The story comes out of South Carolina, one of more than two dozen states that have enacted laws requiring voters to show some type of official photo identification to vote. The idea is to prevent election fraud, but the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) claims that requiring a photo ID at the polls discriminates against minorities because many are too poor to obtain them. The Florida congresswoman who chairs the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, says voter ID laws are a “full-scale-assault” on minority voters designed to “rig” elections for Republicans.

The U.S. Supreme Court has disagreed with this assessment, upholding Indiana’s voter ID law in a 2008 ruling that says the state’s interest in protecting the integrity of the voting process outweighed the insufficiently proven burdens the law may impose on voters. “There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,” the nation’s highest court said in its decision.

Last spring the notoriously liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an Arizona requirement that voters show photo identification before casting a ballot. A renowned Latino rights group claimed the measure, approved by voters in 2004 to stop illegal immigrants from voting, discriminates against Hispanics because it creates a barrier for minorities that’s tantamount to a poll tax. If true, that would violate equal protection rights within the Constitution.

The rulings haven’t stopped the bloated civil rights division at Obama’s DOJ from wasting resources to legally challenge voter ID laws across the nation, most recently in Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Last week a federal court ordered the DOJ to pay South Carolina’s legal costs involving the multi-million-dollar challenge to a 2011 law requiring voters to show a photo ID before casting a ballot.

The DOJ tried blocking the measure, claiming that it disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of minority voters who don’t have a photo ID. A federal court disagreed and recently ordered the feds to pay a yet-to-be-determined portion of South Carolina’s $3.5 million legal tab over the “unnecessary” voter ID litigation. The DOJ is responsible for the high cost of the case, according to a South Carolina Attorney General rep quoted in a local newspaper story. For example, the DOJ delayed the case by 120 days and filed numerous frivolous motions.  

The voter ID issue is getting hotter and hotter as the presidential election approaches. More than two dozen states have laws requiring voters to show at least some type of identification to vote. Several states—including Texas and Pennsylvania—have enacted voter ID measures in the last year and the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) has vowed to block them or at least heavily scrutinize them.

In fact, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez has publicly said that DOJ lawyers are probing voter ID measures to ensure that they’re not racially discriminatory. “We have received numerous inquiries about recently enacted state laws relating to voter identification requirements, voter registration requirements and changes to early voting procedures,” Perez said, adding that “we are carefully reviewing these laws.”

This has forced states to waste scarce tax dollars to defend the common-sense policy requiring photo identification at the polls. Democrats and the liberal civil rights groups that support them claim it discriminates against minorities. In fact, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who chairs the Democratic National Committee, says voter ID laws are a “full-scale-assault” on minority voters designed to “rig” elections for Republicans.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court has disagreed with that absurd assessment. In 2008 the High Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, ruling that the state’s interest in protecting the integrity of the voting process outweighed the insufficiently proven burdens the law may impose on voters. “There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,” the nation’s highest court said in its decision.

This week the notoriously liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an Arizona requirement that voters show photo identification before casting a ballot. A renowned Latino rights group claimed the measure, approved by voters in 2004 to stop illegal immigrants from voting, discriminates against Hispanics because it creates a barrier for minorities that’s tantamount to a poll tax. If true, that would violate equal protection rights within the Constitution.

The 9^th Circuit disagreed, saying that no proof was offered to show that the ID requirement gave Latinos fewer opportunities to vote. The Arizona law’s “photo identification requirement is not an invidious restriction” and does not violate the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection clause, the court wrote in its 73-page decision.

Judicial Watch applauds any measures—such as voter ID requirements—that help keep the election process free of corruption. Earlier this year JW launched the 2012 Election Integrity Project to assure that voter rolls are as clean as required by federal law. Through publicly available data, JW has already discovered that voter rolls in several states—including Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Florida, Alabama, California and Colorado—contain the names of individuals who are not eligible to vote.

The Texas Legislature passed the measure in 2011 and six months ago it was submitted to the DOJ for approval. More than a dozen states—including Kansas, Indiana, Tennessee and Wisconsin—have similar laws that require voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls and the Obama Administration has launched a campaign to challenge them all.

Liberals claim the laws are discriminatory because many minorities are too poor or too ignorant to get a valid identification—provided free in most states that have passed voter ID laws—that proves they are who they say they are. In fact, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who chairs the Democratic National Committee, says voter ID laws are a “full-scale-assault” on minority voters designed to “rig” elections for Republicans.

With that said, the administration is utilizing the DOJ as a political tool to challenge voter ID measures like one already upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in 2008. In that case SCOTUS upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, ruling that the state’s interest in protecting the integrity of the voting process outweighed the insufficiently proven burdens the law may impose on voters. “There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,” the nation’s highest court said in its decision.

This hasn’t deterred the DOJ’s mission to eliminate voter ID laws. In the Texas case, the agency must approve the measure because the Federal Voting Rights Act prohibits changes to election laws in certain states without federal clearance. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office has been waiting for the DOJ preclearance since last July, but the feds continue stalling, essentially blocking the law’s implementation.

Among the stall tactics employed by the DOJ is requiring Texas to provide extensive information before ruling one way or the other. For instance, the state must tell the DOJ the number of registered voters by race and Spanish surname in possession of a driver’s license or other form of photo ID. It must also provide the number of registered voters with Spanish surnames who don’t have a driver’s license.   

In its complaint, filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Texas says it doesn’t record citizens’ race when they register to vote so it is unable to determine the racial makeup of registered voters who lack state-issued IDs.  ”Indeed, the very reason Texas refuses to maintain racial and ethnic data on its list of registered voters is to facilitate a colorblind electoral process, and Texas adopted this race-blind voter-registration policy shortly after the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” the complaint says.

State officials are asking the court to approve its voter ID law, assuring that the measure will not deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race or color, nor will it deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote because he is a member of a language minority group.

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Today, August 30, 2011, Judicial Watch attorney Michael Bekesha will testify before the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee on the “National Security Begins at Home” legislative package. This legislation is designed to address the illegal immigration crisis by shutting down public benefits, employment access and other economic incentives that draw illegal aliens to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.