Vote suppression

SUMMARY

Over the last years, America has repudiated just about everything the Republicans have been trying to peddle, the tax-and-borrow financing, the culture wars at home, the holy wars abroad, and the Republicans really have no new ideas to peddle. Accordingly they know they’re going to have trouble winning elections -- as long as the elections are fair. So they are working in statehouses all across the country to tilt the game in their favor, by making it harder for Democrats to take part in the electoral process. Central to this is the Voter ID effort: they are pushing the entirely discredited myth that voter fraud is plaguing our elections, and using that delusion as a pretext to pass laws which make it harder for heavily-Democratic groups to vote: not just minorities as it was during the Jim Crow era, but also students, the elderly, working women, and other groups. They supplement this by using a wide range of tactics aimed at disenfranchising, deceiving and frightening voters, and making the process of voting as unpleasant as possible in minority areas. They are working to restrict absentee voting, early voting, late-night voting, voter registration drives, name and address changes, anything they can think of. Meanwhile they are also working to see to it that their own allies enjoy unfettered participation in the process by means of tools like the Citizens United decision, while working to block pro-Democratic groups such as lawyers and unions from taking part. And of course the old stand-by dirty tricks, jamming phone lines, fake announcements and so forth.

The article is written in five sections, describing the roots of GOP efforts at vote suppression, their attacks on the documentation of legal voters, their latest effort to expand the vote-suppression crusade, the party pols pulling the strings behind the scenes, and the GOP's ever-growing pattern of attacking the democratic process:

Vote suppression
Documentation
The latest push toward vote suppression
Behind the scenes
The ever-widening pattern

Vote suppression

This is arguably the most important article on this site. It is about the Republican war on democracy itself.

Two pivotal events happened to the Republicans in the 1960s, both involving Nixon.

First, the Republicans sustained a terrible shock in 1960, losing by a hair to that upstart Irishman. They have insisted ever since that Kennedy stole the election, but the argument is so bogus that even Pat Buchanan laughed it down, pointing out all the illegal things the Republicans did in the same election. But they vowed never again to lose a close race without a fight. They started Operation Eagle Eye to nudge election results in the right direction, beginning with the 1962 race in which young lads like William Rehnquist cut their teeth as political gangsters, harassing black voters in Arizona under the guise of protecting “ballot security”.

The Republicans have been screeching “Democratic voter fraud” for the last fifty years. Study after study shows that the voter-fraud meme is utterly baseless, but they keep yelling it, complaining to the media and to their own supporters about unsubstantiated “tips” and “reports” of “irregularities”, magnifying any error by any Democrat anywhere is a titanic vote scandal. All to crank up their own turnout, to get people like the Wall Street Journal to endlessly repeat the accusations, and to justify their own thug-like political tactics, on the reasoning that real Republican voter disenfranchisement is less important than imaginary Democratic voter fraud.

The second issue involves race. As civil rights became a central issue in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Republicans, led by Nixon, realized they couldn’t woo both blacks and white racists at the same time, so they chose to dump the legacy of Lincoln and go with the rednecks. And they decided also to get into the vote-suppression business in a big way.

They have exploited the fear of the shrinking white majority regarding minorities, as well as anyone trying to help minorities to vote: Obama, the Rainbow Coalition, ACORN, the NAACP, and the ACLU; the aim is to sell the notion that anybody black or brown is illegitimate dishonest, criminal, and anyone who helps them to vote must be a crook. The Republicans also worked to combine the concept of the big Democratic party machines with the black vote into one scary meme: “urban”. In one case they openly admitted targeting blacks and got barbecued by a judge. Later on they decided to write off the Latino vote for reasons no one can understand, and decided to criminalize that entire community with the immigration jihad as well.

So the Republicans made vote suppression a fixed part of their political strategy: seeing to it that minorities don’t vote.

How do they do all this? Long before the polls open, the GOP launches a very public, organized, completely unauthorized effort to “deter” fraud in black and Hispanic areas. It goes something like this:

“When you get to the polls, election officials are watching. We will ask you questions, and if you get them wrong you could go to jail. Voter fraud is illegal. It’s a crime. The FBI could become involved. We are putting out a reward for catching perpetrators of fraud!”

All to scare minorities away. And when that doesn’t work, they simply lie:

“There are new residency requirements! Voting machines can see who you are and notify government agencies! If you have a traffic ticket, a parking ticket, or a child support issue, if you have been questioned by the police for anything, or even been a witness, or anybody in your family, you will be arrested if you vote!”

That last one was sent by the “Harris County Negro Protective Association” which of course does not exist. And once they figure out their message, they bring out all the king’s men to get it out: robo-calls, radio ads, newspaper inserts, posters, mailers, postcards, even signs posted at polling places. Blacks and Hispanics, who have years of experience being harassed by the police even though they’ve done nothing wrong, get the message, just as they did when they tried to vote in the 1950s: show up to vote and nasty things will happen. This of course is in parallel to all their other dirty tricks: robo-call smears, push-poll smears etc, telephone harassment.

Here's a recent example, involving Julius Henson, political operative for Republican former Governor Robert Ehrlich of Maryland. Henson has such an appalling record of political dirty tricks that even other political operatives "don't want to even breathe the same air as him." Henson in his own words: "I put a man in who's dumb, who's a liar and lazy. He should be going to prison instead of [political office]. The best people lost. They're smart, and they worked hard, and they still lost to my guy. 'Cause I know what I'm doing. And I've got 14 candidates this cycle, and I'm gonna go 14 and 0 with them." One of his stunts included sending homeless people to a Martin O’Malley rally in Maryland where O’Malley was getting a key endorsement, and screaming in the endorser’s face; the backlash from the incident helped elect O’Malley. Henson admitted sending out robocalls lying to Democrats so they wouldn’t vote on election day during the recent Ehrlich-O’Malley race, and now he has finally been indicted. His lawyer actually claims the robocalls are protected free speech. Henson’s indicted coconspirator, Paul, Schurick, created The Schurick Doctrine which was aimed at suppressing the black vote by promoting “confusion, emotionalism, and frustration among African-American Democrats."


For fifty years the Republicans have been training white poll watchers and sending them into minority areas to intimidate minority voters with harassment and abuse, to frighten and humiliate voters. Their poll watchers challenge minorities with nosy, abusive questions. “Where’s your ID? You’re illegitimate! Fraud! Fraud!” Once they even justified their abuse with “some of them were voting more than once….most blacks look alike so it was hard to tell.” If a minority voter is foolish enough to ask for assistance, the Republican poll watcher is likely give them an abusive answer, or complain about the “improper assistance” they are getting from other poll watchers. Another trick is to take pictures and film of voters, to include recording their confidential conversations with real election officials.

The Republicans are quite open about trying to terrorize voters they don’t like, on the grounds that since they’re black they’re probably crooks anyway: “‘Browbeating’ is a common defense to cover irregularities.”

Next come the goon squads: big scary guys who stand in the doorway, Wallace-like, to intimidate voters. They are quite open about encouraging assault: They want to “have a human body who is tough and even mean, at the polls counting the ballots.” At one polling place, “We dispatched a 6’6,” 275 lb. football player to the polling place; he walked in, cracked the guy on the kisser, and flattened him to the floor, turned around and walked out, and no more problems occurred at that polling place! Use force if needed!”

If that isn’t good enough, bring in the fake cops. The Republicans have been caught many times sending their own people with uniforms, guns and radios to the polling places, giving the impression that they have the power to arrest people. Some wear badges that say things like “Ballot Security Program.” Some of them write down license numbers, ask questions about citizenship, sit next to the real election officials

Of course the real cops can intimidate people too: just the fear of immigration officials could keep perfectly legal Latinos from going to the polls in Arizona, so the Republicans have already won that battle. Courts have had to direct unofficial poll watchers to coordinate any complaints with the secretary of state’s office rather than starting to whoop up trouble right there at the polls or call the police.

The Republicans also push local cops to go door-to-door in black areas, armed, to ask about their absentee ballots – try to vote and you’ll get a cop on your doorstep! They have also hired private investigators and other unregulated freelancers to go out into minority areas, ostensibly hunting down fraudulent voters, offering rewards for the purpose. We will absolutely see the teabaggers taking the law into their own hands this fall.

A key aim is to ensure that their dirty work is done on election day itself: scream at election officials on election day to get their way on the big day itself, get the media reporting the results they want to see, and then it’s too late to correct errors or outright fraud.

The larger aim is to make voting a negative experience so that minorities don’t come back. Minority areas don’t have enough polling places close by, lines are long, equipment is antiquated, ballots run out, dragging out the process of identifying voters. The Republicans have been known to send homeless panhandlers to polls for harassment, or to put out the word that “anybody who moves within the county must verify their address at the clerk’s office!” So you must go to poll, learn the new rules, go to city hall, then back to vote. Or give up and go home, which is a Win for the GOP.

The aim here is entirely partisan. They are particularly focusing on states that were close in 2008, and methods that Obama voters used a lot last time: their express aim is to reverse the Democratic trend from four years ago. Even before this latest effort, they used the power of the Bush White House to drive U.S. attorneys to be more diligent in hunting alleged Democratic voter fraud: fight the GOP fight or get fired.

Documentation

The Republicans are particularly energetic at illegally attacking documentation. They aggressively and illegally purge voter rolls in minority areas, particularly in the South, as they did in Florida in 2000; often the claim is that the people being purged are convicts, which neatly feeds into white fears of blacks. They vigorously challenge voter documents, especially the increasing number of absentee ballots; in minority areas they illegally demand notarization of absentee forms, and they will challenge ballots for pencil marks that stray outside the box, for example. Many times they have used the subterfuge of sending registered mail to minority addresses; if they are not returned, the voter is illegally tossed off the voter rolls. They can also target renters who are disproportionately poor, old, black or Hispanic.

Their real pet peeve is voter identification in minority areas, a way to suppress turnout, pushing for more and more identity documents. A key aim is to criminalize being a minority, to push the “Brown = Criminal” meme: just as they screech about Obama’s birth certificate, they pop up in minority areas and bark “Show me photo ID! Show me a bank statement, a gas bill!” In at least one case a Republican poll watcher sneered at one voter “Where’s your government check?” They also resist anything that increases minority participation, such as motor-voter.

The latest push toward vote suppression

The Republicans are launching a 40-state effort to restrict voting rights, with the aim of making it harder for people who vote Democratic to vote at all, the biggest effort to restrict voting rights since Jim Crow. They have given us laws and bills that require state-issued voter ID, restrict absentee voting, lengthen residency requirements, cut poll hours, block voter registration efforts especially if they come from out of state like Mississippi in the 1960s, voter caging like they did during the Bush era, force the use provisional ballots, restrict early voting, ban same-day registration, complicate name and address changes. Gingrich has proposed bringing back Jim-Crow literacy tests, while Ron Paul said he didn’t support the Civil Rights Act from the 1960s.

This is despite the fact that their dire warnings about voter fraud have never materialized; a study of about 400 million votes in national elections since 2000 found exactly one improper vote which Voter ID would have stopped. The obvious exception occurred in Wisconsin where it was the Republicans who were caught using fraud in submitting recall petitions.

These attacks don’t just go after blacks like the Jim Crow boys did; they disproportionately hurt liberal voting blocs: the poor, the sick, the disabled, the young, students, the elderly, blacks, Latinos, working moms. They are desperate to fight these fights on all fronts, because they know they are losing demographic battles across the map, and have nowhere to go so they can find new voters before their rapidly aging base ages off the system.

One New Hampshire legislator admitted it was political: “Voting as a liberal, that’s what kids do.” Likewise Gingrich specified that it’s young voters who should be poll-tested, even though it’s the senior-heavy tea party crowd which surpasses all in ignorance of U.S. history and government. And the rightwing governors in Florida and Wisconsin, both probable battleground states, have signed election laws making it harder for the elderly, students and other Democratic constituencies to vote.

This effort disproportionately hurts women too: 32 million women may not have identity documents in their proper names. And the Republicans have already forced the League of Women Voters to give up registering voters in Florida.

To show how transparently they are aiming at the Democrats, and specifically Obama, look at Nebraska. Obama took advantage of Nebraska’s electoral system, which allows a presidential candidate to try to win electoral votes in specific districts, and he managed to pick off one Nebraska elector in 2008. GOP legislators then tried to change the rules so he couldn’t do that. Other states are trying to keep Obama off the ballot entirely with birth-certificate rules.

Another transparent effort to rig the game for the Republicans: Texas makes voting easy for GOP-friendly Texas seniors, and lets you vote with a gun permit or military ID, but not with a student ID – all designed to tilt the table toward Republicans.

And another: Wisconsin Republicans, facing recall elections for their unpopular Senators, are trying to game the system by entering fake "Democrats" into the races. The "Democrats" in some cases are actually GOP donors.

The great irony in all this is that Mitt Romney, the putative frontrunner for the GOP nomination, the potential beneficiary of all of this anti-democratic activity by the Republicans, himself has gotten in trouble more than once for fudging his state of residency during campaigns. It could be that the most visible fraudulent vote cast in the 2008 race could be Romney’s, while millions of perfectly legal voters are illegally prevented from voting against him.

This is why national Democrats need to focus on building up local Democratic parties, so the party can compete for state legislative seats and governorships. It is all the more important since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court won't uphold our Constitutional rights to equitable voting rights: they've already upheld one Voter ID law, despite the fact that the case only turned up one case of in-person voter fraud in 143 years.

Behind the scenes

The GOP sometimes tries to distance itself from these efforts by hiring operatives who are not officially on the payroll, the same deniability strategy that failed disastrously in Watergate. But they’re not really trying hard: GOP officials have admitted privately, many times, that they are suppressing the minority vote illegally. They even gave out trophies to the goons who stole the 2000 election. And the Republicans have been caught, sued and punished in court over and over. They’re answer, effectively, is “tough luck, you’re sore losers! Rules are for sissies!”

The GOP leadership is running all of this, controlling thousands of GOP lawyers via the Republican National Lawyers Association, who played a key role in the Florida fight, borrowing help from their corporate pals, using the local secretaries of state like Katherine Harris, exploiting their control of the U.S. Attorney organization during the Bush era to illegally use the Justice Department to suppress Democratic votes, and I’ll bet they use the tea party people this time too.

Just as the Democrats have insisted on pursuing their legislative agenda by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Republicans have been kicking them in the crotch over and over, we seem to be heading for another election cycle in which Democrats play by the rules and the Republicans don’t. Which is how you lose. Just as Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004 by allowing the Republicans to suppress the vote. So as they wheel the Obama campaign machine out of the garage again, they must be sure that the effort includes voter education and resistance to vote suppression. Keep working with the usual suspects to register voters and fight voter suppression: the Rainbow gang, the NAACP, the ACLU etc. Utilize another group the Republicans loathe, the trial lawyers. When their goons show up at the polls, take their pictures, and their cars too!

So, Republicans, it is useless to deny you’re doing it, because the party has admitted doing it, and they have been caught and punished in court. And it is also useless to holler “Democrats are doing it too!” because, time after time, you fail to back up your baseless claims.

The ever-widening pattern

Look at the pattern.
Republicans go after minorities in Kansas, to stop them from voting Democratic.
Republicans throw Arizona Mexicans in jail, to stop them from showing their faces on the street so they can vote Democratic, by means of their unconstitutional papers-please law.
Republican vote suppression in Ohio, stop voters from voting Democratic, steal the 2004 presidential election.
Illegal Republican voter suppression in black and Hispanic sections of Florida, stop voters from voting Democratic, steal the 2000 presidential election.
Republicans go all out to destroy any African-American voter registration effort, stop them from voting Democratic.
Republican hissy fits when one alleged “Black Panther” shows up at a polling place with a “stick”, screeching “Hey, he’s only a Democrat, only Republicans are allowed to commit voter suppression!!”….”ACORN!!” And incidentally, the GAO and the FEC proved that the accusations against ACORN were unfounded, but they were destroyed anyway, because they tried to get more blacks to vote.
Republicans declare war on union groups, because they organize Democratic voters.
Republicans declare war on lawyers and push for tort reform, because they organize Democratic voters; Texas has passed a bill which forces you to pay legal fees if you sue a corporation and lose, and sometimes even if you win; even most Texas judges said the law was unnecessary.
Republicans shamelessly pushing Voter ID laws, voter purging laws, ex-con disenfranchisement laws.
Republicans putting criminals like Katherine Harris in charge of voting laws.
Republicans jamming the phone lines of Democratic organizers to suppress voter turnout in New Hampshire.
Republicans illegally registering voters using pro-marijuana petitions.
Republicans suppressing voter representation in Democratic districts by sending fake census forms so the real forms don’t get filled out.
Republicans undertaking such a widespread vote suppression effort in the Virginia gubernatorial race that the FBI had to step in.
Republicans pushing vote suppression in the 2008 race, using caging, purging and delays a polling places to stop people from voting for Obama in Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Montana, Wisconsin.


This is a part of the larger GOP effort to distort the entire democratic process, to suit their ends.

It is beyond dispute that they are using not only vote suppression but also great masses of unmonitored cash under the Citizens United standard, to tilt the electoral process their way.
It is beyond dispute that they are trying to ensure that only their voices are heard: the House GOP leadership is using their control of the franking office to prevent Democratic members from using their campaign fliers to warn their constituents about the GOP attack on Medicare, and they are demanding that TV stations pull ads that criticize them.
It is beyond dispute that when they do lose races, they use legislative tools like filibusters and subpoenas to stop Democrats from doing what they were elected to do: govern. This also drives public-minded Democrats out of government service, which means that Republicans will always have more experienced government officials on their bench than the Democrats.
It is beyond dispute that Republicans are particularly targeting efforts to bring crooked corporations under control, using these methods: they are undertaking Herculean efforts to block the appointments of just about anybody with regulatory power.
It is beyond dispute that Republicans are blocking dozens and dozens of judicial appointments in hopes that all those chairs will be empty when Obama leaves office: that way, the GOP can load up the federal judiciary with more and more Republicans, and work to steal the entire judicial system for themselves, just as they did at the end of the Clinton administration. This is particularly important since the courts are the arena of last resort when, say, Republicans do things which are unconstitutional and illegal, like Scott Walker and John Kasich and Mitch Daniels and Rick Scott.
It is beyond dispute that they are working to block Obama from using recess appointments as well.
It is beyond dispute that when Republicans have control of both the White House and Congress, they use many departments within the executive branch to prosecute Democrats, expose Democratic intelligence officials, harass Democrats, and spread anti-Democratic propaganda, at taxpayer expense. They did all that under Bush.
Add to that their contempt for the truth, their devotion to lies and smear attacks, and the ever-present threat of violence which we saw during the health care debate: Michele Bachmann, now a serious presidential candidate, led an angry mob into the halls of Congress with the express purpose of intimidating members of Congress into changing their health-reform votes.

So the Republicans aren't just trying to steal elections, like they did in 2000: now they're trying to steal the entire democratic process itself.