In State after State,
including my home State of New Hampshire, unnecessarily stringent voter
ID laws have been passed by Republicans with the clear intent to deny
access to the ballot box on the part of minorities, the young, and the
poor. Striking down the laws passed by Republicans in North Carolina, a
unanimous Federal court ruled that they ``target African Americans with
almost surgical precision''--that is a direct quote--and ``impose cures
for problems that did not exist.''
Invalidating similar laws in Wisconsin, U.S. District Court Judge
James Peterson wrote: ``The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a
preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real
incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance
confidence in the elections, particularly in minority communities.''
President Trump has falsely claimed on numerous occasions that 3 to 5
million undocumented immigrants voted in the election in November. We
have even heard that claim in New Hampshire, where our deputy secretary
of State, a Republican, has said those claims are not accurate. Throughout our history, these arguments, not grounded in fact and
data, have been used as a pretext for advancing new voter ID laws,
including at the national level.
Keywords matched
undocumented immigrants