“The Voter ID law in New Hampshire, parts of which are up for a repeal vote in the House this week, required three separate mailers be sent out to voters who didn’t have the proper identification during the voting and/or registration process: Qualified voter affidavits, domicile affidavits, and challenged voter affidavits.”

Of approximately 22,200 mailers sent, about 3,300 affidavit postcards have not been returned by voters, and 1,697 mailers have been returned by the post office as undeliverable.  Undeniably significant numbers, but enough to change the outcome of an election?  If the investigation finds that fraudulent votes were cast, then “the results of some of the House and Senate races could have been affected, due to the razor-thin victory margins in some of those races.”

Which makes Democrats’ rush to roll back voter ID before it’s fully implemented all the more premature.  As Rep. Shawn Jasper (R-Hudson) points out: “The claim has been made for years that there is no voter fraud in New Hampshire; the simple fact of the matter is that until now we have never actively looked for it.  It is clear to the minority that it is too soon to say that there was no voter fraud in 2012.”

When the Inspector General of the Department of Justice (henceforth DoJ) last week issued a report blistering DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, much attention focused on the IG’s recognition that division chief Perez, under oath, had “not reflect[ed] the entire story regarding the involvement of political appointees” in the now-infamous 2009 decision to dismiss voter-intimidation cases against several New Black Panthers in Philadelphia.

While this aspect of Perez’s dishonesty deserves all the attention it can garner (also deserving attention is the extreme dubiousness of the IG’s assertion that Perez’s lies about political-appointee interference were not “intentional”), it is far from the only example, from that very same testimony, of Perez pushing stories that were flagrantly false. . . .

Perez came awfully close to perjury, and some might argue that he committed it, when discussing the far more important, broader issue that was the main focus of the IG report. (It boggles belief, by the way, that the IG never even discussed this untruth, considering that it so directly involved the larger substance of his report.) That broader issue was the question, fairly definitively answered in the affirmative by the IG, of whether the Civil Rights Division is a hotbed of hostility against the very idea of race-neutral enforcement of civil rights and voting rights laws. . . .

Surely a few skits could have been sacrificed so that officials could enforce laws to make sure that voting rolls are accurate.”

Requires Holder Response to 2011 letter re: DOJ NVRA case in Louisiana

(Washington, D.C.) – U.S. Sen. David Vitter announced his commitment to block the nomination of Thomas Perez as Secretary of the Labor Department until the Department of Justice responds to his 2011 letter related to spotty enforcement of the National Voter Registration Act in Louisiana.  Perez was closely involved in the controversial New Black Panther voter intimidation case before the Department of Justice.

“Thomas Perez’s record should be met with great suspicion by my colleagues for his spotty work related to the New Black Panther case, but Louisianians most certainly should have cause for concern about this nomination,” said U.S. Sen. David Vitter.  “Perez was greatly involved in the DOJ’s partisan full court press to pressure Louisiana’s Secretary of State to only enforce one side of the law – the side that specifically benefits the politics of the president and his administration at the expense of identity security of each and every Louisianian on the voter rolls.”

In the 2011 letter, Vitter asked the DOJ to be consistent in their efforts to enforce the National Voter Registration Act. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Vitter highlighted that DOJ filed a lawsuit against Louisiana alleging the state has not complied with Section 7 of NVRA, yet has done nothing to enforce Section 8 in other states.  Thomas Perez is specifically named in the letter (bolded below).

Section 7 of NVRA requires certain government offices, such as those who provide welfare assistance, to provide voter registration forms. Section 8 requires states to conduct voter roll cleaning to purge ineligible felons, illegal aliens and deceased voters from corrupting the election process. The two provisions act together as counterparts.

            The text of Vitter’s 2011 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder is below.