Mark Kirk Sends Poll Monitors To 'Vulnerable,' Largely African-American Neighborhoods
Ryan J. Reilly | October 12, 2010, 2:45PM
In a private phone conversation that was secretly recorded, Mark Kirk, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois, told state Republican leaders last week about his plan to send "voter integrity" squads to four predominately African American neighborhoods of Chicago "where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat."
Kirk's campaign confirmed the candidate was secretly taped last week as he was talking about his anti-voter fraud effort.
"Voter fraud" is, of course, an entirely mythical phenomena used by conservatives and the GOP as an excuse to intimidate minority and low-income voters. (This is well documented, for example in the September 2007 report from Project Vote, "Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters" by Teresa James, J.D., which I quote from on the flip.) The highly politicized Bush DOJ was unable to come up with a single case of organized voter fraud to prosecute in 8 years. According to Barnard polisci professor Lorraine C. Minnite, in "The Politics of Voter Fraud", there were just 24 DOJ convictions for voter fraud from 2002 to 2005, but none were the result of organized efforts, such as Kirk baselessly and maliciously alleges to exist in Chicago. But the Bush DOJ did manage to unlawfully fire at least three US Attorneys for failure to prosecute such non-existent cases.
Here's the tape of Kirk (transcript below):
"I have now funded at the largest voter integrity project in 15 years in the state of illinois. These are lawyers and other people that will be deployed in key, vulnerable precincts, for example, South and West sides of Chicago, Rockford, Metro East, where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat,"
In the local news coverage, there's a total failure to provide any historical or political context. Instead of focusing on the stark reality of decades of efforts to suppress minority votes, the focus is on Kirk's use of the term "jigger", a reflection of how trivialized the discourse on racism in politics has become:
It's impossible to tell from this clip how much the systemic misunderstanding of the issues involved is actually shared by the black community, but it's quite clear that there is simply no contest in terms of the hegemonic struggle in the media. There is not even a hint of the long history of racist voter suppression that this latest incident is part of.
In sharp contrast, Project Vote's report referred to above, "Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters" explains:
Caging in this context involves sending out non-forwardable or registered mail to targeted groups of voters and compiling "caging lists" of voters whose mail was returned for any reason. Although the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA ) prohibits election officials from canceling the registration of voters merely because a single piece of mail has been returned, Republican operatives have used the lists for many years in caging operations to challenge the voting rights of thousands of minority and urban voters nationwide on the basis of returned mail alone.
With their caging lists in hand, Republican officials and operatives take the second step in their caging operations, using the lists as the basis for media campaigns to create the impression that the returned mail is evidence of mass voter fraud. Having raised the chimera of a voter fraud, Republican parties and operatives move into the third phase of caging operations. Operatives use the caging lists to challenge the voting eligibility of thousands of people of color and Democrats. The caging process, couched in racially neutral terms, is described in one party campaign document under the heading, "Pre-Election Day Operations - New Registration Mailing."' The use of such lists by the Republican Party to challenge voters in heavily Republican precincts has not been reported.
The Democratic Party, election experts, and civic organizations, charge that the intended effect of voter caging operations is to suppress minority votes. Several court decisions and occasional public comments by Republican officials lend support to this conclusion. In response, national and state Republican party entities defend caging operations as necessary ballot security measures. At least one federal court disagrees. The RNC is bound by a U.S. District Court consent decree ordering it to obtain court approval before it engages in any type of ballot security program*. Yet, Republican-led caging operations continue unabated.
Caging operations are relevant to the US Attorney dismissals because at least three of the fired US Attorneys refused to pursue voter fraud charges that could be used by Republicans to paint Democrats as perpetrators of fraud despite being pressured to do so by Republican Congress members and officials immediately before the 2006 elections. The US Attorneys are John McKay, Western District of Washington, David Iglesias, California, and Todd Graves of the Western District of Missouri. Mr. Graves' interim successor, Bradley Schlozman, brought voter fraud charges against four former employees of a community organization in the week before the 2006 election. All three fired US Attorneys had exemplary records of service in office. The common thread in their performance was that they did not respond to external pressure to prosecute weak voter fraud cases.
* Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, Civil Action No. 86-3972, (D.N.J. 1986),
It's embarrassing that Democrats have allowed this nonsense to continue all this time. It's been out there and obvious for decades. And to make matters even worse, they have allowed the Republicans to not only engage in this methodical intimidation, they've enabled them to simultaneously gin up pseudo-scandals about "voter fraud" based upon sloppy voter rolls that has never been shown to result in any kind of systematic election fraud. It's political malpractice at this point
