At a recent National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference televised on C-Span3, Secretaries of State Hosemann and Kobach challenged the analysis that Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez and the Voting Section are employing to interpret the Supreme Court photo ID case of Crawford in relation to Section 5 preclearance states. 

1h8m into the video, Mississippi Secretary of State Hosemann points out that DOJ relied on statistics showing neglible differences on the possession by ethnic groups of a DMV license.  AAG Perez refused to answer the questions on the use of these limited statistics and quickly pointed out that the burden was on the jurisdiction.  Oh yes, the burden!  We know that without the ever-moving goalposts burden to hide behind, who knows how many more times DOJ would have been sanctioned for frivilous lawsuits and objections.  Yes, this is the same type of objection that DOJ is running away from in the Kinston case as the judicial guillotine is slowly placed over their head.

1h15m of the stream, Kansas Secretary of State Kobach questioned Perez on how DOJ (as an executive branch agency) was able to get around the Crawford ruling where the Supreme Court specifically noted that the trip to the DMV doesn’t qualify as a burden on voters.  Perez refused to discuss the factors involved in the decision; instead, he opted to discuss his new holilistic approach that he uses to address these issues. Apparently, it isn’t important to articulate the legal analysis to chief election officials or Section 5 legislatures that might want to pass healthy voter ID laws.  Instead, Perez told the election officials that the Voting Section would wait to address the legal factors until they got to court.      

Perez continued his mantra that DOJ was utilizing a “holistic look at the process” meaning that unless the voting procedure is preceived as “healthy” for the jurisdiction by a bunch of Obama political appointees, it would not be approved.  Since the Obama Administration is anathema to photo ID, we can safely assume that all proposed ID laws will be considered “unhealthy” upon arrival.