the state.
The list of “voters” registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn’t require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.

Here’s more from John Fund’s article:

Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been delivered after last year’s Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest–over 97%–were fake.

With all due respect to Rep. Ellison, requiring a photo ID is the only way to prevent organizations like ACORN and ACT from committing widespread voter registration fraud.

While I understand that poll taxes were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, I also know that the courts must also decide how to balance the right to vote with the need to protect the security of elections.

It’d seem to me that this would be moot if people were given photo ID’s if they couldn’t afford one. Here’s what Infoplease.com says about the poll tax:

poll tax, a capital tax levied equally on every adult in the community. Although no longer a significant source of revenue for any major country, the poll tax did provide large sums for many governments until well into the 1800s. The tax has long been attacked as being an unfair burden upon those less able to pay. In the United States, the poll tax has been connected with voting rights. Poll taxes enacted in Southern states between 1889 and 1910 had the effect of disenfranchising many blacks as well as poor whites, because payment of the tax was a prerequisite for voting. By the 1940s some of these taxes had been abolished, and in 1964 the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution disallowed the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in federal elections. In 1966 this prohibition was extended to all elections by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that such a tax violated the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Based on this information, poll taxes were levied against everyone. History tells us that poll taxes were used to prevent minorities from voting in southern states like Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. The best way to eliminate voter disenfranchisement while preserving elelction integrity is to provide a free photo ID for voters who can’t afford a photo ID.

Elllison’s whole reason for calling photo ID a “modern day poll tax” is to energize the minority vote. He’s stirring minorities by using racially charged words. His goal is to stigmatize anyone who proposes a photo ID to be branded a bigot. It’s a time-tested tactic within the Democratic Party to stigmatize people they disagree with as bigots. They use that tactic to avoid a genuine discussion on the subject.

Voters across the nation should reject Ellison’s divisive political tactics. More importantly, the Supreme Court should reject Rep. Ellison’s brief. Most importantly, the Supreme Court should affirm the ruling of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Indiana’s law as constitutional.

To do anything less would be to disenfranchise every vote cast in America.

Technorati Tags: Keith Ellison, Disenfranchisement, Poll Tax, Photo ID, Voter Fraud, John Fund, SCOTUS, Constitution, ACORN

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 2:20 am and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, Corruption, Crime, Election 2008, Elections, Race, Voter Fraud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.