While the President has launched a so-called bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration after the 2012 General Election, the Vice-President apparently got the internal political memorandum and is making the “long lines” issue a racial and partisan issue.  Whatever his excuse, he is already undermining any legitimate review of election issues from the previous presidential election.  Biden ignores the evidence of no racial intent in lines where the relatively few lines were in urban area codes that included both whites and blacks and have a history of underfunding of election. 

Instead, the Vice-President of the United States feels the need to make “the lines” an racial and political issue.  Up to this point, few substantive analysts have pointed to intentional racial discrimination for any of the lines on election day.  But there is always Joe Biden.  With these comments certain to alienate Republicans, the White House is setting the Commission up for failure.

Politico reports: 

Before a heavily African-American crowd, Biden seized on a deeply polarizing issue in this state: voting rights.  Invoking a 106-year-old lady who cast a ballot last year, Biden claimed she waited seven hours to vote.  “She said, ‘I tell you what, I didn’t fight this hard, this long, for
anybody to deny me the right to vote,’ ” thundered the vice president.

It wasn’t clear if Biden was alluding to the 106-year-old South
Carolina woman who voted for the first time last year or the
102-year-old Florida lady who famously had to wait for over three hours
to cast her ballot and attended President Obama’s State of the Union
address in February. Or, Biden being Biden, he might have
unintentionally rolled the two anecdotes together and come up with his
own version.