Carl Leubsdorf’s column in Monday’s Times was excellent propaganda. Leubsdorf has been reporting on political issues since his early days in the South, where a political reporter was either a Democrat or unemployed.

The country has changed, the South has changed, but Leubsdorf hasn’t. When we have had female and minority Cabinet secretaries, a black female national security adviser and a minority president, Leubsdorf references pre-Civil Rights Act issues.

He believes that in Texas, where people often drive until their late 80s or until 90, minorities do not have driver’s licenses or birth certificates, and he doesn’t mention that the law requires the state to provide free voter ID.

He relies on the Justice Department’s list showing hundreds of thousands of Texans ineligible to vote under this law. The Harvard professor, who paid for this list, could not explain how it includes (among others) the 43rd president and a couple of members of the Texas Legislature.

The U.S. attorney general decided that violations of voting rights by minorities against whites will not be prosecuted. His Department of Justice tried to keep Florida from complying with federal law by removing dead people and those ineligible to vote from the voter rolls.

The government refused to provide access to the list of immigrants in the United States. Florida went to court and gained access to determine if any were registered to vote in Florida.

Leubsdorf makes much of only 67 persons prosecuted for voter fraud. But these cases are rarely pursued. There were several elections where felons voted illegally, yet there were no prosecutions. We normally don’t know the extent of voting fraud.

Thousands of illegal voter registration applications were found in Harris County, Texas, in 2010.

Edward F. Haertel

Dexter

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