IT’S A BAD HABIT SHE HAS: Hans Von Spakovsky: Clinton Gets Everything Wrong on Voting:

She insists that state legislative initiatives to improve the integrity of our election process are a “sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color.” Wrong. Instead, as Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity aptly puts it, states are engaged in “the usual effort to strike the right balance between facilitating voting by eligible voters and preventing voting by ineligible voters.”

Clinton’s assertion is hard to reconcile with the U.S. Census Bureau’s finding that blacks voted at a higher level than whites by two percentage points in the 2012 election. Moreover, the Justice Department didn’t file a single case in 2014 (or, thus far, in 2015) under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act alleging the disenfranchisement of people of color.

Clinton also claimed that students and grandmothers are being turned away from the polls in Texas because of its voter-ID law. But there is no evidence that this is occurring. In state elections in 2013, turnout almost doubled in comparison with the 2011 state election (when the ID law was not in place) — including in heavily minority areas, some of which had even greater increases in turnout. And the few people who don’t have an ID are provided with one free of charge by Texas authorities.

Voter anti-fraud laws aren’t about “disenfranchising” anyone. They’re about ensuring the integrity of our constitutional republic, by implementing commonsense measures to restrict voting to those who are eligible to vote. Democrats like Clinton, by contrast, have every incentive to loosen anti-fraud measures, so that ineligible voters–mostly convicted felons, students (who want to vote outside their state of legal residency) and illegal immigrants–can vote, as Democrats know that these ineligibles are highly likely to vote for Democrats.

Plus, invoking the “disenfranchisement” rhetoric–with an added dose of “Jim Crow” references for good measure–are designed to gin up black and other minority turnout in a 2016 presidential election that will not have the same minority pull as when Obama was on the ballot.