wingnuts and racism...no surprise.
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 North Carolina, GOP officials in Mecklenburg and Cumberland counties planned to videotape people in some heavily Democratic precincts, saying it was to prevent voting fraud. State GOP spokesman Richard Hudson said poll-watching programs targeted heavily Democratic voter registration precincts, not racial groups. However, as a result of complaints about the plans, the Justice Department sent out letters making clear that videotaping minority voters at or near the polls violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Despite the GOP spokesman’s claim, the Associated Press reported that a Justice Department official, speaking on grounds of anonymity, described such monitoring of voters as a phenomenon of the last 10 years. The official noted that it started in 1988 with uniformed security guards being placed in mostly Latino precincts in Orange County, California. “All of these moves are called ballot security moves, moves by plain citizens to keep illegal voters from the polls,” the official said, “but none targeted illegal voters. They all targeted minority voters and specifically threatened them with some dire consequence if there are problems with voter records.”28
In Dillon County, South Carolina, several days before Election Day, GOP state Rep. Son Kinon mailed more than 3,000 brochures to black voters. The outside of the brochure read, “You have always been my friend, so don’t chance GOING TO JAIL on Election Day!” ... “SLED agents, FBI agents, people from the Justice Department and undercover agents will be in Dillon County working this election. People who you think are your friends, and even your neighbors, could be the very ones that turn you in. THIS ELECTION IS NOT WORTH GOING TO JAIL!!!!!!”29
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.
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