Denying the vote, twisting the facts

By
Max J. Castro                                                                Read Spanish Version
majcastro@gmail.com

Disenfranchising
the disadvantaged has a long and sorry history in the United States.
Preventing blacks from voting was a pillar of the Jim Crow system of
racial oppression that held sway in the U.S. South from
Reconstruction to the Civil rights movement.

But
disenfranchisement did not disappear with the Voting Rights Act,
although the law greatly reduced the practice and forced its
practitioners to find more subtle schemes to deny blacks and others
the right to vote. Since the 1970s, the Republican Party has taken on
a good deal of the mind set and many of the worst traditions of the
old South, practicing a lite version of Jim Crow while denying it all
the way to the ballot box.

Intimidating
minority voters, along with denying the vote to felons even after
they have served their sentences, are two ways of ensuring that
voters hostile to the GOP never get to express their feelings on
Election Day.

Intimidating
voters takes many forms but has one clear objective. Making wildly
exaggerated charges about voter fraud, going fiercely after voter
registration organizations victimized by dishonest employees who
report bogus registrations in order to earn commissions, and
prosecuting anyone not eligible to vote who does so even through an
honest mistake, are part and parcel of a Republican strategy to
suppress the vote from sectors of the population hurt by Republican
policies and offended by Republican rhetoric.

The
scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys for political reasons has
shown what happens in this administration to prosecutors, including
rising Republican stars like David Iglesias, who fail to pursue even
voter fraud cases lacking merit. They get fired.

The
fate of a report on voting problems in the United States, mandated by
a commission set up by Congress after the fiasco of the 2000
election, shows this pattern even more clearly.

As
she wrote in the Washington
Post last week, Tova
Andrea Wang, an expert on elections, was approached two years ago by
the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to carry out “a project
that would take a preliminary look at voter fraud and intimidation
and make recommendations for further research on the issues.”

But
Wang, who describes herself as leaning Democratic, and her Republican
co-author, came up with conclusions that were inconvenient for the
GOP project of using specious and overstated accusations of voter
fraud to scare voters and voter registration groups:

We said that our
preliminary research found widespread agreement among administrators,
academics and election experts from all points on the political
spectrum that allegations of fraud through voter impersonation at
polling places were greatly exaggerated. We noted that this position
was supported by existing research and an analysis of several years
of news articles.

This
was not what Republican partisans wanted to hear. The result was that
the authors were excluded from the process of revising and editing
their own report, which was delayed by six months. Finally, Wang
writes, “the EAC publicly released a report — citing it as based
on work by me and my co-author — that completely stood our own work
on its head.”

Why
was the report turned topsy-turvy? After looking into the two issues
that Congress had mandated the EAC to investigate, fraud and
intimidation, the draft report written by Wang and her co-author
concluded that voter fraud was not widespread but voter intimidation
was. That is exactly the opposite result that Republicans wanted. So
the EAC and its staff rewrote the report to focus exclusively on the
rare crime of electoral fraud and ignore the more common abuse of
intimidation.

Wang
writes:

This new report was
titled simply "Election Crimes" and excluded a wide range
of serious offenses that harm the system and suppress voting but are
not currently crimes under the U.S. criminal code. The commission
chose instead to state that the issue was a matter of considerable
debate. And while we found that problems of voter intimidation were
still prevalent in a variety of forms, the commission excluded much
of the discussion of voter intimidation.

We also raised
questions about the way the Justice Department was handling
complaints of fraud and intimidation. The commission excised all
references to the department that might be construed as critical —
or that Justice officials later took issue with. And all of the
suggestions we received from political scientists and other scholars
regarding methodologies for a more scientifically rigorous look at
these problems were omitted.

The
distortion of the report, which Wang considers “inexplicable,” is
easy to explain. Bending and twisting everything, from the
Constitution to the Geneva Conventions to science to the intelligence
on Iraq, has been a hallmark of the Bush administration. In this
specific case, intimidation is a practice that the Republican Party
engages in and which benefits it. Voter fraud is the smoke screen it
uses to justify that. Why allow minor considerations like truth and
fairness to undermine such keys to Republican electoral success as
the myth of voter fraud and the reality of voter intimidation?