Authored by Roger Simon via The Epoch Times,

I would like to vote in France and Spain. And for that matter, I wouldn’t mind voting in Germany as well.

I have opinions about the government in all three countries and I can even speak their languages relatively well, well enough to read the newspapers anyway. (My German is a little shaky.)

Unfortunately, I don’t have identification in any of those countries in order to vote, but according to our Attorney General Merrick Garland, that’s not a problem, because IDs are somehow discriminatory and should not be required to vote.

Did you hear that, Monsieur Macron? Say the word and I’ll be on a plane to Charles de Gaulle within a day. But, alas, I know you still require a French National Identity Card or French Passport to vote. How old fashioned of your country!

In Spain, I can use a driver’s license, but regrettably that is also a form of photo ID.

Dang! Life is just unfair!

Thank goodness Mr. Garland feels differently, as reported by the Washington Times:

“Attorney General Merrick Garland said on the eve of the Super Tuesday primaries that states requiring voter ID at the polls and restricting drop boxes are suppressing Black voters, and the Justice Department has doubled the number of its lawyers to fight those laws.”

The man himself is quoted as adding the following at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama:

“That is why we are challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.”

With all due respect, Mr. Garland, that is not what you are doing. You are making it easier to stuff the ballot, through the mail, in those drop boxes, and now in-person for individuals sans ID, some of whom could easily be illegal immigrants.

Most people know this. A majority of Americans do not believe we have fair elections anymore. You are just adding to the perception.

This is true even in your own party.

A Rasmussen poll in early March found that 57 percent of Democrats would oppose certification of the forthcoming presidential election were Donald Trump to win.

We live in a country of mutual distrust fanned by years of prevarication, electoral and otherwise.

But it’s actually worse.

Behind this pandering to black and other minorities is the notion that they are incapable of obtaining IDs for themselves.

Were I one of these minorities, I would be insulted and appalled. This is racism at its purist.

In a world where black people have already been president of our country, CEOs of major corporations, and the first in history to surgically separate conjoined twins joined at the head, this kind of thinking seems both meretricious and bizarre.

Would Mr. Garland dare say that the same people not be required to have a legal ID to get on an airplane like the rest of us?

Not if he or one of his relatives or friends were on that plane, I would wager.

But to vote, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from. Zetas cartel? No problem. CCP? No problem.

In a recent appearance on Maria Bartiromo’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” the newly installed co-chair of the Republican National Committee, Lara Trump, named election integrity as the primary goal of her party’s new regime.

Amen to that. And high time, too, since the GOP has acquiesced to a tainted system for many years. The country had acquiesced to it as well, much of the public, until now, not realizing until recently how corrupt it had become.

Without election integrity, we do not have the semblance of a democratic country of any sort, specifically, in our case, a constitutional republic.

For some time, Donald Trump has adamantly supported the purity of same-day voting on paper ballots, though he has argued of late that his supporters must engage in early and mail-in voting for now to combat a situation that is radically unbalanced.

Lara Trump also emphasized on Maria Bartiromo’s show that an unprecedented effort was going to be made by the RNC in November via poll watchers and election observers of every sort to preserve integrity and prevent cheating.

For Mr. Garland’s part, to heighten the propaganda impact, because that was what he was engaged in, the attorney general made his arguments in favor of the unnecessary IDs in Selma, Alabama, where Dr. Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began a then highly justifiable voting rights march in 1965.

I remember watching this historic event from afar as a young man in graduate school. It helped inspire my own small participation in the civil rights movement in South Carolina in the summer of 1966.

I made a mistake then that was to some extent similar, although in no way on as great a scale, to what Mr. Garland made in 2024. I was advised to go into the fields to register cotton pickers, who were largely women, to vote, generally a good thing. Most were illiterate in those days, so I would instruct them in writing an X on the line to formalize their registration.

Then I did something I now regret. On the lines below to register their party affiliations, I instructed them to place their Xs next to Democrat, and all of them did.

This was the wrong thing to do on many levels, the most obvious one being that I had no right, political or moral, to do it. But, smugly, in those days, I thought I was doing the right thing.

Over the years, I have corrected myself. At least I hope so. But I strongly suspect the same self-righteousness motivates Mr. Garland. A little self-inspection might be advisable, because what he is promoting is not the road to justice or equality in any form. It is a road to totalitarianism.