Behold the latest handiwork of J. Christian Adams and Hans von Spakovsky on the DOJ’s voting rights crusade charade, over at National Review.

Amazingly, therein we find the below nugget on the Justice Department’s subsidizing of Catalist in connection with its failed litigation efforts over North Carolina’s election rules:

The Justice Department also pumped untold thousands of dollars into a database run by a company called Catalist. This database has been populated with data provided by the Democratic National Committee, unions, and other liberal organizations and is used to help them win elections. Catalist’s infrastructure and database are expensive to maintain, but fear not, the Justice Department, in the North Carolina trial and elsewhere, has provided federal tax dollars to its expert witnesses so that they could purchase Catalist’s proprietary data. Yes, federal dollars were used to fund a database that will be used next year to try to win the 2016 election for Democratic candidates.

What’s more:

For all the resources expended, the Justice Department’s entire case was built on speculative claims. Not able to produce a single eligible voter who was or would be unable to vote, the plaintiffs relied on hypothetical statistical arguments to claim that the turnout of black voters would be “suppressed” because they might use early voting and same-day registration slightly more than white voters, and because black voters are “less sophisticated voters.” DOJ experts actually made the borderline-racist argument that “it’s less likely to imagine” that black voters could “figure out or would avail themselves of other forms of registering and voting.” That’s a shameful way to enforce a law that was used to protect real victims of real discrimination in the Deep South.

Luckily, reality trumped racialism:

In the end, real statistics destroyed the Justice Department’s case. The reforms the plaintiffs claimed would disenfranchise “less sophisticated” black voters didn’t depress turnout at all. Indeed, in comparison with the 2010 primary, the turnout of black voters actually increased a whopping 29.5 percent in the May 2014 primary election, while the turnout of whites increased only 13.7 percent,. The same thing happened in the general election. This knocked the stuffing out of the plaintiff’s discrimination claims.

By the way, the case itself had boiled down to the fact that for the Justice Department

Apparently, in 2015 North Carolina, not being able to register when you are 16; having to register 25 days ahead of time; having only ten days before the actual date of an election to vote; and being required to vote on Election Day in the precinct where you actually live is not only racist, but a barrier to voting itself. Contrast these “conditions” with the ugly discrimination of the early ’60s.

Of course, progressives would never honestly contrast the impact of voting laws meant to minimize fraud of today with actual Jim Crow discrimination of yesteryear. To do so would merely reveal the shameful cynicism of their efforts.

 

Featured Image Source: Reuters.