Black Conservatives to Tell United Nations: Don’t Waste Your Time Investigating U.S. Voter Laws

Project 21 Delegation to Defend Ballot Integrity Measures, Rebut NAACP Request that U.N. Human Rights Council Investigate the United States

Importance of Protecting Sanctity of Voting Lest Hard-Won Voting Franchise Be Diluted by Fraud to Be Stressed

New York City, NY / Washington, DC – A delegation from the Project 21 black leadership network will meet today with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to urge the U.N. Human Rights Council not to waste its time investigating state-level voter integrity laws.

In March, leaders of the NAACP formally asked the Human Rights Council to, as reported by the Guardian, “launch a formal investigation into the spread of restrictive electoral laws.”

The Project 21 delegation will stress to U.N. leaders that America’s state-level voter ID laws are an important safeguard of human rights, as every fraudulent vote cast cancels out the vote of a lawful voter.

Furthermore, the Project 21 delegation will stress, every state-level vote integrity safeguard was adopted in an open, transparent process by democratically-elected representatives, and polls consistently show overwhelming bi-partisan support for these safeguards.

“Just as we are obligated to fight for the rights of all qualified citizens to vote, we must be equally vigilant in protecting the voting process from fraud,” said Project 21 member Council Nedd II. “Validating that someone is who he says he is before he casts a ballot is just as important as ensuring that the same individual can vote at all. Opposing commonsense voter ID laws for the sake of political expedience is a short-sided tactic and leads to dire consequences.”

The Project 21 black leadership network delegation, Horace Cooper, Deroy Murdock and Council Nedd II, are scheduled to meet with Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic and human rights officer Giorgia Passarelli at United Nations headquarters in New York City on June 13 at 3:00 PM eastern. The meeting comes almost three months to the day after NAACP activists met with OHCHR staff in Geneva, Switzerland to claim that voter protection laws unfairly target minorities.

Project 21 members plan to discuss the potential disfranchisement of Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds if ballot integrity is not safeguarded — presenting U.N. officials with examples of illegal voting behavior that was documented and oftentimes prosecuted. Cooper, Murdock and Nedd will note that additional rights that Americans hold dear will be at risk without the ability to cast a ballot without fear of vote fraud.

Project 21 member Horace Cooper said: “One of our nation’s founding principles is self-determination. It is fundamental to being a free people that real Americans lawfully registered cast the votes that decide who our leaders will be and what policies we will adopt. Systematically overlooking ghost voting and other forms of voter fraud undermines this fundamental precept.”

The Project 21 delegation brings a wealth of talent and experience to the United Nations meeting. Horace Cooper, an adjunct fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, taught constitutional law at George Mason University in Virginia and was a senior counsel to former U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey. Deroy Murdock is a nationally-syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Council Nedd II is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Missionary Church, the honorary chairman of the religious freedom-oriented organization In God We Trust and a former congressional staffer.

Project 21 is a long-standing proponent of protections to ensure ballot integrity in the American electoral process. Its parent organization, the National Center for Public Policy Research, is in the process of publishing several National Policy Analysis position papers authored by delegation member Horace Cooper on voting rights issues, including “When the Dead Vote, the Living Suffer: Department of Justice is Wrong to Oppose Voter ID,” “Victims of Voter Fraud: Poor and Disadvantaged are Most Likely to Have Their Votes Stolen” and “Voter Fraud is Real: “Why the Voting Rights Act Should Be Used to Fight Election Fraud.”

“My Project 21 colleagues and I plan to present the United Nations with specific examples of vote-fraud convictions, states in which the number of dead voters on the rolls exceeds the margins of victory in close races and even American constituencies where the number of registered voters is more than 100 percent of the universe of eligible voters,” said Project 21 member Deroy Murdock. “These concrete reasons for requiring that all voters, regardless of race, present photo ID cards before voting should engage the United Nations much more than the NAACP’s tired blend of baseless accusations of racism and nebulous myths about anti-black disfranchisement.”

Project 21, a leading voice of black conservatives since 1992, is sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research (https://nationalcenter.org).

-30-



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.