If you listen to Democrats talk about “voting rights,” you’d think that Bull Connor and his dogs had returned from the grave to prevent black people from voting. “Jim Crow 2,” Joe Biden called it during the 2020 campaign.
In fact, if the Democrats didn’t use hysterical hyperbole to talk about “voting rights,” they wouldn’t have anything to say.
And as far as voter ID, Democrats still can’t get used to the fact that overwhelming majorities of Americans in poll after poll show their support for voters needing identification to cast a ballot.
But an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll also shows that the Democrats’ lies and exaggerations about voting laws being passed in several Republican states are taking hold in the black community—just as the Democrats knew they would.
“I’m concerned that the more conservative elements are attempting to create a Jim Crow 2,” said Richard Barnett, a retired attorney who volunteered as an election judge in his Chicago suburb, echoing the term President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat, used to attack the new Republican laws. “They’re making it hard for ‘the other’ people to vote to consolidate their power.”
That’s a statement with no basis in fact. There is no evidence that GOP efforts to secure the vote have made it “harder” to vote anywhere.
Recoa Russell, a 67-year-old retired machine operator in Mobile, Alabama, who is Black, lives in a state with some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. But he said the rules there “work well. Just show your ID and pull the lever.”
Indeed, voter identification is the most popular of a series of voting reforms in the poll, with 70% favoring requiring photo identification before casting a ballot. Smaller majorities were in favor of automatic voter registration of eligible citizens and sending mail ballots to all registered voters, two top Democratic priorities. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to support the voter ID law, 87% to 55%.
According to some surveys, up to 96.6 percent of Americans have valid photo IDs that would allow them to vote. While that means that several million people of voting age do not possess valid photo IDs, the question arises why someone who wants to vote wouldn’t get an ID.
It’s a stupidly simple requirement and I have yet to hear an intelligent answer to that question.
The poll illustrates why Democrats have had such problems in their push for a federal overhaul of voting laws. An attempt to pass sweeping election changes stalled in the Senate earlier this year amid unanimous Republican opposition. For months, Democrats hesitated to even bring the bill to a vote because they couldn’t get their entire 50-member Senate caucus to agree to it.
With 75 percent of Americans fairly satisfied with elections in their states, Democrats are having a hard time ginning up hysteria against “Jim Crow 2.0.” Most Americans don’t think that GOP voting integrity measures make it harder to vote, despite Democratic scare tactics.
But Democrats need an issue to club the GOP over the head with, so the scare tactics will continue.
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