Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, December 25, 2007 5:33:13 PM
I found one of the most foolish statements ever in the
Washington Post today:
The Indiana case seems to offer a perfect example. The state's
Republican-led legislature passed the law in 2005 requiring voters to
have ID, even though the state had never prosecuted a case of voter
impersonation.
Why is this is a silly statement? Think about it for a moment. If they had no voter ID requirement, how could they have identified voter impersonation in the past? Of course they never prosecuted it! How could they tell if there was no ID requirement?
The point is to require ID to prevent and identify fraud. Without such a requirement, the proponents contend (and I agree) that fraud takes place invisibly, and CANNOT BE DETECTED. So, of course there were no prosecutions; without a requirement, there is no way to detect the crime!
I worry about some "journalists".
UPDATED 12/26/2007 To be fair, the reporter was just parroting the argument of the anti-ID lawyers. So that silly argument came from the lawyer.
Of course, the fact that the reporter parroted the liberal lawyers' argument as part of the "factual" segment of the report seems a bit biased. The least they could have done was present the response from the other side as part of the facts as well.* Or perhaps made the simple observation I made above, that it is pretty hard to prosecute voter fraud if you have no mechanism in place to identify it. Would that have been so hard to do? I spotted the problem with the statement as soon as I read it. Even a journalism major should be able to notice after a few hours, I would think.
Then again, as I have been told again and again there is no political bias in the press, I suppose I am just imagining things.
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* Oddly enough, for a fair and impartial report, I somehow never saw the response in the article. I know that one side alleged that there was never any voter fraud and so the law is unneeded, but I don't seem to see much of a response in the article itself.
And before you argue that I am imagining reporter bias, please, read the article. The arguments may get equal inches of column (though I think the left side gets a bit more), but the presentation is horribly skewed. Go ahead, read the report and see if you don't agree. It is far from the most biased reporting I have seen, but they present the left side "straight", but on the right they present a few arguments, then throw in "Posner agrees that..." several times, showing every instance where the right concedes the arguments of the left. Oddly, either the left side never conceded anything to the right, or else the reporter somehow overlooked them.
Well, as I said, please read the article and let me know if I am reading too much into it. (After all, there is no left wing media bias.)