khirkhib
Jr. Member
Posts: 967
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« Reply #2 on: October 24, 2004, 09:31:58 PM » |
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Race-Based Targeting
Here are a few examples of recent incidents in which groups of voters have been singled out on the basis of race.
- Most recently, controversy has erupted over the use in the Orlando area of armed, plainclothes officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to question elderly black voters in their homes. The incidents were part of a state investigation of voting irregularities in the city's March 2003 mayoral election. Critics have charged that the tactics used by the FDLE have intimidated black voters, which could suppress their turnout in this year’s elections. Six members of Congress recently called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate potential civil rights violations in the matter.
- This year in Florida, the state ordered the implementation of a “potential felon” purge list to remove voters from the rolls, in a disturbing echo of the infamous 2000 purge,
which removed thousands of eligible voters, primarily African-Americans, from the rolls. The state abandoned the plan after news media investigations revealed that the
2004 list also included thousands of people who were eligible to vote, and heavily targeted African-Americans while virtually ignoring Hispanic voters.
- This summer, Michigan state Rep. John Pappageorge (R-Troy) was quoted in the Detroit Free Press as saying, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have
a tough time in this election.” African Americans comprise 83% of Detroit’s population.
- In South Dakota’s June 2004 primary, Native American voters were prevented from voting after they were challenged to provide photo IDs, which they were not required to present under state or federal law.
- In Kentucky in July 2004, Black Republican officials joined to ask their State GOP party chairman to renounce plans to place “vote challengers” in African-American precincts
during the coming elections.
- Earlier this year in Texas, a local district attorney claimed that students at a majority black college were not eligible to vote in the county where the school is located. It
happened in Waller County – the same county where 26 years earlier, a federal court order was required to prevent discrimination against the students.
- In 2003 in Philadelphia, voters in African American areas were systematically challenged by men carrying clipboards, driving a fleet of some 300 sedans with magnetic signs designed to look like law enforcement insignia.
- In 2002 in Louisiana, flyers were distributed in African American communities telling voters they could go to the polls on Tuesday, December 10th – three days after a Senate runoff election was actually held.
- In 1998 in South Carolina, a state representative mailed 3,000 brochures to African American neighborhoods, claiming that law enforcement agents would be “working”
the election, and warning voters that “this election is not worth going to jail.”
Recent Strategies
As this report details, voter intimidation and suppression is not a problem limited to the southern United States. It takes place from California to New York, Texas to Illinois. It
is not the province of a single political party, although patterns of intimidation have changed as the party allegiances of minority communities have changed over the years. In recent years, many minority communities have tended to align with the Democratic Party. Over the past two decades, the Republican Party has launched a series of “ballot security” and “voter integrity” initiatives which have targeted minority communities.
At least three times, these initiatives were successfully challenged in federal courts as illegal attempts to suppress voter participation based on race.The first was a 1981 case in New Jersey which protested the use of armed guards to
challenge Hispanic and African-American voters, and exposed a scheme to disqualify voters using mass mailings of outdated voter lists. The case resulted in a consent decree prohibiting efforts to target voters by race.
Six years later, similar “ballot security” efforts were launched against minority voters in Louisiana, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana. Republican
National Committee documents said the Louisiana program alone would “eliminate at least 60- 80,000 folks from the rolls,” again drawing a court settlement. And just three years later in North Carolina, the state Republican Party, the Helms for Senate Committee and others sent postcards to 125,000 voters, 97 percent of whom were African American, giving them false information about voter eligibility and warning of criminal penalties for voter fraud – again resulting in a decree against the use of race to
target voters.
2002 In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, five Republican poll watchers – including two staff members of Senator Tim Hutchinson’s office – allegedly focused exclusively on African Americans,
asking them for identification and taking photographs during the first day of early voting. The chair of the county Democratic Party and Election Commission said the
tactics caused some frustrated black voters to not vote. “They are trying to intimidate African American voters into not voting,” said the Democrat coordinating national
efforts with Arkansas’ campaigns. “They were literally going up to them and saying, ‘Before you vote, I want to see your identification.’“ Local law enforcement officials
escorted the poll watchers out, but they later returned.
In South Dakota, the state attorney general announced a voter fraud initiative in coordination with the Justice Department, which had just announced a “Voting
Integrity Initiative.” In this case, that involved working with the FBI to send state and federal agents to question almost 2,000 newly registered Native American voters. No
probe was announced to investigate new registrants in counties without significant Native American populations, despite the fact that those counties contained most of the
new registrations in the state.
As the election approached, specific allegations of voter registration fraud led to the filing of criminal charges against a Native American woman registering voters on
reservations for the Democratic Party.17 It was also the topic of a Republican direct mailpiece. Democrats charged the piece was inaccurate and the GOP later apologized for its use of a newspaper headline that did not relate to the subject.18 Eventually, the GOP attorney general found some of the affidavits alleging the fraud to be false themselves, and described the search for wrongdoing to have been “fueled by vapor and fumes.”
Charges against the woman were dropped in 2004.
I could go on, pages and pages.
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