Block the vote
Will
the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots
determine the next president?
By
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. & Greg Palast Read Spanish Version
This
is a shortened version of an article which appeared in Rolling Stone
Magazine. For the complete article in English the email address can
be found below.
These
days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more
than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In
national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More
than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives
below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday
caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local
polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that
his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a
statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was
especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.
Maez
was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday,
one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found
their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were
even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of
the county’s voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in
limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional"
ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials
without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all
provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.
This
November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands
of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican
operatives — the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics —
are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise
Democrats. If this year’s race is as close as the past two elections,
the GOP’s nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the
presidency in November. […]
Suppressing
the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral strategy.
Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich —
a principal architect of today’s Republican Party — scolded
evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians
have what I call the ‘goo goo’ syndrome — good government,"
said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They
want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a
matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up
as the voting populace goes down."
Today,
Weyrich’s vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according
to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new
voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition,
at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election —
and the commission’s own data suggests that the real number could be
twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots,
partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from
"unreadability" to changes in a voter’s signature. And this
year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA),
the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.
Passed
in 2002, HAVA was hailed by leaders in both parties as a reform
designed to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida that threw
the presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court. The measure set
standards for voting systems, created an independent commission to
oversee elections, and ordered states to provide provisional ballots
to voters whose eligibility is challenged at the polls.
But
from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican
superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors
for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former
Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In
practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have
actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their
vote counted. […]
[…]
The Bush administration’s main point person on "ballot
protection" has been Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice
Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA to
erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election
Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may
be stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have
repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a
recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at
Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud
from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. "The
claim of widespread voter fraud," Minnite says, "is itself
a fraud."
Allegations
of voter fraud are only the latest rationale the GOP has used to
disenfranchise voters — especially blacks, Hispanics and others who
traditionally support Democrats. […] The recently enacted barriers
thrown up to deter voters include:
1.
Obstructing voter-registration drives
Since
2004, the Bush administration and more than a dozen states have taken
steps to impede voter registration. Among the worst offenders is
Florida, where the Republican-dominated legislature created hefty
fines — up to $5,000 per violation — for groups that fail to meet
deadlines for turning in voter-application forms. […] A court order
eventually forced the legislature to reduce the maximum penalty to
$1,000. But even so, said former League president Dianne
Wheatley-Giliotti, the reduced fines "create an unfair tax on
democracy." […]
2.
Demanding "perfect matches"
Under
the Help America Vote Act, some states now reject first-time
registrants whose data does not correspond to information in other
government databases. Spurred by HAVA, almost every state must now
attempt to make some kind of match — and four states, including the
swing states of Iowa and Florida, require what is known as a "perfect
match." Under this rigid framework, new registrants can lose the
right to vote if the information on their voter-registration forms —
Social Security number, street address and precisely spelled name,
right down to a hyphen — fails to exactly match data listed in other
government records.
There
are many legitimate reasons, of course, why a voter’s information
might vary. Indeed, a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice
found that as many as 20 percent of discrepancies between voter
records and driver’s licenses in New York City are simply typing
mistakes made by government clerks when they transcribe data. But
under the new rules, those mistakes are costing citizens the right to
vote. In California, a Republican secretary of state blocked 43
percent of all new voters in Los Angeles from registering in early
2006 — many because of the state’s failure to produce a tight match.
In Florida, GOP officials created "match" rules that
rejected more than 15,000 new registrants in 2006 and 2007 — nearly
three-fourths of them Hispanic and black voters. Given the big
registration drives this year, the number could be five times higher
by November.
3.
Purging legitimate voters from the rolls
The
Help America Vote Act doesn’t just disenfranchise new registrants; it
also targets veteran voters. In the past, bipartisan county election
boards maintained voter records. But HAVA requires that records be
centralized, computerized and maintained by secretaries of state —
partisan officials — who are empowered to purge the rolls of any
voter they deem ineligible.
Ironically,
the new rules imitate the centralized system in Florida — the same
corrupt operation that inspired passage of HAVA in the first place.
Prior to the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris and her predecessor, both Republicans, tried to purge 57,000
voters, most of them African-Americans, because their names resembled
those of persons convicted of a crime. The state eventually
acknowledged that the purges were improper — two years after the
election.
Rather
than end Florida-style purges, however, HAVA has nationalized them.
[…]
All
told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their
rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. […]
4.
Requiring unnecessary voter ID’s
Even
if voters run the gauntlet of the new registration laws, they can
still be blocked at the polling station. In an incident last May, an
election official in Indiana denied ballots to 10 nuns seeking to
vote in the Democratic primary because their driver’s licenses or
passports had expired. Even though Indiana has never recorded a
single case of voter-ID fraud, it is one of two dozen states that
have enacted stringent new voter-ID statutes.
On
its face, the requirement to show a government-issued ID doesn’t seem
unreasonable. "I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries,
I’ve got to show a little bit of ID," Karl Rove told the
Republican National Lawyers Association in 2006. But many Americans
lack easy access to official identification. According to a recent
study for the Election
Law Journal,
young people, senior citizens and minorities — groups that
traditionally vote Democratic — often have no driver’s licenses or
state ID cards. According to the study, one in 10 likely white voters
do not possess the necessary identification. For African-Americans,
the number lacking such ID is twice as high.
5.
Rejecting "spoiled" ballots
Even
intrepid voters who manage to cast a ballot may still find their vote
discounted. In 2004, election officials discarded at least 1 million
votes nationwide after classifying them as "spoiled"
because blank spaces, stray marks or tears made them indecipherable
to voting machines. The losses hit hardest among minorities in
low-income precincts, who are often forced to vote on antiquated
machines. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in its investigation
of the 2000 returns from Florida, found that African-Americans were
nearly 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots
rejected, a ratio that holds nationwide.
Proponents
of HAVA claimed the law would correct the spoilage problem by
promoting computerized balloting. Yet touch-screen systems have
proved highly unreliable — especially in minority and low-income
precincts. A statistical analysis of New Mexico ballots by a
voting-rights group called VotersUnite found that Hispanics who voted
by computer in 2004 were nearly five times more likely to have their
votes unrecorded than those who used paper ballots. […]
6.
Challenging "provisional" ballots
In
2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were
refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on
a technicality. Instead, these voters were handed "provisional"
ballots, a fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA to enable officials to
review disputed votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes
means tossing ballots in the trash. In 2004, a third of all
provisional ballots — as many as 1 million votes — were simply
thrown away at the discretion of election officials.
Many
voters are given provisional ballots under an insidious tactic known
as "vote caging," which uses targeted mailings to
disenfranchise black voters whose addresses have changed. In 2004,
despite a federal consent order forbidding Republicans from engaging
in the practice, the GOP sent out tens of thousands of letters to
"confirm" the addresses of voters in minority precincts. If
a letter was returned for any reason — because the voter was away at
school or serving in the military — the GOP challenged the voter for
giving a false address. […]
In
the century following the Civil War, millions of black Americans in
the Deep South lost their constitutional right to vote, thanks to
literacy tests, poll taxes and other Jim Crow restrictions imposed by
white officials. Add up all the modern-day barriers to voting erected
since the 2004 election — the new registrations thrown out, the
existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional
ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of
voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly
being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.
"Jim
Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not," says Donna
Brazile. "We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now
have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their
franchise." Come November, the most crucial demographic may
prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If
Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat
John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that
exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.
Contributing
editor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the nation’s leading
voting-rights advocates. His article "Was the 2004 Election
Stolen?" [RS 1002] sparked widespread scrutiny of vote
tampering. Greg Palast, who broke the story on Florida’s illegal
voter purges in the 2000 election, is the author of "The Best
Democracy Money Can Buy." For more information, visit No
Voter Left Behind
and Steal
Back Your Vote.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote
