Schedler Introduces Reality To Holder’s Motor Voter Lawsuit Idiocy

The Monroe News-Star had a piece tonight on the decision of the State of Louisiana to fight the Department of Justice’s insane lawsuit alleging voting rights violations from the state’s lack of vigor in registering those on public assistance to vote.

There isn’t a great deal of new information in the piece beyond what we’ve already posted here; essentially, DOJ’s stance is that it’s fine for the New Black Panthers to stand outside of a voting precinct with night sticks and howl racial epithets at white people who might be seeking to enter the building and vote – but if every welfare, Medicaid or disability recipient isn’t registered as a Democrat voter, Eric Holder will descend on Baton Rouge with all his power to lay waste to the villains responsible. Forget about the fact that Louisiana ranks fourth nationally in the number of registered voters as a percentage of those eligible as counted by last year’s Census; where there’s a political will, there’s a DOJ suit.

The Justice Department has been haranguing public assistance recipients outside state offices for most of the first half of this year in an attempt to build a case which says that Louisiana is discriminating against poor (or black) people in its application of the Motor Voter bill – the 1993 law which makes it a state responsibility to register people to vote at offices where public assistance is disbursed.

But in the piece, there’s a terrific quote from Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler about the moronic nature of the suit…

Schedler said employees in those offices have been trained to offer voter registration information to citizens. If the citizen chooses not to register or gives some excuse as to why they can’t, employees then have to get try to get citizens to sign an affidavit saying the registration was offered.

“My job as secretary of state is to coordinate and train those personnel, and we do that vigorously as far as I am concerned,” Schedler said. “I am not naïve to believe if you have 50 people in line for food stamps and one irate customer screaming at you that the personnel could inadvertently fail to offer to register for voting. I wouldn’t even stand up in a court of law and say that couldn’t happen.”

He’s captured the incredibly stupid character of the lawsuit.

People in a free society have the freedom to vote – or not to vote if they want. And in a free society participation in the franchise should be no less voluntary than anything else. Demanding that state offices proselytize voter registration to those people who draw sustenance from government largesse, as though it’s somehow crucial to the survival of a democracy that those in a position to vote themselves more money get every opportunity to do so, is classic Cloward-Piven strategy at work – overwhelm the system by use of those not invested in it so as to change it to something else.

Louisiana’s voter rolls used to be polluted with dead people and fictional characters, due in no small part to the role of New Orleans-based ACORN registering massive numbers of winos on Camp Street and players cut from Saints camp every year, so as to provide names which could be voted in precincts where nice Republican ladies from the suburbs wouldn’t dream of serving as poll watchers. This practice was so foolproof that Democrat activists would boast – your humble author was the recipient of an episode in particular courtesy of one veteran activist involved in Charles Foti’s successful-though-ultimately-come-to-grief campaign for Attorney General – that Louisiana Republicans were never going to be able to dominate statewide elections like the GOP was able to do in other states precisely because of the machine vote in New Orleans.

Except that after Katrina, Secretary of State Jay Dardenne was able to scrub the voter rolls of dead people, fictional characters and folks who no longer lived in New Orleans. The Democrats have struggled badly to be relevant in statewide elections since.

It’s difficult to believe the current ridiculous lawsuit by Holder and his leftist stooge Thomas Perez isn’t directly aimed at reversing current realities and bringing back Louisiana’s “good old days” in which unlimited ACORN-style fraudulent voter registrations lead to buses full of the underclass voting at multiple precincts under multiple spurious identities – with the Election Night result being that Orleans Parish was always the last to report its vote totals and usually delivered precisely the number of votes that the Democrats needed to bring in a race. Mix Chicago and Louisiana politics and you’ll get little less.

It’s also hardly a surprise to see Holder’s Motor Voter gambit in Louisiana given that Schedler’s main announced challenger for the job is an old-line Democrat, Caroline Fayard, with national party connections thanks to her father’s long history of large Dem donations and an established record of ethical shenanigans even having only run one unsuccessful race. The Left has gotten incredible mileage from a George Soros-funded initiative called the Secretary Of State Project in which hard-left, ACORN-friendly candidates have gotten elected and presided over a destruction of the integrity of their voter rolls. The most egregious example of that project was in Minnesota, where a Soros-backed Democrat Secretary of State bent over backwards in a successful attempt to steal a 2008 U.S. Senate race where Al Franken rode several hundred illegal votes from convicted felons to a close after-the-fact victory over Republican incumbent Norm Coleman.

In light of that disgraceful experience, the idea that a national, partisan Democrat like Fayard should be a candidate to supervise voter rolls and electoral proceedings in Louisiana – while being given an assist from Holder with the current lawsuit – should transcend suspicion and be regarded as something akin to a planned coup d’etat.

If Schedler is smart, he’ll spend every day from now to Election Day howling about the Left’s assault on Louisiana’s conservative majority the DOJ lawsuit represents. This state’s citizens ought to be outraged at the ham-handed and partisan federal intrusion of a runaway, rogue, left-ideologue Justice Department, and the issue ought to be front and center from now until Election Day. It cuts to the very base of the disaffection with the Obama administration among the state’s majority voters; the emphasis on redistribution of wealth and power to the underclass and the dependent from the productive class, and an institutional arrogance bordering on contempt for regular folks.

The idea that Washington should browbeat Louisiana into proselytizing all welfare recipients into voter registration so as to feed a political machine – and the unspoken concept that should the state not pursue such an agenda with sufficient vigor it’s evidence of racism – is something which ought to inflame ordinary folks in this state. Schedler has himself a winning issue against Fayard, and he’s crazy if he doesn’t ride it to another four years in his current job.

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