Thread: Justice Department to sue Texas over voter ID law

Justice Department to sue Texas over voter ID law

By Pete Yost / Associated Press
Posted: 08/22/2013 11:18:38 AM MDT

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department said Thursday it will sue Texas over the state's voter ID law and will seek to intervene in a lawsuit over the state's redistricting laws.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the action marks another step in the effort to protect voting rights of all eligible Americans. He said the government will not allow a recent Supreme Court decision to be interpreted as open season for states to pursue measures that suppress voting rights.

"This represents the department's latest action to protect voting rights, but it will not be our last," said the attorney general.

On June 25, the Supreme Court threw out the most powerful part of the Voting Rights Act, whose enactment in 1965 marked a major turning point in black Americans' struggle for equal rights and political power. The Justice Department's legal action in Texas is based on another provision in the law. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has called the Obama administration's actions an "end-run around the Supreme Court."

In the voter ID lawsuit, the U.S. government will contend that Texas adopted a voter identification law with the purpose of denying or restricting the right to vote on account of race, color or membership in a language minority group.

Intervening in the redistricting case would enable the federal government to seek a declaration that Texas's 2011 redistricting plans for the U.S. Congress and the Texas State House of Representatives were adopted in order to deny or restrict the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

A federal court in Washington, D.C., has previously held that Texas failed to meet its burden of proving that its 2011 redistricting plans and its 2011 voter identification law were not discriminatory.

The separate provision of the Voting Rights Act that Holder is invoking may be a difficult tool for the Obama administration to use. A handful of jurisdictions have been subjected to advance approval of election changes through the Civil Rights Act provision it is relying on, but a court first must find that a state or local government engaged in intentional discrimination under the Constitution's 14th or 15th amendments, or the jurisdiction has to admit to discrimination. Unlike other parts of the voting law, the discriminatory effect of an action is not enough to trigger the provision.


http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/ci_23915853/justice-department-sue-texas-over-voter-id-law

Site says Obama stole election through voter fraud


barackofraudo.com





Joe NewbyElections Examiner

November 24, 2012

During the election, Examiner's Dean Chambers caused quite a stir when he talked about polls being skewed for Obama, something many conservatives reported.

Now that the election is over, Chambers is focused on what he said is the reason for Obama's victory. On Saturday, The Blaze reported that Chambers' new site, barackofraudo.com, shows that Obama received 80 electoral votes in four states due largely to voter fraud.

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk," the site says, quoting Henry David Thoreau.

"Evidence of vote fraud is very much like that," Chambers wrote on the site.
"Those who engage in it are slick and do all they can to hide it, so the evidence is often quite circumstantial. In fact, often the circumstantial evidence is all the evidence we have, such was finding tens of thousands of bogus votes in the ballot box, we didn't see someone actually put them there, but they are found, they are there, and they are clearly evidence of vote fraud," he added. "Such is true of the voting divisions where Obama gets 100 percent of the votes cast. As if anyone REALLY believes that is legitimate."

The Blaze reported that Chambers was mocked throughout the election for his site, UnSkewedPolls.com, where he attempted to, as Dave Weigel wrote at Slate, put "into numbers what other conservatives put into words."

But according to Chambers, four states -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida -- should rightfully have gone to Romney, and would have were it not for voter fraud.

"I'm getting credible information of evidence in those states that there enough numbers that are questionable and could have swung the election," he said, according to Weigel. "I'm only putting good credible information on there, like the actual vote counts, reports, and mainstream publications reporting voter fraud," he added.

Chambers admits, however, that right now there is a lot of noise with very little substance.

"There's a lot of chatter, though. There are articles people have sent me that don't hold up. Crazy stuff," he said.

"What's not crazy?" Weigel asked.

"Things like the 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia where Romney received zero votes," Chambers said. "Even Larry Sabato said that should be looked into."
Weigel said that "57 precincts gave McCain no votes in 2008."

"There's such a thing as a 99% Democratic precinct, and such a thing as a 99% Republican precinct," he added.

Chambers said that Ohio had irregularities that didn't get much media attention.
"Some of the precincts or divisions in Cleveland were projected to be 99% Obama. That's a part of the state where it's known that a lot of ballot box scamming has been done in the past," he said. "There were isolated reports of people voting for Romney and having votes changed, though they didn't get much attention."
Chambers also noted that Romney went from an 80,000 lead in Virginia to losing by 120,000.

"When votes were being counted on election night, 97% of the precincts were counted, and Romney was still leading 50-49," he said. "When that remaining 3% were counted, a lead of 80,000 or so votes for Romney were turned into 120,000 for Obama."

Mytheos Holt observed that there were areas "where Mitt Romney also got 100 percent of the votes cast."

"Because of missed details like this, and his erroneous claim elsewhere that Virginia wasn’t called until Obama was leading, Chambers’ argument probably won’t face any success, or be taken with much seriousness by RNC leaders," Holt added.

Even if there was overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence of voter fraud, Bob Unruh wrote at WND that the GOP would be powerless to stop it, thanks to a 1982 court case between the two parties.

According to Unruh, "a race-based consent decree negotiated by Democrats against the Republican National Committee a generation ago still has tied the RNC’s hands, and GOP officials could be cited for contempt – or worse – if they try to make sure American elections are clean."

http://www.examiner.com/article/site-says-obama-stole-election-through-voter-fraud

First article added to Homepage--

http://www.alipac.us/content.php?r=2...r-voter-ID-law

August 26, 2013
Judicial Watch

The Obama administration just sued Texas over a voter identification law passed to prevent election fraud, asserting in a federal complaint that it was designed to “disproportionately impact Hispanic and African-American voters.”

Apparently the administration didn’t read—or has chosen to ignore—the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling stripping the feds of power over state election laws like Texas’s. The decision, issued in late June, struck down a decades-long federal preapproval requirement for certain states to enact changes to election laws. This was established under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to keep states with a history of discrimination in check.

But the Supreme Court found that the portion of the law is unconstitutional and can no longer be used to establish the “preclearance” requirements. “The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions,” the ruling says. Furthermore, the high court found “disparate treatment of the states” because the preclearance measure only applied to nine. This “imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs,” according to the ruling.

The court stressed that the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment empowers states—not the federal government— to regulate elections. Not good enough for President Obama and his Department of Justice (DOJ). Nearly a dozen states have passed voter ID laws in the last few years to prevent election fraud, but the administration and many powerful Democrats (Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says they are a “full-scale-assault” on minority voters) insist the measures are racist and taxpayer dollars will be used to fight them.

In the Texas case the administration accuses legislators of designing a measure to “disproportionately impact Hispanic and African-American voters.” Passed in 2011 the law requires voters to present an official government photo ID at the polls. This can include a driver’s license, personal identification card or concealed handgun license issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety, a U.S. passport, a U.S. military ID bearing the person’s photo or a U.S. citizenship certificate with a picture.

The goal is to prevent voter fraud, state officials say, pointing out that a Texas woman was recently arrested for illegally voting five times in the same election. The DOJ claims in its complaint that obtaining an acceptable ID will “impose a substantial burden” on minority voters, resulting in their “disenfranchisement.”

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is named in the DOJ’s lawsuit, says voter IDs have nothing to do with race and are available for free to anyone who needs one. The administration’s claim that voter ID measures are a “racist plot to disenfranchise minority voters” is outrageous and offensive to the overwhelming majority of Texans of all races who support the ballot integrity measure, Abbot said.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/20...-voter-id-law/