To The Editor:
I am so glad that Art Hall thinks the last vestiges of racism have been eradicated from this nation.
He has heard of one black doctor, talks to one black friend (who, I suspect, shares his socio-economic stratum and political views) and posits that there is not a black voting problem (excepting that, of course they apparently do not know how to vote their own self-interest).
According to the 2010 U.S. census, blacks made up 13.6 percent of the population, but they have less than 10 percent of the U.S. House of Representatives (42 voting members plus one nonvoting delegate from Washington D.C. and in the New Jersey caucus, there is only one black representative for the whole state).
In the U.S. Senate, the picture is much bleaker. Out of 100 senators, only one defines himself as black (1 percent). Hall states that there is no black voter problem; perhaps he is right, but the race to enact voter I.D. laws, purge voter rolls and other activities in the name of stamping out voter fraud, suggests that the Republican Party wishes that there were one.
Mother Jones Magazine reports that there were more reports of UFO sightings than charges of voter frauds, let alone the number of convictions. To put this in perspective, according to the National UFO Reporting Center (nuforc.org) there were approximately 47,000 reports of UFO sightings from 2000 until 2010.
If each of those reports were instead a case of voter fraud in a single election, for example the 2012 presidential election with approximately 100 million votes in total, the incidence of voter fraud is a whopping 1/20th of one percent.
According to Justin Levitt, an associate professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles Calif., from 2000 to 2010 there were 13 credible cases of in-person voter fraud. To me the danger posed by insecure electronic voting machines represent a far greater hazard to the sanctity of our votes and to survival of our democracy. We actually live in a republic but that’s a subject for another letter.
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