06 Nov 2012 Liberals Keep Pushing Losing Arguments Against Voter ID

Now We’re Told that Voter ID Slows Election Result Tabulations

Washington, D.C. – In a new National Policy Analysis paper, “Voter ID Opponents’ Latest Spurious Claim: Voter ID Allegedly Slows Election Tabulations,” National Center for Public Policy Research Adjunct Fellow Horace Cooper is responding to the latest charge from opponents of voter ID: that voter ID laws may force states to issue large numbers of provisional ballots, the counting of which will delay the announcement of election results.

“Critics of voter ID now claim that rules adopted in some voter ID states that allow a voter who shows up at the polling site without ID to vote provisionally, and return with ID later, will unduly delay the nation from knowing the outcome of elections,” explains Cooper.

“On the merits, courts in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, as well as federal courts, have upheld voter ID laws,” Cooper says. “Yet opponents seem to have a never-ending list of new excuses – ultimately they lose, but in the interim they delay the laws and cost taxpayers unnecessary legal fees.”

“If the left’s goal was to prevent voter ID from being in effect this year, I’d grade them a C+,” Cooper says. “But if it is actually to stop them from ever going forward I’d have to give them a failing grade. They are wrong on the policy and wrong on the law and their record in court shows it.”

“This new criticism requires an entirely new goal to be established – one that could be at odds with honest and fair elections – timeliness over accuracy,” Cooper says. “Rather than keeping the focus on ensuring that the election results are accurate, this new critique implies that emphasis should be placed on ensuring speedy election reports.”

“Provisional ballots are unlikely to be the deciding factor in any election unless the election is extremely close. But it is precisely when elections are close that it matters most that fraud prevention measures like voter ID be in place,” Cooper adds.

“Critics of voter ID continue to change their basis for criticizing this commonsense policy. Yet state courts and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have consistently upheld this policy against a range of arguments. In the end, this latest argument will also fail,” Cooper explains.

Cooper, a legal commentator who taught constitutional law at George Mason University, is the author of a series of National Policy Analysis papers on election fraud published by the National Center this year.

Horace Cooper is an adjunct fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, a member of the African-American leadership group Project 21 and a legal commentator. He was a senior counsel to U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey.

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a conservative, free-market, non-profit think-tank established in 1982. It is supported by the voluntary gifts of over 100,000 individual recent supporters. In 2011 it received over 350,000 individual donations. Two percent of its revenue comes from corporate sources. Contributions to it are tax-deductible.

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