Hans von Spakovsky: Merrick Garland's misleading voting claims – what AG gets wrong about US elections

Partisan, political, designed to inflame. That’s what Merrick Garland’s recent speech on voting rights was. It certainly was not objective, measured and deliberate – the kind of speech you expect from an attorney general.

Garland’s speech started to go off the rails when he talked about the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which he said "drastically weakened" voting rights protections. It did not. Every election jurisdiction in the country should conduct post-election audits, and Garland should encourage them, not try to stop them. That decision left untouched the most important parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, including Section 2 – a permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting. Garland’s Justice Department can use Section 2 to fight voting discrimination wherever it occurs. (Fortunately, such discrimination is so rare these days that, in eight years, the Obama administration filed only four cases alleging voting discrimination under Section 2 – a fact Garland neglected to mention.)