Black Voters Increasingly the Target of Creative Intimidation and Suppression
Thursday, 05 October 2006 By Chris Levister

... Meet Prentice, a registered Democrat who served in the Navy overseas from 2003 to 2005. When he showed up in his San Bernardino precinct to vote in the November 2005 California Special Election he was turned away. The reason according to the poll worker: "He was registered to vote from a false address."

"I was shocked to learn I was listed among voters registered in Jacksonville, Florida," said Prentice whose mother and sister live near the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. "San Bernardino has always been my registered address. I never registered in Florida," said Prentice. Prentice says months after the 2005 election he was contacted by news reporters from the BBC Television Newsnight (UK). He says it was then he learned of so-called "caging lists" and other confidential data surrounding an October 2004 campaign directed by GOP party chiefs which sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election. He says the spreadsheets indicate most of the letters were sent to African-American majority zip codes.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) says the Prentice case is a striking example of several hundred to a few thousand voters the majority of them Black servicemen and women assigned to overseas duty who were wrongly identified as registering to vote from false addresses.

Here's how the vote challenging campaign worked: Certain voters were mailed letters in envelopes marked "Do not forward, return to sender". These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their U.S. home addresses. The lists of soldiers of "undeliverable" letters were transmitted to election officials as "bad addresses". The party could then challenge the voters' registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballot from being counted.

Prentice says when he tried to re-register for the 2005 California election he was challenged on the basis of the returned envelope. Republican spokesman Mindy Tucker Fletcher acknowledged that these were voters, "we mailed to, where the letter came back - bad addresses."

The GOP has refused to say why it would mark soldiers as having "bad addresses" subject to challenge when they had been assigned abroad.

Because, to Republicans, being black and serving in the military is fine and dandy, but that doesn't mean they want you voting with all the white folks. And Republicans don't draw the line at non-white members of our Armed forces. They are just as eager to disenfranchise non-white, non-service people from exercising their right to vote.

Fraudulent Registrations:

Last month the Riverside Press Enterprise reported the political party affiliation of dozens of Inland voters was switched to Republican without their knowledge during recent GOP-funded registration drives. Investigations by the state and the San Bernardino County district attorney's office into suspicious voter registrations have yet to produce any criminal charges. The PE reported registered Democrats were sent GOP absentee ballots and party campaign materials and were allowed to vote only for Republicans.

[...} State officials are also investigating voter registration fraud in Orange County. Earlier this year, the Orange County Register reported that more than 100 voters there had been re-registered as Republicans without their knowledge.

Why file fraudulent registrations in which Democrats are magically converted to Republicans? What's the benefit to Republicans? At first blush, it doesn't make much sense. Such people with fraudulently changed registrations are still likely to vote for Democratic candidates, yes?

However, fraudulent registrations have at least two possible uses for Republicans. One, to limit minority participation in Democratic primaries. Two, if you plan to "fix the election to fit the Republican candidate," it makes a lot sense to change the perception of how many voters are registered Republicans within that district. And how best to do that? Make it appear that there are more Republicans, by filing phony registrations or change of party affiliation forms.

Voter Challenges on Election Day:

This was a popular tactic in Ohio in 2004, and I suspect all across the country. It's really quite simple. You can challenge people based on "caging lists" as was done to Prentice, the black military service member whose experience was documented in the first excerpt I quoted from. Another likely practice which GOP operatives will employ to challenge minority voters this year will be based on more restrictive identification requirements that many states have adopted since 2004:

19 states require ID for all voters. Photo and non-photo ID accepted in these states. (AL, AK, AZ, AR, CO, CT, DE, GA*, KY, MO*, MT, NM, ND, OH, SC, TN, TX, VA, WA)

2 states require all voters show photo ID. Voters without the proper ID will be offered provisional ballots. (FL, IN)

3 states request all voters show photo ID. Voters without the proper ID can sign affidavits and cast regular (non-provisional) ballots. (HI, LA, SD)

As we all know from the 2004 election, the likelihood that many provisional ballots will never be counted is quite high.

And then there is this tried and true method to keep non-white voters from casting their ballots ...

Improper Actions by Election Officials:

It's no great surprise that governmental bureaucracies do dumb things by accident - and that they also do things that just look like dumb mistakes but are intentional. This may be the case with the State Elections Board in Atlanta, which mailed 200,000 letters - not 20,000 as the board first reported - notifying some Georgia residents that they may not have the type of photo ID needed to vote in the Nov. 7 elections. It gets a little incredulous in that the board did this a week after a Superior Court judge struck down the photo ID requirement on Sept. 19, saying Georgia's photo ID law violates the state Constitution.

What could this board have been thinking when it mailed out letters flatly stating that voters would need certain types of photo IDs unless they voted using absentee ballots? It would be nice to think this was an oversight. That was the case during the primary election earlier this year when some polls didn't get the word that an official photo ID wasn't required and held voters to that standard. That doesn't appear to be the case here.

This law, as we and others have maintained, was designed to make casting a vote more difficult for people who are not likely to have driver's licenses, a widely used form of identification. This includes the elderly, the poor, and members of minority groups less likely to own cars. It just happens these people are more inclined to vote for Democratic candidates than for Republicans.

Think this is a rare occurrence? Hardly. There have been numerous examples of such chicanery by election officials across the country over the last six years, as, for example, in Ohio ...

Recently, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell effectively shut down most voter registration efforts in Ohio when he promulgated new rules that severely restrict the operations of groups seeking to register new voters in traditionally disenfranchised communities. While Blackwell claims these new rules merely implement House Bill 3, which was signed into law in January, his rules in fact go beyond the intent of the law in restricting voter registration activities.

Kansas ...

Something was lost in the translation when Kansas produced its Spanish-language voter registration cards.

And now they'll have to be replaced.

Voting-rights advocates say the Spanish card is so different from the English version -- and so confusing to voters -- that they've given up on using it for fear that mistakes could cause registrations to be invalidated.

Adding to the confusion, no one speaks Spanish at the voter-information hotline number printed on the Spanish card.

"Whether it's deliberate or accidental, it has the potential to be disenfranchising to many voters," said Ernestine Krehbiel, co-president of the Wichita-Metro League of Women Voters.

"It's just frustrating, it really is," she said. "It's hard enough to get people active without having something like this."

Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, whose office produces both English- and Spanish-language voter materials, had the registration cards re-examined after The Eagle inquired about discrepancies between the versions.

"Clearly, some mistakes were made in the translation on that," he said Friday.

and Florida.

This year, Florida adopted new rules for voter registration drives that were so onerous -- and carried such draconian punishments for mistakes -- that the League of Women Voters of Florida announced that for the first time in 67 years it would not register voters.

Election officials are still wrongly purging eligible voters from the rolls. Four years after Harris' error-filled purge of felons, her successor as Florida secretary of state developed another error-filled felon list. She abandoned it only after news media pointed out that, oddly enough, it included 22,000 blacks, a group that votes heavily Democratic, but just 61 Hispanics, a group that tends to vote Republican in Florida.

Other, more insidious means of voter suppression by election officials are also often employed. For example, polling places in minority districts have been changed at the last minute, without notice. On election day in Ohio, 2004, too few voting machines were provided to minority precincts causing people to wait for hours in line, in the rain, in order to vote.

When Election Day dawned on November 2nd, tens of thousands of Ohio voters who had managed to overcome all the obstacles to registration erected by Blackwell discovered that it didn't matter whether they were properly listed on the voting rolls -- because long lines at their precincts prevented them from ever making it to the ballot box. Would-be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati routinely faced waits as long as three hours. Those in inner-city precincts in Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo -- which were voting for Kerry by margins of ninety percent or more -- often waited up to seven hours ...

A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot.(133) That's more than 174,000 voters. "The vast majority of this lost vote," concluded the Conyers report, "was concentrated in urban, minority and Democratic-leaning areas." [...]

The long lines were not only foreseeable -- they were actually created by GOP efforts. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In most cases, the new machines never materialized -- but that didn't stop officials in twenty of the state's eighty-eight counties, all of them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of precincts by at least twenty percent.(136) Republican officials also created long lines by failing to distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts. After the Florida disaster in 2000, such problems with machines were supposed to be a thing of the past. Under the Help America Vote Act, Ohio received more than $30 million in federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why? Because Ken Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that there was no point in buying electronic machines that would later have to be retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper ballots.

I can testify personally to the fact that calls to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections by me on November 2, 2004, regarding numerous precincts where there were an insufficient number of voting machines, went either unanswered or were ignored by election officials even after being informed of the problem.

Still, perhaps the worst offense was the deliberate attempt by some election officials at the polling places to prevent minorities from voting. In Cleveland, I received several reports from volunteers of election officials who required photo ID of every person who was overheard speaking Spanish, or who had a Spanish surname, even though ID was not required by law unless the person was a first time voter. No other voters were forces to undergo this process.

And it wasn't limited to Ohio. For example ...

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.

Intimidation:

Intimidation of voters can, and does, take many forms. And one of those is the employment of an a large law enforcement presence near polling places in minority precincts:

[In 2003], controversy ... 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.

Florida, under Governor Jeb Bush, is famous (infamous?) for its the placement of state troopers outside African-American polling places in the 2000 election to intimidate black voters. And in Virginia, the ACLU , prior to the 2004 election, formally requested that Chesterfield County cancel its plans to place armed, uniformed police officers outside all of its 63 polling places.

Again, this form of intimidation is not limited to the South. In the 2004 election in Cleveland, Ohio, I received numerous reports from other election protection volunteers of police cars parked outside precincts in predominately African-American neighborhoods. When questioned the cops told the volunteers they were because of a "security threat." No such police were located outside suburban, mostly white districts. This tied in nicely with another tactic which was reported by many of those same Cleveland EP volunteers, the use of GOP operatives roaming black neighborhoods and broadcasting from a speaker that police were waiting outside local polling places with arrest warrants for anyone who owed outstanding child support or parking tickets.

There are numerous reports of similar coercive tactics by Republican operatives on Election Days past. Here's just one example from Philadelphia:

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.

Another example of this particular Republican dirty trick comes from South Carolina:

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.

Conclusion

There are many, many more examples of how the Republican Party, whether out of self-interest or bigotry, or (more likely) a combination of the two, has made it a priority to limit the votes of minorities, but neither you nor I have the time to run through a more comprehensive list. Consider this diary a representative sample of Republican abuses, but only a sample, and a small one at that.

To be fair, Republicans didn't use to be the only party that acted to keep people of color away from the polls. Prior to the Civil Rights Voting Act in 1965, Southern Democrats were just as, or more, avid at preventing African Americans and other non-whites from exercising their right to vote. But it is clear that today, 40 years later, the GOP is firmly established as the party of white racism, prejudice and bigotry, and not just in the South.

Many people, no doubt, still believe that the days of Jim Crow have passed into the dustbin of history. But, as I have tried to show above, with respect to voting rights, that just ain't the case. The racists and opportunists in the Republican Party who manage the party's election campaigns have gotten more sophisticated, but their goal is the same as it ever was. Keep as many people of color from voting as humanly possible. Use every trick, legal or illegal, to achieve that result. And sadly, as the last several elections have shown, their efforts have made a substantive difference in our politics. By keeping minority voters away form the polls, Republicans have managed to obtain political victories to which they are not entitled. And those political victories have translated into policies that place greater burdens on non-white communities.

This is one of the main legacies of the Conservative Movement within the Republican Party. A cheapening of our democracy, and the failure to live up to the high standard of fairness and equality mandated by our Constitution. For, to paraphrase Donne, any person's loss of voting rights diminishes me. And you. And the country we all love.

Right to Vote Voting Rights Voter Suppression Republican Dirty Tricks Voting Rights Act of 1965 US Elections 2006 Election Election Integrity Voting Irregularities 2000 Election 2004 Election Electoral Fraud