Top Democrats are aggressively pushing the claim that Republicans’ worries about voter fraud are an insincere excuse to suppress voting by African-Americans and Hispanics.

But former Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis told The Daily Caller that anti-fraud measures are needed to protect African-Americans from corrupt political bosses — many of them African-Americans themselves — who run Democratic Party machines in the South.

On Nov. 14, progressive Democratic Reps. John Conyers, Steny Hoyer, Jerrold Nadler, Keith Ellison, Steve Cohen, Marcia Fudge and Emanuel Clearer, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus — along with representatives from several advocacy groups — held a meeting to complain about what they say is the danger posed by laws that require voters to identify themselves.

Artur Davis is unimpressed.

“What I have seen in my state, in my region, is the the most aggressive practitioners of voter-fraud are local machines who are tied lock, stock and barrel to the special interests in their communities — the landfills, the casino operators — and they’re cooking the [ballot] boxes on election day, they’re manufacturing absentee ballots, they’re voting [in the names of] people named Donald Duck, because they want to control politics and thwart progress,” he told TheDC.

“People who are progressives have no business defending those individuals.”

Davis is free to talk publicly because he quit electoral politics in 2010, giving up his African-American-dominated district to run for the Democratic nomination in the 2010 gubernatorial race. He lost in the primary, and the the winning Democrat subsequently lost to the Republican by 16 points, 42 percent to 58 percent.

Stay tuned to the Daily Caller for more on our interview series with Rep. Artur Davis.

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