Thomas Sowell‘s latest column at National Review Online takes outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to task over the issue of voter identification requirements.

One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting. …

… The most devastating account of voter fraud may be in the book Injustice by J. Christian Adams. He was a Justice Department attorney, who has detailed with inside knowledge the voter frauds known to the Justice Department and ignored by Attorney General Holder and Company.

One of these frauds involved sending out absentee ballots to people who had never asked for them. Then a political operator would show up — uninvited — the day the ballots arrived and “help” the voter to fill them out. Sometimes the intruders simply took the ballots, filled them out, and forged the signatures of the voters.

These were illegal votes for Democrats, which may well be why Eric Holder sees no evil, hears no evil, and speaks no evil.

As for race-based “voter suppression,” amid all the political hysteria, how many hard facts have you heard? Probably none that supports that claim. Widely available free photo identification cards mean that poverty is no barrier to voting.

Since blacks and whites both have to show photo ID for everything from cashing checks to getting on a plane, why has requiring a photo ID for voting caused such shrill outcries?

Unfortunately, this is part of the cynical politics of promoting as much racial polarization and paranoia as possible, in hopes of getting more black voters to turn out to vote for the Democrats.