This morning, Democracy Now! had a segment, "How Safe Is Your Ballot? Tracking Voter Suppression, Intimidation on Election Day", with Wendy Weiser, of the Brennan Center for Justice. They talked at first about some of the various different "voter fraud" campaigns the Republicans are mounting, and in particular about Harris County, Texas, and the voter intimidation there. But then the discussion turned to the broader issue of how many people were not being registered in the first place:
AMY GOODMAN: The Brennan Center has also found registration patterns vary from state to state. But more than 26 percent fewer new voters registered in Florida this year than in 2006, along with 21 percent fewer in Maryland, almost 17 percent fewer in Tennessee. What does this mean?
WENDY WEISER: Yeah, we've been seeing a troubling pattern this year of dropping registration rates. They are much lower than they've been in many states from prior midterm elections. And one of the reasons for this--and this has raised some concern--is that there are far fewer efforts to register voters. We don't see large-scale voter registration drives out there the way there have been in past election cycles.
AMY GOODMAN: Like the disbanding of ACORN.
WENDY WEISER: Like the disbanding of ACORN, but this is--it's not only ACORN that's been affected by this attack on voter registration groups. Many groups that used to register voters aren't out there registering voters now.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
WENDY WEISER:I think there was some kind of climate of fear created by those attacks on registration groups that have made it much more difficult for people to do that. This was a civic good that people were doing out of civic virtue, and they were worried about being attacked for engaging in these kinds of activities. In some cases, it's been laws that were passed that make it very difficult.
AMY GOODMAN:So this, the right's attack on ACORN and the congressional attack on ACORN, which was unprecedented, the disbanding of ACORN, not only affected this largest voter registration organization in the country, but had ripple effects everywhere.
WENDY WEISER: That is what we think has happened, yes.
This is the war we are fighting. Make no mistake. It is a war. It is a war for the right to vote. Whatever happens today, that war will continue. And we need to step it up.
Last night Kieth Olbermann did what he does best--a remarkably tight, focused debunking of the voter fraud myth and its use to intimidate and suppress minority voters--which I've written about repeatedly over the years. It's less than four minutes, and hits all the high points:
The fact that the Democratic Party has utterly failed to push back against this, and make the GOP pay a heavy price for lies, deceit and hostility to democracy is perhaps one of the strongest indictments of them as a party just now. But it's their voter base--as opposed to the party hacks--whose welfare I'm most concerned with. And with that in mind, it's worthwhile to expand our horizons a bit, to build on what Olbermann put out there last night, and call attention to yet another enormous anti-democratic outrage: The routine disenfranchisement of millions of voters due to simple bureacratic "denial of service" as it were. Information on this comes from the Harvard/MIT study, "2008 Survey of the Performance of American Elections" [Executive Summary], which found a staggering number of people kept from voting for administrative reasons:
Lost votes due to administrative problems
Results from the survey can be used to estimate roughly how many votes were "lost" in 2008 due to administrative problems, such as registration problems and long lines. Approximately 3 million registered voters appear to have been excluded from voting because of registration problems, 2 million could not find where to vote, 2 million did not have proper identification, and between 2 and 3 million encountered lines that were too long. Perhaps 3 million potential absentee votes were lost because requested ballots never arrived. While these are ballpark figures, and there may be some double counting due to people reporting multiple problems, they suggest that a significant fraction of non-voters might be brought into the electorate through administrative improvements to elections.
Tuesday was a good day for voting rights when a New Jersey federal judge ruled to extend restrictions against partisan voter suppression efforts that primarily target minority voters, effectively rejecting the Republican National Committee's claim that such protections are no longer needed.
After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld one of the country's strictest voter ID laws in April, several states rushed to pass similar bills before the year's end. By December, more than 25 states introduced legislation to require voter ID at the polls. Though none of these bills were successful this year, lawmakers in several states are hoping to revive such restrictive requirements in 2009.
Since July of this year, at least seven states have pre-filed or carried over voter ID legislation for the 2009-2010 sessions, including Nevada, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.
(I'll be writing some more about this on the weekend. But at this point, the voter suppression front needs daily attention. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
It happened in 2004 and 2006, and it may be happening in 2008
In the 2008 election Americans may once again be seeing law enforcement turned into a tool of voter suppression.
It is illegal for law enforcement agents to use their authority to attempt to intimidate or suppress the vote. Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 states that no person “whether acting under color of law or otherwise,” shall intimidate, threaten, or coerce any individual forvoting or attempting to vote, or for attempting to assist others to vote. Section 12 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993provides for criminal penalties against any person who intimidates or attempts to intimidate any person for registering to vote, voting, or attempting to register or vote.
In the past few weeks, however, partisan forces have manufactured hysteria around the myth of “voter fraud” that they have used to help goad law-enforcement into intimidation and politically motivated investigations into eligible voters. As the election approaches Project Vote and other voting rights organizations are seeing law enforcement officials inserting themselves into election administration, and partisan pressure to coerce law enforcement agents into overreaching investigations into the eligibility of legal voters.
The Republican party has been in the throes of a dramatic transformation these last forty-four years. The final stage of its metamorphosis remains unclear.
When Goldwater received the Republican nomination in 1964, there was still a Northeastern-Midwestern liberal wing. Governor William Milliken of Michigan and Senator Jacob Javits of New York were advocates of public education, civil rights, and full employment. The Southern racist right was a powerful force in the Democratic, not Republican, party.
LBJ's aggressive action on civil rights and Nixon's so-called Southern strategy helped moved Dixiecrats toward the Republicans. But we weren't fully aware then of the enormity of the Republican transformation that had begun.
Nixon's dirty tricks seemed like the crimes of a paranoiac, not signs of a coordinated strategy. Reagan's attractive persona blinded many of us to the authoritarian core of his politics. !988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis said his campaign was about competency. He was practicing politics as usual, paying no heed to the evidence of the rise of a Republican party rooted in Southern racism and reaction, committed to the extension of one party Mississippi politics to the nation as a whole.
Few of us paid too much attention when Senator Robert Dole dismissed the results of the 1992 election and denied the legitimacy of Clinton's presidency.
Perhaps we were snoozing when William Kristol led Republicans to obstruct health care reform in 1994. A disillusioned electorate brought us a wave of Democratic defeats.
Gingrich's "Contract with America" had concealed within it clues of the Republican, neoconfederate, authoritarian agenda. Suddenly, Republicans began to call Clinton's party, our party, the "Demokrat" party. The word "liberal" always followed "failed."
Management consultant Maurice Schechter helped Gingrich develop the new vocabulary of partisan abuse.
The Washington pundits were dismayed by President Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. They seemed not to notice that Republicans were demanding impeachment over the disputed meaning of the word "sex."
We should have been concerned when Candidate George W. Bush signalled that he would not accept defeat in the electoral college were he to win the popular vote in 2000. This foreshadowed the debacle to come and reflected the covert operations then underway to suppress the vote.
Were you stunned by the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore? The neoconfederate "Federalist" network in the courts announced through Justice Scalia that the American people have no constitutional right to vote for President. We have learned since then that the Republican party has sought to turn federal attorneys into the instruments of their voter suppression strategy.
By 2000 it was evident that the Fox network was part of a three-pronged Republican media strategy. The Republicans controlled Fox and could influence the other networks through direct or indirect (corporate) means.
From time to time the Gallup Poll sheds its "objectivity" and joins the Republican campaign.
More and more we see that the Republican party has become an authoritarian phalanx seeking to use every available lever of power to pursue their hard right agenda.
Unfortunately, we see only a part of this process, not the whole. Investigative journalists have failed to uncover the machinations of the Council for National Policy, which is the steering committee for the religious right. If there is a"Mein Kampf" in this movement, it is the CNP that produced it.
The Democratic party can win big this year, but we must be ready for the next step in the Republican party's campaign for authoritarianism. What will it be?
While many see voting as an implicit right in a representative democracy, decisions in America about who can vote and how are actually controlled by the states and vary greatly from state-to-state, even from county-to-county.
Misinformation and misinterpretation of each state's particular laws-not only by voters, but also by state officials-has the potential to influence the outcome of the election, a problem seen recently as two of the country's most disenfranchised groups - youth and former felons -have encountered procedural roadblocks to electoral participation.
America's Democratic Promise The history of democracy in the United States is one marked by the steady, though intensely contested, expansion of the right to vote. Where once only male landowners were permitted the right to choose their representatives, the United States now proudly extends that right to all adult citizens. The most recent expansion of the franchise were the result of years of struggle through the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. The seminal Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 26th Amendment ratified in 1971 created enforcement mechanisms to protect minority voting rights and extended the right to vote to 18 year olds.
Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters
Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
In recent weeks, two Congressional hearings examined hot button voter suppression issues, voter fraud and voter caging, that have the potential to "taint the November election." These major voting rights issues have moved into broad public consciousness thanks to the 2007 exposure of the U.S. Attorney scandal in which nine federal prosecutors were fired for alleged lack of zeal in pursuing partisan accusations of widespread voter fraud. Now, two states with upcoming primary elections, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, have made local headlines for voter registration discrepancies, creating openings for confusing and discouraging voters and possibly even allowing those with voter suppression agendas to make an impact.
Mostly, Tuesday's state and local elections fell within the bounds of what observers might call "free and fair". However, there were enough rough spots to call attention to the fact that 2008, like 2004 and 2000, is likely to see a range of rules, laws, and tactics that will serve as barriers to participation.
STATE BLOGS
