----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 12:39
PM
Subject: strange bedfellows....
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.
