http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/greg_palast/2006/06/voting_rights_
act_nailed_to_bu.html
Democracy in chains
US Republicans are planning to change the law to stop black, Hispanic
and Native American voters going to the polls in 2008.
Greg Palast
June 23, 2006 05:03 PM
Don't kid yourself: the Republican party's decision yesterday to
delay the renewal of the Voting Rights Act has not a darn thing to
do with objections of the Republican's white sheets caucus.
Complaints by a couple of good ol' boys to legislation have never
stopped the GOP leadership from rolling over dissenters.
This is a strategic stall that is meant to decriminalise the
Republican party's new game of challenging voters of colour by the
hundreds of thousands.
In the 2004 presidential race, the GOP ran a massive, multi-state,
multimillion-dollar operation to challenge the legitimacy of black,
Hispanic and Native American voters. The methods used breached the
Voting Rights Act, and while the Bush administration's civil rights
division grinned and looked the other way, civil rights lawyers began
circling, preparing to sue to stop the violations of the act before
the 2008 race.
So Republicans have promised to no longer break the law - not by
going legit but by eliminating the law.
The act was passed in 1965 after the Ku Klux Klan and other upright
citizens found they could use procedural tricks - literacy tests,
poll taxes and more - to block citizens of colour from casting
ballots.
Here is what happened in 2004, and what's in store for 2008.
In the 2004 election, more than 3 million voters were challenged at
the polls. No one had seen anything like it since the era of Jim Crow
and burning crosses. In 2004, voters were told their registrations
had been purged or that their addresses were suspect.
Denied the right to the regular voting booths, these challenged
voters were given provisional ballots. More than 1m of these
provisional ballots (1,090,729 of them) were tossed in the electoral
dumpster uncounted.
A funny thing about those ballots: about 88% were cast by minority voters.
This isn't a number dropped on me from a black helicopter: they come
from the raw data of the US election assistance commission in
Washington DC.
At the heart of the GOP's mass challenge of voters was what the
party's top brass called caging lists - secret files of hundreds of
thousands of voters, almost every one from a black-majority voting
precinct.
When our investigations team, working for BBC TV, got our hands on
these confidential files in October 2004, the Republicans told us the
voters listed were their potential donors. Really? The sheets
included pages of men from homeless shelters in Florida.
Donor lists, my ass. Every expert told us, these were challenge
lists meant to stop these black voters from casting ballots.
When these caged voters arrived at the polls in November 2004, they
found their registrations missing, their right to vote blocked or
their absentee ballots rejected because their addresses were
supposedly fraudulent.
Why didn't the GOP honchos fess up to challenging these allegedly
illegal voters? Because targeting voters of colour is against the
law. The law in question is the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The act says you can't go after groups of voters if you choose your
targets based on race. Given that almost all the voters on the GOP
hit list are black, the illegal racial profiling is beyond even Karl
Rove's ability to come up with an alibi.
The Republicans target black folk not because they don't like the
colour of their skin; they don't like the colour of their vote:
Democrat. For that reason, the GOP included on its hit list Jewish
retirement homes in Florida. Apparently, the GOP was also gunning for
the Elderly of Zion.
These so-called fraudulent voters, in fact, were not fraudulent at
all. Page after page, as we have previously reported, are black
soldiers sent overseas. The Bush campaign used their absence from
their US homes to accuse them of voting from false addresses.
Now that the GOP has been caught breaking the voting rights law, it
has found a way to keep using its expensively obtained caging
lists: let the law expire next year. If the Voting Rights Act dies in
2007, the 2008 race will be open season on dark-skinned voters. Only
the renewal of the Voting Rights Act can prevent the planned racial
wrecking of democracy.
Before the 2000 presidential ballot, then Jeb Bush purged thousands
of Black citizens' registrations on the grounds that they were
felons not entitled to vote. Our review of the files determined
that the crime of most people on the list was nothing more than VWB
-- Voting While Black.
That felon scrub, as the state called it, had to be pre-cleared
under the Voting Rights Act. That is, the US justice department must
approve scrubs and other changes in procedures.
The Florida felon scrub slipped through this pre-clearance
