*From Roger Howell:*
*
*
*I've taken/ Newsweek/ for years and Web Exclusive means Web ONLY, or at
least it always*
*has. All their more controversial articles are web only, which means
essentially that no one*
*sees them.*
*
*
*Even so, note the gross and unwarranted generalization: "Republicans
aren't bigots like*
*the Jim Crow segregationists." I don't know if you've read/ The
Prosecution of George W./*
/*Bush for Murder*/* (and if you haven't, DO), but Vince Bugliosi takes
Jonathan Alter to the woodshed for just such spasms of gullibility.*
*
*
*Aside from that lapse, however, the article is right on target and/
should/ be in the print*
*version. All we can do is disseminate it ourselves. I think we
should send it a couple*
*thousand times to the DNC. Seems they're doing little or nothing about
these tactics, and THAT is what will cost us the election.* [Not/ only/
that--MCM]
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Mark Crispin Miller <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*To:* newsfromunderground@googlegroups.com
<mailto:newsfromunderground@googlegroups.com>
*Sent:* Saturday, September 13, 2008 7:28 PM
*Subject:* [MCM] Jonathan Alter on McCain's Jim Crow strategy
A "Newsweek Web Exclusive"--so will it be in the actual magazine as
well?
MCM
*'Jim Crawford' Republicans*
*The GOP is working to keep eligible African-Americans from voting
in several states.*
*Jonathan Alter*
*Newsweek Web Exclusive*
Updated: 2:37 PM ET Sep 11, 2008
It was a mainstay of Jim Crow segregation: for 100 years after the
Civil War, Southern white Democrats kept eligible blacks from voting
with poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements. Starting
in the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these assaults on the
heart of American democracy unconstitutional.
Now, with the help of a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Crawford vs.
Marion County (Indiana) Election Board, white Republicans in some
areas will keep eligible blacks from voting by requiring driver's
licenses. Not only is this new-fangled discrimination
constitutional, it's spreading.
GOP proponents of the move say they are merely trying to reduce
voter fraud. But while occasional efforts to stuff ballot boxes
through phony absentee voting still surface, the incidence of
individual vote fraud-voting when you aren't eligible-is virtually
non-existent, as "The Truth About Vote Fraud
<http://truthaboutfraud.org/>," a study by the Brennan Center for
Justice at New York University, clearly shows. In other words, the
problem Republicans claim they want to combat with increased ID
requirements doesn't exist. Meanwhile, those ID hurdles facing
individuals do nothing to stop the organized insiders who still try
to game the system.
The motive here is political, not racial. Republicans aren't bigots
like the Jim Crow segregationists. But they know that increased
turnout in poor, black neighborhoods is good for Democrats. In that
sense, the effort to suppress voting still amounts to the practical
equivalent of racism.
In Crawford, the court upheld an Indiana law essentially requiring a
passport or driver's license in order to vote. But more than two
thirds of Indiana adults have no passports and nearly 15 percent
have no driver's licenses. These eligible voters, disproportionately
African-American, will need to take a bus or catch a ride from a
friend down to the motor vehicles bureau to make sure they obtain a
nondriver photo ID. Otherwise, they cannot vote in Indiana this year.
To get an idea of how many African-Americans nationwide lack
driver's licenses, recall Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when thousands
were stranded without transportation. "Crawford Republicans" could
make the old "Jim Crow Democrats" look like pikers when it comes to
voter suppression.
Consider Wisconsin, a swing state. Republicans officials there are
suing to enforce a "no match, no vote" provision in state
regulations, where voters must not only show a photo ID, but
establish that it matches the name and number in the Department of
Motor Vehicles or Social Security Administration database.
(Democrats are resisting the suit.) These lists are riddled with
errors in every state, as the Brennan Center has proven in its
report, "Restoring the Right to Vote
<http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/restoring_the_right_to_vote/>."
How error prone? Florida wrongly purged tens of thousands of
law-abiding, mostly Democratic, voters from the rolls in 2000,
claiming they were felons. (This, among other things, cost Al Gore
the presidency). Even after the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)
<http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm> and worldwide attention, the
Florida software is still flawed. It requires only an 80 percent
match to the name of a convicted felon. "So if there's a murderous
John Peterson, the software disenfranchises everyone named John
Peters," Andrew Hacker writes in a recent New York Review of Books
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21771>.
Voters caught in these snafus can have their rights restored but not
if they fail to straighten things out before Election Day. Otherwise
they are granted "provisional ballots" that are sometimes counted
and sometimes not. Even obtaining a provisional ballot can require
an appearance in front of a judge in some states. Faced with the
hassle, most voters just give up.
The ability of actual felons to get their right to vote back varies
by state. It's especially hard for felons to vote in Virginia; a bit
easier in Pennsylvania and Michigan. (Other countries are far more
generous to ex-convicts, figuring that having paid their debt to
society they should be allowed to vote again.)
All of this would seem to favor John McCain over Barack Obama this
year, but some voting-rights trends are pointing in the opposite
direction.
In Ohio, where the governor and secretary of state changed in 2006
from Republican to Democrat, a new law allows voters to register to
vote and fill out an absentee ballot at the same time between Sept.
30 and Oct. 6. This will mean a week of furious campaigning and
early voting in a key state.
Advantage Obama. With 470,000 students enrolled in Ohio's public
colleges and universities (and nine out of 10 are Ohio residents),
expect a bumper crop of young voters.
The combination of voter suppression and early voting make turnout
predictions perilous. And without knowing turnout, most polling is
deeply flawed.
So about the only thing we know for sure this year is that with the
Crawford decision we are seeing a return to the days when one
political party saw a huge advantage in preventing as many poor
people as possible from voting. That's understandable politically,
but also un-American.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/158392
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