The Trib's Odd Little Editorial

This morning, The Clinton-loving Editorail Board at DickieCougarMellonScaife's Tribune-Review took on the the editorial board of the New York Times.

The result was an odd editorial that left out more than it included. The issue at hand is the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding Indiana's Voter ID law. Here's The Trib:

Leave it to liberals to declare that protecting the integrity of the franchise somehow is a threat to our democratic republic.

Yet that's exactly how The New York Times characterized the U.S. Supreme Court's commonsense ruling upholding the constitutionality of requiring voters to prove they are who they say they are at the polls.

"Democracy was the big loser" in Monday's 6-3 decision upholding an Indiana law, The Times opines. Fraud prevention, these whacked-out liberals contend, is an "interference." The ruling "solves a nearly nonexistent problem," it notes.

Which is true, by the way. According to this study, voter fraud is nearly non-existent. Take a look:

At the national level, a major new project at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative (BAVII) has resulted in only a handful of convictions. according to the Attorney General, since the inception of the program in 2002, "we’ve made enforcement of election fraud and corruption offenses a top priority." The result? Government records show that only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. This includes 19 people who were ineligible to vote, five because they were still under state supervision for felony convictions, and 14 who were not u.s. citizens; and five people who voted twice in the same election, once in kansas and again in Missouri.

In addition, the BAVII uncovered several vote buying schemes that have resulted in the convictions or guilty pleas of about 30 people, though most of those convicted were party and election officials, candidates for public office and elected officials, and in one case, the commander of a local VfW post. The vote buying cases involved a handful of elections in the appalachia regions of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, East St. Louis, Illinois and Caldwell County, North Carolina.

So between 2002 and 2005 there were a few dozen of convictions during which time millions upon millions of people voted. Yet the Trib board counters that with a stunningly placed non sequitur:

Like the atrocious, political-speech restricting campaign finance laws that those of The Times' ilk support?

I don't know if I need to remind anyone, but the trendy thing for conservatives to oppose in campaign finance laws is "McCain-Feingold" also known as "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002." It too passed Supreme Court muster. In 2003.

If an OK by the Supreme Court is enough to placate the Trib's editorial board, then how do they explain their reaction to the "atrocious, political-speech restricting" laws that the Supremes have already OKed?

I wonder.

Anyway, the Trib ends things this way:

The coup de grace of the high court's voter-identification ruling is that the lead opinion was written by dedicated liberal John Paul Stevens. Which makes the liberals' protestations all the more laughable and all the more suspect.

Democrat-sponsored voter fraud certainly must be pervasive.

Again, no it isn't. But it's certainly interesting to point out what the Trib doesn't complain about in the Times editorial. The Times goes through a discussion of the issue:

In 2005, Indiana passed one of the nation’s toughest voter ID laws. It requires voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polls. Private college IDs, employee ID cards and utility bills are unacceptable. For people without a driver’s license — who are disproportionately poor and minority — the burden is considerable. To get acceptable ID, many people would be forced to pay fees for underlying documents, such as birth certificates.

This should not have been a hard case. The court has long recognized that the right to vote is so fundamental that a state cannot restrict it unless it can show that the harm it is seeking to prevent outweighs the harm it imposes on voters.

The Indiana law does not meet this test. The harm it imposes on voters, some of whom will no doubt be discouraged from casting ballots, is considerable. The state’s interest in the law, on the other hand, is minimal. It was supposedly passed to prevent people from impersonating others at the polls, but there is no evidence that this has ever happened in Indiana. It seems far more likely that the goal of the law’s Republican sponsors was to disenfranchise groups that lean Democratic.

Here's the curious part. At the tail end of the editorial we find:

Hovering over Monday’s decision was a case that was not mentioned: Bush v. Gore. In 2000, the Supreme Court took seriously the claims of one individual — George W. Bush — that his equal protection rights were being denied by a state election system, and the court had no hestitation about telling the state what to do.

On “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Justice Scalia yet again told the public to “get over” that ruling. There are many good reasons to remember Bush v. Gore, and Monday’s ruling was a reminder of one of them. Seven years after it invoked the Constitution to vindicate what it saw as Mr. Bush’s right to fair election procedures, we are still waiting for the court to extend this guarantee with equal vigilance to every American.

The Trib pounces on the first paragraph of the Times editorial but leaves this unmentioned?? What, didn't they bother to read the whole thing?