Democrats have officially run out of excuses to oppose commonsense voter ID laws — but that didn’t stop Vice President Kamala Harris from taking another crack at it anyway.
After milking the racism angle for all its worth — the left’s go-to argument that’s become as trite as it is lazy — Harris tried to assert that the lack of office supply stores was a compelling reason to dispense with laws that require voters to prove that they are who they say they are.
No, really.
In a “CBS This Morning” teaser clip for a full BET interview with Soledad O’Brien set to air on the network Friday, Harris told the former CNN anchor that voter ID laws are just too onerous because “there’s no Kinko’s, there’s no OfficeMax” in some communities.
#EXCLUSIVE: Vice President @KamalaHarris is talking about changes to voting laws in her first interview on the topic as VP.@VP Harris spoke with @soledadobrien for an interview airing Friday at 8/7c on @BET and @BETherTV. pic.twitter.com/hNJRhTkHbn
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) July 8, 2021
“I don’t think that we should underestimate what that could mean,” Harris said as she attempted to explain why she wouldn’t compromise on voter ID laws to ram through Democrats’ elections overhaul legislation, the For the People Act.
“Because in some people’s mind, that means, well, you’re going to have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove that you are who you are,” she claimed, though states often accept pieces of official mail as proof enough to cast a ballot.
“Well, there are a whole lot of people, especially people who live in rural communities, who don’t — there’s no Kinko’s, there’s no OfficeMax near them,” Harris said.
“People have to understand that when we’re talking about voter ID laws, be clear about who you have in mind and what would be required of them to prove who they are.
“Of course, people have to prove who they are, but not in a way that makes it almost impossible for them to prove who they are.”
Harris may not be the most talented politician, but she has quite a knack for stuffing several idiotic assertions into just a few sentences.
Starting with the lowest-hanging fruit, one obvious solution for the people who can’t manage to make a photocopy is to simply vote in person on Election Day rather than requesting a mail-in ballot.
But if that’s not possible, surely there are other places like local businesses, public schools, the post office, the public library — just to name a few — where someone would be happy to make a photocopy for them if that was the requirement.
The next easiest myth to debunk is that these people need to send photocopies of ID at all when many states have no such requirement, according to Ballotpedia.
As it turns out, even the much-maligned Georgia voter ID requirement can be satisfied with a utility bill or just by providing the last four digits of a Social Security number — something that literally every legal citizen in the U.S. has.
But the most insulting assertion Harris made was not-so-subtly implying that people in rural areas are not only technology-deprived but also too stupid to even know what they need to send in their vote. (That speaks volumes about how she views her own constituents.)
She’s not alone in that viewpoint, of course. Washington elites like Harris always speak about people in rural areas like they’re a remote tribe they’ve only read about in National Geographic — mysterious, primitive, sometimes endearing, but nowhere near as smart and sophisticated as they are.
Still, Harris tried her best to create an argument against a simple way to prevent voter fraud, and that’s a hard sell to the American people who instinctively understand why this is so important.
Democrats pulled out all the stops with their well-worn race card to try to sell it as a form of voter suppression only to find out a majority of black voters still support the measure.
They’re out of ideas on how to oppose this, leading Harris to grasp at straws and strawmen in a last-ditch effort to oppose an easy way to ensure mail-in ballots are cast by the people they’re sent to.
All of this raises the important yet still-unanswered question — if Democrats aren’t afraid of an honest election, why do they oppose every measure that would ensure it?
