Voter fraud? What fraud?
Houston Chronicle editorial
As background for the trial that began this week in federal court in Corpus Christi contesting the constitutionality of Texas' new voter identification law, we would like to see as exhibit No. 1 the report of a raid carried out a few years ago against a voter registration group called Houston Votes.
In 2010, as reported by the Dallas Morning News, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott dispatched armed deputies and agents in bullet-proof vests to a house on Houston's north side; they had a search warrant. Investigators for the attorney general's office initiated the raid, accusing Houston Votes of election fraud.
"They could have used a subpoena," Fred Lewis, the president of the parent group of Houston Votes, told the Morning News. "They could have called us and asked for the records. They didn't need guns."
A year later, the investigation sputtered to a halt. Abbott's office filed no charges - although his outrageous police action managed to destroy Houston Votes. The organization's funding dried up, bringing to an end its efforts to register low-income citizens so they could exercise their constitutional right. Abbott's office never returned the group's records and office equipment. Instead, the attorney general destroyed them under a 2013 court order.
Abbott, who's defending the state in the Corpus Christi trial, vowed a crusade against the "epidemic" of voter fraud in Texas when he became attorney general in 2002. In the dozen years since, his zealous efforts have uncovered a grand total of two cases that would have been stopped by the state's voter ID law. That's no misprint; he's found two. If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, the crusading AG has found it.
Meanwhile, some 800,000 of our fellow Texans, most of them either minorities or the elderly or both, lack the appropriate state-issued ID to vote. The man likely to be the state's next governor seems little concerned about curtailing their constitutional right.
If it's voter fraud that truly concerns Abbott, then surely he realizes that fraud, however rare, almost exclusively involves absentee ballots. Voter ID laws deal only with in-person voter impersonation, which is about as rare as Houston Astros front-office kumbaya or a Texas Democratic candidate with statewide potential.
In light of the dearth of voter-impersonation problems, it's hard not to conclude that Abbott and his fellow crusaders are being disingenuous - about as disingenuous, the columnist Paul Waldman has noted, as those elected officials claiming that laws mandating restrictions on abortion providers are really just about protecting women's health. What the voting-fraud Elliot Nesses are really concerned about, it seems, is making sure that those who may be inclined to vote other-than-Republican choose not to exercise their right. Apparently, the crusaders want to squeeze down the voting pool to just their most reliable folks.
In Corpus Christi during the next couple of weeks, U.S. Justice Department lawyers will be seeking to convince a federal judge that the voter ID law the Republican-led legislature passed in 2011 discriminates against minority citizens. If they prevail, Texas might once again be required to seek federal approval before making changes to its voting procedures. The U.S. Supreme Court freed Texas and eight other mostly Southern states from that requirement in 2013.
Perhaps it's a naive hope when raw political power is at stake, but we would like to think that the state's political establishment, whether Republican or Democratic, is dedicated to expanding the franchise, not curtailing it. In a healthy, vigorous democracy, citizens participate. As the attorney general ought to understand, participation is essential to sustaining the liberty that the Constitution guarantees.
Voter fraud, General Abbott, is not a problem. Voter participation is.
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