Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation explains for National Review Online readers why Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton “gets everything wrong on voting.”
Hillary Clinton made so many false assertions about voting in the speech she gave at Texas Southern University that it’s hard to know where to start. Contrary to her contention, no “barriers” are being imposed on eligible Americans that prevent them from easily registering and voting in our elections.
Let’s examine Clinton’s claims in light of the facts.
She insists that state legislative initiatives to improve the integrity of our election process are a “seeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color.” Wrong. Instead, as Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity aptly puts it, states are engaged in “the usual effort to strike the right balance between facilitating voting by eligible voters and preventing voting by ineligible voters.”
Clinton’s assertion is hard to reconcile with the U.S. Census Bureau’s finding that blacks voted at a higher level than whites by two percentage points in the 2012 election. Moreover, the Justice Department didn’t file a single case in 2014 (or, thus far, in 2015) under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act alleging the disenfranchisement of people of color.
Clinton also claimed that students and grandmothers are being turned away from the polls in Texas because of its voter-ID law. But there is no evidence that this is occurring. In state elections in 2013, turnout almost doubled in comparison with the 2011 state election (when the ID law was not in place) — including in heavily minority areas, some of which had even greater increases in turnout. And the few people who don’t have an ID are provided with one free of charge by Texas authorities.