In New York, the arrests and guilty pleas continue to roll in.  Not exactly a boost to voter confidence:

The City Council president, a councilman and two others were arrested Tuesday and charged with felonies for allegedly forging absentee ballots in the 2009 primary to benefit Democratic candidates.

Those arrested early Tuesday included City Council President Clement Campana, Councilman John Brown and political operatives Anthony Renna and Anthony DeFiglio.

So far seven elected or appointed officials and operatives have been charged in the two-year probe into allegations that scores of absentee ballots were forged to benefit Democratic candidates in the 2009 Working Families Party primary. Most voters targeted lived in Troy Housing Authority apartments and rarely, if ever, voted. They were allegedly targeted because they were unfamiliar with the process.

Campana appeared with his attorney, E. Stewart Jones, and was arraigned on an indictment charging him with first-degree falsifying business records and four counts of illegal voting, all felonies; and a count of conspiracy to promote or prevent election, a misdemeanor.

He could face up to seven years on the charges.

The full litany of indictments and guilty pleas can be found at the link.

You know it’s election season when the political left starts attacking voter identification laws as racist measures that have nothing to do with ballot integrity. Last week the Obama administration and civil rights leaders once again were sounding this theme.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told an audience in Austin, Texas, that photo ID requirements hurt minorities. “Are we willing to allow this era — our era — to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended?” said Mr. Holder. “Call on our political parties to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes,” he added. “Urge policy makers at every level to re-evaluate our election systems and to reform them in ways that encourage, not limit, participation.”

Full story at the WSJ.  There appears to be no daylight between the head of the Democratic National Committee – Debbie Wasserman “Jim Crow” Schultz – and the alleged chief law enforcement official in the country –  Atorney General Eric Holder.  Using language like “urge your policy maker” to do X or Y, the next thing we might see is Holder making commercials for the DNC based on DOJ’s principled opposition to photo ID laws. 

Here.

Federal judges released a plan to update Mississippi’s four congressional districts.
Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann says the plan released Monday decreases the number of split counties from eight to four.  “The Congressional redistricting plan proposed by the Federal Panel will allow us to proceed with the 2012 Elections without pre-clearance from the Department of Justice,” said Hosemann. “The Secretary of State will not file an objection to the Plan.”

It’s astounding to me that the attorney general of the United States would claim state voter ID requirements are unconstitutional,” John Eastman told us; he’s a professor of law at Chapman University School of Law. He said such ID checks already passed constitutional muster in the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board.

And as to the federal government registering voters, Eastman pointed to Article 2, Section 1, of the Constitution. It grants to the states, “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” the appointment of electors to the Electoral College that chooses the president. By implication, states also have control over other elections.

Constitutional amendments and voting rights laws do prevent discrimination based on race, age (18 or older) and sex. “But that doesn’t prevent other requirements the states might impose,” Eastman said, such as hours of voting. “It appears that the attorney general isn’t aware of that, unless he’s preparing a constitutional amendment, which I haven’t heard him say.”

Full story at the link.

Changes made to a proposal that would require all voters to show photo identification at their polling place are intended to address concerns about potentially disenfranchising some legitimate voters.

An amendment added to the House-passed voter ID bill by the Senate State Government Committee this week would allow voters to use IDs issued by colleges and nursing homes in addition to official state IDs, such as drivers’ licenses.

In addition, absentee voters would be required to include their drivers’ license or Social Security number on the form for their absentee ballot.

Another change would allow voters without a valid ID to cast a provisional ballot that would become official if they supply a valid ID — via mail, fax or in person — to their county election officials within six days of the election.

“This is a balancing act. We’re not trying to disenfranchise anyone, but at the same time we do not want our system of underlying democracy to be manipulated in any way,” said state Sen. Charles McIllhinney, R-Bucks, chairman of the committee.

The full story at the link.

The latest public opinion poll from Rasmussen Reports shows 69% of the public believe photo ID laws are not discriminatory towards racial minorities.  Despite an outburst of negative smears of racism and Jim Crow policies in recent weeks, the American people see through the unfounded allegations in continuing their support of reasonable election administration practices.

Attorney General Eric Holder signaled last week that the Justice Department will be closely examining new state laws that require showing a photo ID before voting for potential racial bias, but voters nationwide overwhelmingly favor such a requirement and reject the idea that it is discriminatory.

Seventy percent (70%) of Likely U.S. Voters believe voters should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to cast their ballot. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 22% oppose this kind of requirement

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on December 18-19, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence

In an interview at Inside Texas Politics, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is not shying away from defending the Texas photo ID law now scheduled to go into effect January 1, 2012 unless the DOJ continues its strategy of delay and opposition.  At approximately minute 7:54 of this local interview, Abbott foreshadows the coming battles over the Texas Voter ID law.  Abbott seems much more confident in his position than the mild and hesitant Holder. 

“I know Eric Holder knows for a fact that a very similar voter ID law was passed in the State of Indiana and was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. Also he knows that the United States Department of Justice cleared a very similar voter ID law from the state of Georgia. If Eric Holder and the Department of Justice refuses to preclear the Texas Voter ID law, it is nothing more than a game of politics…and we we think that is inappropriate for them to play…. they had been dragging out this process with regard to preclearing the Voter ID law; if they continue to drag it out, we are going to be forced to challenge that in a 3 judge panel in Washington DC just like we are challenging the redistricting maps.”

With Attorney General Holder personally inserting himself into the messy preclearance process, the high profile media coverage of the voter ID process have dramatically increased the stakes.  In comparison, Holder has not even inserted himself as much into the health care legal challenge.  it is obvious that the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez simply wasn’t getting the job done; thus far, Holder’s last minute self-substitution has been a flop.

An opinion piece from Texas Senator John Cornyn in the Statesman.

The Supreme Court has ruled that such laws are constitutional. In 2008, the court upheld Indiana’s voter-ID law, which is substantially similar to the Texas law. Writing for the court, Justice John Paul Stevens explained that “the application of the statute to the vast majority of Indiana voters is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.’ ”

In the face of clear Supreme Court precedent, and despite the fact that lawyers at the Justice Department have not completed their review of voter-ID laws, Holder has publicly compared them to literacy tests and poll taxes. This comparison is outrageous. The attorney general has clearly prejudged voter-ID laws. Even worse, he is sending an unmistakable message to his own department in the midst of their review.

By urging Americans to campaign against voter-ID laws, Attorney General Holder has once again placed himself on the wrong side of a critically important issue, not to mention the wrong side of public opinion. Safeguarding the credibility and soundness of our voting process is vital to the health of American democracy. Does the Attorney General really want us to become a nation where the federal government discourages efforts to preserve electoral integrity?

Here is the link.  The U.S. Justice Department is reviewing new voter-photo ID laws in some states, but apparently Kansas is not one of them.  “We have not been contacted at all by the Justice Department in this respect,” said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Secretary Kobach should understand that DOJ will focus its efforts on delaying voter ID laws only in those Section 5 southern states where they can hide behind their obscure, subjective and ever malleable retrogressive standard. 

Where, despite the best efforts and practices implemented by jurisidictions, DOJ can simply send a last minute letter stating that the jurisdiction has unfortunately failed to meet its burden of proof in convincing the bureaucracy that the laws are not discriminatory. 

It is not an accident that DOJ decides the fight the last battles over photoID in Section 5 states where they can hide behind their manufactured burdens of proof.

Tom Fitton has more at the Bigs.