On Tuesday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” network contributors Juan Williams and Charles Krauthammer debated the merits of North Carolina’s new voter identification legislation signed into law this week by North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.
Williams said there are circumstances in which photo identification is necessary, but since voting is a right, he argued that identification shouldn’t be a requirement.
“When I look at the polls, most Americans support voter ID,” Williams said. “Most Americans are pretty clear in their thinking that if you have to, as Gov. McCrory said, show some ID to get in the airport or to get anything — yeah, I think you should be required to. Now, the difference in my mind is of course that voting is a constitutional right and that you shouldn’t have any impediment to it pursue your constitutional rights. But again, this is something beyond that you heard from that civil right advocate, [N.C. NAACP President Rev. William] Barber, I believe, in which he said you are limiting — I think you’re going from 17 days of voting down to 10. If you change your address now, you have to make the change in terms it of your ID within 25 days. The hours of voting are constrained. I mean, this really is an effort to suppress the vote. I don’t know how you get away from that and I don’t know how any judge to answer your question, Shannon wouldn’t see this thing.”
Fill-in host Shannon Bream pointed out that the Supreme Court had already upheld a measure in Indiana which requires identification. Krauthammer countered Williams by saying that with that ruling, the unconstitutionality claim doesn’t hold merit.
“That’s why I think the claim that it’s unconstitutional is simply not going to hold up … which is the major point,” Krauthammer said. “That’s usually the sticking point in all of these cases. And it’s also the political point. But there is one aspect of the political argument that I think is missed. The left gets the prestige of this by saying that its position is to prevent people from being — from losing the right to vote from being disenfranchised. But, if you go to the polls, you vote for ‘a’ and by a fraud say illegal immigrant or somebody who is, who voted already votes for candidate ‘b,’ your vote for ‘a’ has been cancelled. So, in affect you also have been deprived of your vote it. So I think it ought to be seen in those terms. There are ways depriving of the vote. ‘A’ is to stop them. Second is to cancel the vote by allowing illegal fraudulent voting. So, I think there is an equal moral standing on the two sides.” (RELATED: Voter ID rules protect seniors, minorities from fraudsters, says new study)
Williams and Krauthammer then had an exchange over the need for such laws. According to Williams, there is no evidence of rampant voter fraud, which Krauthammer argued it was more prevalent than Williams was willing to acknowledge:
WILLIAMS: Let me just suggest there is no evidence of any such thing going on. There is no evidence and, in fact, Gov. McCory went so far as to say ‘undetected fraud’ because he has no evidence of any fraud.
BREAM: I will say to that point, Greg Abbott, the attorney general that is running for governor down in Texas, says they have prosecuted many, many of these cases. In Florida we have seen the same thing. I don’t know about North Carolina, but it does happen.
WILLIAMS: Oh no, everything happens. People fall off buildings. People, you know, fall off bridges. What I’m saying as a matter of influencing or changing election outcome, when was the last time we heard about that?
KRAUTHAMMER: You think that somebody casting a ballot fraudulently is as infrequent as somebody falling off a bridge?
WILLIAMS: Correct.
KRAUTHAMMER: I think you have fallen off the bridge.
BREAM: No one is falling off the bridge.
KRAUTHAMMER: Elections aren’t clean in every attempt.
WILLIAMS: Believe me, we have such — we have flyspeck surveillance of our elections in this country. if there is was any evidence that any Democrat was pursuing cheating in this manner, boy, would Republicans be ballistic, Charles.
KRAUTHAMMER: If you believe that our elections are clean, you believe that baseball is clean. I’m not sure either is true.