Debunking Civitas' debunking of Voter ID flaws

After parading a list of hot-button troublemakers to prejudice readers:

In fact, the opponents of voter ID are a small, but loud, alliance of Democratic leaders, ultra-liberal activists and the mainstream media. Across the country, groups like the ACLU, League of Women Voters, NAACP and AARP work together to form a powerful and well-funded coalition to stop voter ID legislation.

The puppet on duty proceeds to reference a "converted" Democrat who now "sees the light":

Therefore it is interesting to learn that there are cracks emerging in the "thin liberal line" in the voter ID debate.

The most recent example is former Alabama Congressman Artur Davis. In an October op-ed in the Montgomery Advisor which ran after Alabama passed a new voter ID law, Mr. Davis categorically admits that while an elected official, he was on the wrong side of the voter ID fight.

In reality, Davis is a disaffected, disgruntled ex-politician, still simmering over an embarassing loss in the Democratic Primary for Governor in his state:

Those long-simmering tensions came to a boil in last year’s Alabama gubernatorial race, a contest in which Davis — with an eye toward currying favor with the Republican voters who dominate the conservative state — sought to bypass Alabama’s Democratic power structure to claim the nomination.

He refused to seek the support of the state’s two dominant black Democratic organizations, the Alabama Democratic Conference and the New South Coalition, and, in a poke in the eye of party faithful, was the only CBC member to vote against the president’s health care bill.

Joe Reed, the ADC chairman and an influential Alabama Democratic power broker, rallied support for Davis’s white primary opponent, then-Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks, who won in a stunning — and, for Davis, humiliating — landslide.

For Davis, the loss signaled a devastating rejection in a race he had long been expected to win. He offered a few complimentary words for Sparks in his election night concession speech, but later, rather than endorsing Sparks and uniting the party behind the nominee, Davis publicly declared that he didn’t think Sparks would win the general election and all but vanished from the governor’s contest.

To buttress his flip-flop on the Voter ID issue, Davis made all sorts of claims about having personal knowledge of voter fraud, including the juicy tid-bit that he had been approached by some nefarious people who wanted him to help fund said fraud. But of course, he refuses to provide any examples or proof of these claims, probably because he made all that crap up on the spot:

Former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, who now supports voter ID laws as a method of preventing voter fraud but refuses to discuss any particular instances he says he witnessed, is again declining to provide any examples of voter fraud he witnessed, claiming doing so would turn the debate over voter ID laws into a ‘he-said-he-said’ controversy.

“If you think I made it up, you’re entitled to do that, and if you think there’s no credibility and I just made it up because I had nothing to do some day, that’s your prerogative,” Davis told TPM in a phone interview on Tuesday.

Davis didn’t provide any examples this time around either, and law professor Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog wasn’t buying it.

“Let’s see some proof, or at least some names, Mr. Davis, as to voter fraud actually happening today in significant numbers aside from absentee voter fraud, which is the main source of voter fraud but one about which voter identification laws do nothing,” writes Rick Hasen.

“In fact, I’d like to see proof of a single vote in his region of someone voting in the name of ‘Donald Duck’ (not to mention proof that doing so will allow ‘them’ to ‘control politics and thwart progress’),” he continues.

Davis said readers are entitled to think that he made it up, but that he’s under no obligation to provide specifics.

Agenda-driven op-eds and baseless innuendo aside, there are some hard data points and legitimate numbers that everybody needs to be aware of, before we go screwing around with our already jeopardized election system:

Last month, the State Board of Elections compared voter registration lists to drivers’ license records from the DMV, finding about a million names that didn’t match up. Supporters of voter ID were skeptical of that number, suggesting many on the list could be people who had changed their addresses or their names without updating their drivers’ licenses.

Democracy NC went through the list, weeding out cases where there was potential for clerical error or name/address mismatches. They were left with 460,500 registered voters that do not have a current driver’s license. That's about 8% of the state's "active voters."

And if we want to retain even our precarious hold on Democracy in this state, we'll stand up for the rights of that 8%, regardless of the rhetoric being thrown around. It's that simple.