What is "Project 351"?
It is an attempt to get reasonable politicians to see the honest reasoning behind the laws sweeping across the land that require people casting a vote to provide the same identification they would be required to show when renting a car or buying a pack of smokes. The name comes from NC General Assembly House Bill 351, a law vetoed by NC Governor Bev Perdue and sustained along partisan lines.
The biggest argument against the bill (put forth by numerous Leftist activists) is that the bill will drive thousands of elderly and minority voters away from the polls. They cite bogus studies that are only convincing in the media... but not so much in either of the two federal trials on the subject. Here is the typical voter the Left says represents tens or even hundreds of thousands of voters somewhere out there. Their problem was that in both the Indiana and the Georgia trials, the Plaintiffs couldn't find a single witness able to demonstrate to the courts that the law would create an undue burden to his/her right to vote. This is well documented in John Fund's outstanding book, Stealing Elections, but the summary is stated more clearly in a Jennifer Rubin column in the Washington Post (see it here).
A more informative Washington Post article on the Indiana trial and its eventual 6-3 validation in the US Supreme Court flatly observed, In the Indiana case before the court, the state acknowledged that it had not prosecuted any voter-impersonation cases like those the law seeks to remedy. On the other hand, those who asked the court to strike the law -- including the Democratic Party of Indiana and numerous civil rights groups -- could not point to one single, specific voter whose ballot was not counted because of it. They rejected the academic studies in writing, "the . . . petitioners' expert's report to be 'utterly incredible and unreliable.' 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 803. Much of the argument about the numbers of such voters comes from extrarecord, postjudgment studies, the accuracy of which has not been tested in the trial court." In short, the research of the academic "experts" has not been cross examined in court.
Project 351 has the goal of finding a minimum of five Democrat NC Legislators who have the courage to support this piece of common-sense legislation and help over ride Gov Perdue's fraud-friendly veto. The override vote is scheduled to be held during the Sept 12, 2011 legislative session, so time is short! If you want to help in an organized effort to present the true facts to the public and to legislators, please join us now!