In the beginning was the Vote, and the Vote was with the People and the Vote was the People. Shortly after that, came the political strategists. From then on, the vote was only for the people who lived in the right precincts.
I just had to tell ya'll about this because its something that makes me crazy.
Last year around Christmas time - the Kansas GOP sent out what I'm sure they thought was a normal everyday fundraising email. What they mistakenly did was talk about all the great work they are doing and talked about their Vote Caging program.
Confirmation hearings for President Bush's nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, brought promises by the nominee to "block political meddling at the Justice Department," and the expectation by senators that the Justice Department will regain public confidence, which was shaken by he U.S. attorney scandal. Questions from senators on both sides of the aisle stressed the need for the Justice Department to be independent of partisan political interests of the President. Of particular interest to voting rights advocates is finding Mukasey's approach to the enforcement of voting rights laws in the wake of revelations about the DOJ's use of US Attorneys and the Voting Section to pursue partisan voter suppression tactics.
Two controversial news items this week potentially impact the course of election law before the 2008 election. First, the Supreme Court has agreed to decide upon the constitutionality of voter ID laws, one of the country's most hotly debated issues with a deeply partisan divide. Second, the names of Federal Election Commission nominees have been sent to the full Senate this week, including a key player in promoting the so-called "voter fraud epidemic," Hans von Spakovsky - and civil rights groups are not happy.
"As the high-stakes ground war escalates heading into next year's elections, Republicans have led the charge for an array of revisions to state voting rights laws, especially in key battleground states. Republican political appointees in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division have endorsed some of these measures," Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers wrote today.
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