Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Voter ID laws preceded Barack Obama’s 2008 election, and in places like Georgia and Indiana minority turnout increased after the laws were passed. A 2007 study by the Heritage Foundation concluded that “in general, respondents in photo identification and non-photo identification states are just as likely to report voting compared to respondents from states that only required voters to state their name.”8 The findings applied to white, black, and Latino voters alike. The spectacle of a black president’s black attorney general pretending that the black franchise is in jeopardy in twenty-first-century America struck many people as intellectually dishonest political pandering. That included black lawmakers who have argued that voter ID laws are necessary to help ensure ballot integrity. “When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician,” wrote Artur Davis, a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus who left office in 2010. “Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation. The truth is that the most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.”9