PK cites Greg Palast!
October 15, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Block the Vote
By
PAUL KRUGMAN
Earlier this week former employees of Sproul &
Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired
by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV
station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic
registrations.
The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear
credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar
actions by Sproul in Oregon.
Republicans claim, of course, that they did
nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been
any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration
organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise
Democrats, by any means possible.
Some of these, like the actions
reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican
Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic
get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.
But many
efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a
Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate
thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.
That attempt failed.
But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when
everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it
got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly
Democratic voters.
And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress
Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.
Florida's
secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed
incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their
citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on
the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent
that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject
applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems
with their applications until it was too late.
Whose applications get
rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County
found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It
also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations.
The
case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials, as in 2000, to try to
wrongly disenfranchise thousands of blacks - has been widely reported. Less
widely reported has been overwhelming evidence that the errors were
deliberate.
In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who
originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those
wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State
officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the
rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have
been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through
quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar
names.
And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting
difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local
election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early
ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties
with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and
other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black
majorities.
Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes of
Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully counted if they are cast. Mr.
Palast notes that in the 2000 election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were
rejected because they were either blank or contained overvotes. Demographers
from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate that 54 percent of the spoiled
ballots were cast by blacks. And there's strong evidence that this spoilage
didn't reflect voters' incompetence: it was caused mainly by defective voting
machines and may also reflect deliberate vote-tampering.
The important
point to realize is that these abuses aren't aberrations. They're the inevitable
result of a Republican Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote
are rewarded, not punished. It's a culture that will persist until voters -
whose will still does count, if expressed strongly enough - hold that party
accountable.
