DEMOCRACY NC Compares Election Integrity Bill to ‘Jim Crow-era Voter Suppression Tactics’

RALEIGH – In a since deleted tweet, Far Left activist group Democracy NC blasted N.C. Senate Bill 326 — legislation requiring votes to be cast, in person or absentee, on or before election day — as tantamount to Jim Crow voter suppression.

Luckily, a quick hand documented the tweet:

Here is the tweet that they deleted: pic.twitter.com/oYBfsGTFYR

— Pete Kaliner (@PeteKaliner) March 31, 2021

Kaliner, host the the Pete Kaliner Show, let’s the audience in on the not-so-secret secret that the Left’s charge here is patently absurd.

Indeed, the grand narrative the Left is crafting, that election integrity measures are voter suppression efforts born of racist motivations by Republicans, is merely a redundant reiteration of the racism smear employed reflexively by those on the Left.

Remember the opposition to Voter ID? Of course, you do, because the ‘Voter ID is Racist’ line is still being parroted by Democrats like Governor Roy Cooper.

So, about the bill that is the subject of the Jim Crow attack; in short, it requires that absentee ballots must be submitted by 5:00 PM on election day.

Maybe, on account of Democracy NC’s categorization, you though the bill would say something like, “voting booths and ballot drop boxes shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored voters, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them?”

THAT would be a law actually akin Jim Crow, and if you exchange the terms ‘voting booths‘ for ‘books,’ and ‘voters‘ for ‘schools,’ you’d get an actual ‘Jim Crow’ North Carolina law written in 1889.

Senate Bill 326? Not so much.

The Left maintains, however, that tightening up voter integrity measures disproportionately affects minority voters. Voter ID, ballot deadlines, registration requirements, signature requirements; all serve to suppress minority voters, according to the narrative.

Aside from the obviously racist presuppositions implied by such perspectives (are minorities incapable of meeting a deadline or obtaining ID?), it’s important to actually test this hypothesis.

Luckily, an Italian economics professors from the University of Bologna recently teamed up with a Harvard Faculty Research Fellow to analyse 1.6 billion data-point observations in U.S. elections from 2008 to 2018 in an effort to establish just how much strict ID laws and ballot deadlines suppress minority voters. What did they find?

As published by the National Bureau of Economic Research:

“U.S. states increasingly require identification to vote – an ostensive attempt to deter fraud that prompts complaints of selective disenfranchisement. Using a difference-in-differences design on a 1.6-billion-observations panel dataset, 2008–2018, we find that the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications and cannot be attributed to voters’ reaction against the laws, measured by campaign contributions and self-reported political engagement. […]”

If requiring simple security pushes such as voter ID, or sensible election day deadlines, is designed to suppress the vote of minorities, the effort is a massive failure by any measure.

This is truth, but the truth doesn’t get Leftist groups like Democracy NC very far.