By JIM SMITH
First vice chair of the Beaufort County Democratic Party

The majority of the Republican-appointed Supreme Court has made two major blunders in the last two years.

No, I’m not referring to marriage rights and the Affordable Care Act decisions, which the far right hates but a majority of Americans support. The greatest recent blunder is the Citizens United decision, which has undermined the legitimacy of the American political system in most people’s minds. Few Americans believe that corporations with their virtually unlimited financial resources have the same rights as natural persons. The damage that this decision did as seen by majorities on the political left and right is to corrupt the entire American political system.

The second great blunder the Court blindly made is overturning a critical aspect of the Voting Rights Act. On June 25, 2013, the Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. States with the worst history of voting discrimination — like North Carolina — no longer have to approve their voting law changes through the federal government. The decision allows a nationwide attack on voting rights of minorities, the elderly, students and people with disabilities in both parties as states pass voter suppression laws. These laws include cuts to early voting, voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls. They create significant burdens for eligible voters trying to exercise their most fundamental constitutional right. Four major voting rights cases have come before the Supreme Court in past months — from Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Texas — and in three instances the court has ruled to restrict voting rights.

The Supreme Court upheld an Appeals Court decision in Texas preserving a law that could disenfranchise 600,000 voters. It was the first time since 1982 that the Court approved a voting law that was intentionally discriminatory. Justice Ginsburg’s dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, observed, “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections is the prospect of enforcing an intentionally discriminatory law, which risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”

Lorraine C. Minnite, of Rutgers University-Camden, an expert on voter fraud, who has testified before Congress and advised government agencies, addressed this issue on numerous occasions. Fraud by individual voters is almost nonexistent. After 10 years of research, Minnite found that intentional fraud by individual voters is exceedingly rare. Other investigations have reached the same conclusion.

Under Republican President George W. Bush, the U.S. Justice Department searched for voter fraud. In the first three years of the program, just 26 people were convicted or pleaded guilty to illegal registration or voting out of 197,056,035 voters studied.

No state considering or passing restrictive voter identification laws has documented an actual problem with voter fraud. In Wisconsin, Indiana, Georgia and Pennsylvania, election officials testified they have never seen cases of voter impersonation at the polls. Indiana and Pennsylvania stipulated in court that they had experienced zero instances of voter fraud.

When federal authorities challenged voter identification laws in South Carolina and Texas, neither state provided any evidence of voter impersonation or any other type of fraud that could be deterred by requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls.

The results of Minnite’s meticulous research into the evidence of voter fraud in contemporary U.S. elections found that voting irregularities produced by the fragmented and complex nature of the electoral process are not totally uncommon, but the incidence of deliberate voter fraud is rare. In many cases discriminatory laws were passed according to a Texas federal judge “because of and not in spite of the voter ID law’s detrimental effects on the African-American and Hispanic electorate.”

Jim Smith is the first vice chair of the Beaufort County Democratic Party.