Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) acknowledged in a Wednesday radio interview that voter ID laws help elect “more conservative candidates.”
The Tea Party booster, who now serves as the president of the Heritage Foundation, argued that this result is the primary reason Democrats fight stringent voter ID requirements.
“The left fights voter ID or any kind of picture ID to know that it is actually a registered voter who’s voting,” DeMint told St. Louis radio host Jamie Allman in a segment flagged by Right Wing Watch. “And so it’s something we’re working on all over the country, because in the states where they do have voter ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change towards more conservative candidates.”
Allman asked about the recent executive order Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) put through to restore voting rights to some 200,000 former convicted felons living in the state. DeMint said the move invited “voter fraud.”
“Well, it’s awfully suspicious coming into a big election in a state where it’s actually pretty close,” he said. “I mean, states can decide who votes, but the governor themselves without legislative action, that seems over the top to me. I haven’t seen an complete analysis here, but the left is trying to draw votes from illegals, from voter fraud, a lot of different things, so this kind of fits right in to trying to find another group that they can basically count on to vote their way.”
DeMint is hardly the first conservative to suggest voter ID laws benefit Republican candidates. Earlier this month, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) noted that “photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference” in defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election.
A study published in February by researchers at the University of California-San Diego confirmed that voter ID laws adversely affect the turnout of minorities and Democrats.
Listen below via Right Wing Watch:
