Recently 14 states have passed laws requiring voters to show a picture ID at the ballot box. The laws are designed to stop voter fraud. The NAACP is categorizing the new laws as a "massive effort" to "disenfranchise blacks and Hispanics."
South Carolina is among the states with a new voter ID law. However, it is not just Republicans who have passed new laws aimed at curbing voter fraud. Rhode Island, where Democrats control both branches of the state legislature, also passed a voter ID law.
The new voter ID laws in South Carolina and other states are being challenged in court. However, the US Supreme Court already upheld a voter ID law in Indiana in 2008. In upholding the Indiana law, the Supreme Court cited Indiana's "own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago."
In the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago, the Indiana Supreme Court threw out the original results due to massive fraud. The case was very racially charged. East Chicago is 51% Hispanic and 36% black. East Chicago mayor Robert Pastrick and several aids were sued by the state for rackateering. Pastrick and several aids were eventually ordered to pay the state a total of $108 million in what was called the "sidewalks for votes" scheme.
The NAACP is planning to go to Geneva to request UN intervention in the 2012 election. The NAACP is also demanding that state laws barring convicted felons from voting be overturned. The NAACP says these laws are unfair to blacks, since blacks commit felonies in great disproportionate to the rest of the population.
UN intervention in a US election would be unprecedented. However, while the NAACP is taking this extreme action, they have never addressed actual voter fraud in the black community.
In fact, the NAACP has it's own scandalous history with voter fraud. Just this year, an NAACP official in MIssissippi was convicted of ten counts of voter fraud.
The NAACP claims Republicans are targeting the south for voter ID laws because southern states have higher proportions of black people.
Georgia and Alabama have seen actual cases of large scale voter fraud recently.
In Georgia, twelve black Democrats have been charged with committing absentee ballot fraud.
Former Alabama Rep. Artur Davis, who is a black Democrat himself, said the case highlights the need for voter ID laws. Artur Davis stated "What I have seen in my state, in my region, is the the most aggressive practitioners of voter fraud are local machines who are tied lock, stock and barrel to the special interests in their communities."
In 2008, a massive investigation was launched to investigate voter fraud in three heavily black Alabama counties. Several black Democrats were convicted of voter fraud. This led then Alabama Congressmen Artur Davis to declare that voter fraud was indeed rampant among black Democrats in the south.
Artur Davis boldly stated "Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too-mentally-impaired to function, cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights -- that's suppression by any light. If you doubt it exists, I don't; I've heard the peddlers of these ballots brag about it, I've been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident it has changed at least a few close local election results."
Artur Davis served four terms in the US House and retired from the House in 2010 to focus on a Gubernatorial campaign.
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