There are so many horrible things happening, and your blogs make me feel as if there is someone in this world thinking. I am very upset about the many restrictions to voting that are being passed in so many states. Do you have any thoughts on the subject, AND any suggestions for counteracting this gross attempt to return to the era of the poll tax without a tax???
I had actually been following this development with some dismay, and so it was with alacrity that I responded as follows:
You are quite right about Republican activities of voter suppression. But this has been their tactic for a very long time and not enough denunciation has ben directed against it.
One might have hoped that the courts would hold this to be a constitutional right, under the due process clause or the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the Constitution which provides that: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," but the US Supreme Court in CRAWFORD et al. v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION BOARD et al. decided otherwise in 2008 voting by a 7 to 3 majority that there was no infringement
At least as early as the 1992 election for New Jersey governor, which was won by Republican Christie Whitman, Ed Rollins, the then prominent Republican campaign consultant bragged in a Time Magazine article that:
..."street smart" New Jersey Republicans had doled out $500,000 in "walking-around money" to black ministers and Democratic Party activists on Whitman's behalf. But in this case the payments were actually sitting- around money, designed to counter Florio's heavy support among black voters by discouraging them from turning out on Election Day. As Rollins told the journalists, "We went into black churches and we basically said to ministers who had endorsed Florio, 'Do you have a special project?' And they said, 'We've already endorsed Florio.' We said, 'That's fine -- don't get up on the Sunday pulpit and preach. We know you've endorsed him, but don't get up there and say it's your moral obligation that you go on Tuesday to vote for Jim Florio.' " He added that Republicans had paid "key workers" in black Democratic strongholds to "go home, sit and watch television" instead of delivering voters to the polls. Bragged Rollins: "I think to a certain extent we suppressed their vote.
In the 2004 election the following was reported by The NewStandard:
News surfaced Tuesday evening that the Bush campaign's Florida office has a list of the names and addresses of 1,886 voters in and around Jacksonville, Florida, a predominately black city inside Duval County, where official voter registration figures show Democrats have a nearly 50,000 person edge over Republicans.
In an October 26 broadcast of the BBC's Newsnight, investigative journalist Greg Palast reported that Florida Bush/Cheney campaign officials are keeping a spreadsheet they call a 'caging list". The broadcast included portions of an interview with Ion Sancho, the Leon County election supervisor who headed up statewide recount efforts on the orders of the Florida Supreme Court back in 2000. Sancho has raised the possibility that the "caging list" will be used to challenge the eligibility of voters at the polls, an action permitted by an arcane law passed in 1895.
During an interview with The NewStandard, Sancho called the legislation "a holdover Jim Crow law" and said that challenges based solely on the Republicans' spreadsheet won't be deemed credible in his county.
Also during the 2004 election Representative Dennis Kucinich commented on allegations of voter suppression in Ohio during the 2004 election:
Dirty tricks occurred across the state, including phony letters from Boards of Elections telling people that their registration through some Democratic activist groups were invalid and that Kerry voters were to report on Wednesday because of massive voter turnout. Phone calls to voters giving them erroneous polling information were also common.
John Pappageorge, a Republican state legislator in Michigan said in the summer of 2004:
'If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election.
Pappageorge later asserted he was quoted out of context stating, "In the context that we were talking about, I said we’ve got to get the vote up in Oakland (County) and the vote down in Detroit. You get it down with a good message."
In September of 2009 ACORN, a community organization dedicated among other things to getting as many minority voters as possibly registered to vote was destroyed by setting a trap or as the Metro New York Labor Communication Council described it:
A pimp and his prostitute walked into an ACORN office — hidden cameras somewhere — and snookered, after considerable editing, two ACORN employees into telling them how to evade taxes on the work they were doing. Fox News took it up, followed by the more “respectable” media. A bandwagon of horrified conservatives and liberal congressional representatives, and a president, took to the low road– and an organization that did more for people needing housing than ever before, and registered more than 1.3 million poor people and people of color to vote, was knocked off the road; consigned to the scrapheap of history.
A cartoon on that web site summarized it very well:
This year I have received e-mails from various sources such as from Governor Martin O'Malley reading, "Maine is the newest addition to our growing list of states that are playing recklessly with voters’ rights. The Republican-controlled legislature just passed a bill to end same-day registration and make it harder for people to cast their ballots, and the Tea Party-backed Republican governor is ready to sign it into law."
The non-partisan League of Women Voters complained about: "...a surprise move, the House leadership has scheduled a vote this Wednesday, June 22, on legislation to abolish the Election Assistance Commission, HR 672. With many continuing threats to the right to vote, now is not the time to terminate the only federal agency that devotes its full resources and attention to improving our elections."
And from Florida I got the following: "The GOP-led Florida Legislature just passed a terrible bill that will make it harder for people to register to vote and limit early voting. Conveniently enough, these new rules target Democratic voters, and they come just in time to have a disastrous effect on the 2012 election."
And finally in another message from the League of Women Voters they wrote: "More than 2/3 of states have passed or are considering laws that would make it harder for people to vote. Because of ONE case of voter fraud in 6 years, a new law disenfranchises 620,000 Kansas residents who lack government ID. An "emergency" Texas bill does not consider student IDs valid IDs to vote, but will allow anyone with a handgun license to vote."
The only recourse good government forces have against this onslaught, since apparently the courts will not take action, is to publicize these outrages.
I continue to be disappointed by the New York Times, which even as this problem escalates has not seen fit to address it in its news pages. The last time that I can find any reference to this problem in the Times News section was in October of 2010 and then it turned it on its head with the headline: "Fraudulent Voting Re-emerges as a Partisan Issue," though in its editorial pages it spoke loud and clear on June 11 of this year. As far as I am concerned it is the News section that defines a paper and not its Editoral Page.
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