“A Conspiracy Of Thousands”: How The GOP Plans To Block The Black Vote
I can’t identify too many threads that connect every single election I’ve ever covered. But one feature has been a constant through every election I’ve seen up close, from New York City Council elections to mayor to governor to senator to president: efforts to suppress the black vote, and, often enough, the Latino vote. I’ve seen the fliers, heard the robocalls, been at the polling places with the mysterious malfunctioning machines. No one ever knows exactly who does these things, and yet everyone generally knows. Republicans. And now we may be getting some proof. Former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer said for the first time on national television Thursday—to Al Sharpton, no less!—that his party is up to its neck in denying citizens the right to vote.
Greer—and I should say up front he’s under indictment; more on that later—was deposed by lawyers for the state GOP in late May for a civil case that will likely be heard after his criminal trial. He was specific. At a December 2009 meeting, “the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting.” They also discussed—and this is lovely—how “minority-outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party.” But with Sharpton, he really cut loose: “There’s no doubt that what the Republican-led legislature in Florida and Governor Scott are trying to do is make sure the Republican Party has an advantage in this upcoming election by reducing early voting and putting roadblocks up for potential voters, Latinos, African-Americans to register and then to exercise their right to vote. There’s no doubt. I was in the room. It’s part of the strategy.”
He also shot down the rationale for the new Florida law, this ginned-up “voter fraud” business: “In three and a half years as chairman in Florida, I never had one meeting where voter fraud was discussed as a real issue effecting elections. Never one time…It’s a marketing tool. That’s clearly what it is. There’s no validity to it. We never had issues with it. The main purpose behind it is to make sure that what happened in 2008 never happens again.”
The party’s current leaders, whom for good measure he called “whack-a-doo, right-wing crazies,” say he’s lying, and naturally they note that his credibility is open to question. He’s accused of funneling party money to himself, about $125,000. He’ll stand trial sometime this fall. Obviously, we don’t know whether he’s guilty of that. But we do know that in every single election in this country where the black vote matters, these mysterious things happen in African-American neighborhoods in the run-up to the election and on Election Day itself. We never know exactly who does it, but it’s pretty self-evident that it isn’t Democrats.
Conservative pundits like to whine from time to time about how blacks “reflexively” or “unthinkingly” pull the Democratic lever. Well, what exactly do they expect? Yes, yes, some Republicans in Congress supported the civil-rights and voting-rights acts. Fine. But those Republicans don’t exist anymore. The racists left the Democrats and joined the GOP, and that’s when—in the late 1960s—these voter-suppression efforts began.
The more you wrap your mind around it, the more astonishing the moral deficiency becomes. Think about it. Every election come the warnings that if you haven’t paid your telephone bill yet or what have you, you won’t be permitted to vote. Something that like, which I saw all the time in New York City, can be pulled off by a handful of ne’er-do-wells, and the party leaders themselves can maintain plausible deniability.
But what’s going on around the country this year requires the assent of officialdom. This is a conspiracy of thousands of people, Republican Party operatives in every state in the country (except those where the black vote is small enough not to matter), all of them agreeing that denying the most fundamental civic right to a group of citizens because they vote the wrong way is a good idea—and knowing that they can get away with it because, after all, it’s “just” “those people.” Imagine that Democrats had decided to proceed along these lines in America’s rural precincts. Something tells me that the country’s great law-enforcement agencies and media institutions would have managed to get to the bottom of it then—and that the Democratic Party would have ended up all but destroyed.
Just lately, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky have been promoting their new book claiming to document vast treachery at the polls. The meme has developed on the right in the last few days that felons elected Al Franken to the Senate. Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Attorney Mike Freeman rebutted their charges this week. I can’t swear that Freeman is correct, but look—that was the most contested and pored-over election recount in the modern history of this country. It took nine months to determine the winner. Does it really seem likely that if massive fraud existed, state election officials (representing both major parties, by the way) weren’t able to ferret it out in nine months?
It’s a sick and sickening situation, and it delegitimizes everything else about the Republican Party. I can understand how someone believes in limited government or low taxes. I can understand how someone could oppose affirmative action. I cannot understand how any individual can be anything other than abjectly ashamed to be associated with a political party so thuggish as to try to rig elections like this and then at its conventions have the gall to invoke Abraham Lincoln and hire lots of black people to sing and dance and smile, to make up for their absence among the attendees. A black mark indeed.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 13, 2012
“Dark Days Of Repression”: Ohio Early Voting Cutbacks Disenfranchise Minority Voters
On Election Day 2004, long lines and widespread electoral dysfunctional marred the results of the presidential election in Ohio, whose electoral votes ended up handing George W. Bush a second term. “The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters,” found a post-election report by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. According to one survey, 174,000 Ohioans, 3 percent of the electorate, left their polling place without voting because of the interminable wait. (Bush won the state by only 118,000 votes).
After 2004, Ohio reformed its electoral process by adding thirty-five days of early voting before Election Day, which led to a much smoother voting experience in 2008. The Obama campaign used this extra time to successfully mobilize its supporters, building a massive lead among early voters than John McCain could not overcome on Election Day.
In response to the 2008 election results, Ohio Republicans drastically curtailed the early voting period in 2012 from thirty-five to eleven days, with no voting on the Sunday before the election, when African-American churches historically rally their congregants to go to the polls. (Ohio was one of five states to cut back on early voting since 2010.) Voting rights activists subsequently gathered enough signatures to block the new voting restrictions and force a referendum on Election Day. In reaction, Ohio Republicans repealed their own bill in the state legislature, but kept a ban on early voting three days before Election Day (a period when 93,000 Ohioans voted in 2008), adding an exception for active duty members of the military, who tend to lean Republican. (The Obama campaign is now challenging the law in court, seeking to expand early voting for all Ohioans).
The Romney campaign has recently captured headlines with its absurd and untrue claim that the Obama campaign is trying to suppress the rights of military voters. The real story from Ohio is how cutbacks to early voting will disproportionately disenfranchise African-American voters in Ohio’s most populous counties. African-Americans, who supported Obama over McCain by 95 points in Ohio, comprise 28 percent of the population of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County but accounted for 56 percent of early voters in 2008, according to research done by Norman Robbins of the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates and Mark Salling of Cleveland State University. In Columbus’s Franklin County, African-Americans comprise 20 percent of the population but made up 34 percent of early voters.
Now, in heavily Democratic cities like Cleveland, Columbus, Akron and Toledo, early voting hours will be limited to 8 am until 5 pm on weekdays beginning on October 1, with no voting at night or during the weekend, when it’s most convenient for working people to vote. Republican election commissioners have blocked Democratic efforts to expand early voting hours in these counties, where the board of elections are split equally between Democratic and Republican members. Ohio Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted has broken the tie by intervening on behalf of his fellow Republicans. (According to the Board of Elections, 82% of early voters in Franklin County voted early on nights or weekends, which Republicans have curtailed. The number who voted on nights or weekends was nearly 50% in Cuyahoga County.)
“I cannot create unequal access from one county board to another, and I must also keep in mind resources available to each county,” Husted said in explaining his decision to deny expanded early voting hours in heavily Democratic counties. Yet in solidly Republican counties like Warren and Butler, GOP election commissioners have approved expanded early voting hours on nights and weekends. Noted the Cincinnati Enquirer: “The counties where Husted has joined other Republicans to deny expanded early voting strongly backed then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008, while most of those where the extra hours will stand heavily supported GOP nominee John McCain.” Moreover, budget constraints have not stopped Republican legislators from passing costly voter ID laws across the map since 2010.
The cutbacks in early voting in Ohio are part of a broader push by Republicans to restrict the right to vote for millions of Americans, particularly those who voted for Obama. “The Republicans remember those long lines outside board of elections last time in the evenings and on weekends,” Tim Burke, Democratic Party chairman in Cincinnati’s Hamilton County, told the Enquirer. “The lines were overwhelmingly African-American, and it’s pretty obvious that the people were predominately—very predominately Obama voters. The Republicans don’t want that to happen again. It’s that simple.”
Ohio in 2012 is at risk of heading back to the dark days of 2004. “Voting—America’s most precious right and the foundation for all others—is a fragile civic exercise for many Ohioans,” the Enquirer wrote recently.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, August 8, 2012
“He’s Not One Of Us”: Why Mitt Romney Is Organizing His Entire Campaign Around “You Didn’t Build That”
Now that we’re having a real debate about the fundamentals of capitalism and success, it’s worth considering another part of the now-infamous “You didn’t build that” speech President Obama recently gave. When he was accused of taking Obama’s words out of context, Mitt Romney’s defense was that “The context is worse than the quote.” As evidence, he cited not the actual context of “You didn’t build that” but what Obama said a paragraph before, about the role of fortune in success. And it’s that idea—that success has to do not only with hard work and talent but also with luck—that really got Mitt Romney steamed. Here’s the passage in question:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there
You might think that this would be hard to argue with, but as David Frum observed, many successful people find the idea that luck played a part in their success to be deeply offensive. And it makes me wonder whether Mitt Romney himself believes that the fact that his father was a wealthy industrialist and governor had nothing to do with his financial success. Does he think that if he been born to a poor single mother in backwoods Appalachia, he would have grown up to be the same private equity titan he turned out to be?
I’m guessing he does, but it would be interesting to hear what he said if someone asked him, “Governor, what role do you think luck played in your success? Do you think you had more of a chance to succeed because of who your parents were?”
Don’t know about you, but I’m happy to admit that luck played a large part in whatever success I’ve had. I was fortunate in my parents; we weren’t rich, but they valued education highly, created an environment with lots of opportunities for learning, and moved us to a town with excellent public schools. Had I been born in more deprived circumstances, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have had anything like the opportunities I did, and I seriously doubt I would have pulled myself up by my bootstraps unless some other piece of luck fell my way. Luck played some part in getting most of the jobs I had, even if it was just knowing someone who knew someone who had an opening. I work hard enough, but I’m not such a jerk that I don’t understand how lucky I am to have a career as a writer, which is absurdly cushy compared to the jobs of people who stand on an assembly line or run around a distribution center or change bedpans. In my youth I had just enough exposure to a series of not-particularly-pleasant jobs like waiting tables and working a cash register in a supermarket to make me never forget how absurdly lucky I am to make a living doing what I do.
Mitt Romney is right about one thing: it’s hard to start and maintain a business. And it’s particularly hard if, unlike someone like Mitt Romney, you can’t live off your stocks when you do it. So I understand why some business owners would get their backs up when Romney tells them that Barack Obama told them they didn’t actually build their business. I’d hope they’d take the time to figure out that Romney is actually lying to them about that, but what can you do. But what I struggle to understand is the rich guy who thinks that luck played absolutely no part in him getting where he is. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t hear that coming from a guy who built up a construction business from the ground up. People like that have usually had exposure to enough bad luck to know good luck when they see it. It’s only the people whose entire lives have been nothing but a string of good luck who so angrily assert that there’s no such thing. It’s the Wall Street tools who got six-figure jobs in their uncle’s firm fresh out of Wharton who insist so vehemently that everything they have is because of their own talents. Only if you think that could you genuinely believe that an increase in your income tax of a few points constitutes some kind of communist attack on success.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 31, 2012
“A Systematic Effort”: Florida’s Former GOP Chair Says The Party Had Meetings About “Keeping Blacks From Voting”
In the debate over new laws meant to curb voter fraud in places like Florida, Democrats always charge that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote of liberal voting blocs like blacks and young people, while Republicans just laugh at such ludicrous and offensive accusations. That is, every Republican except for Florida’s former Republican Party chairman Jim Greer, who, scorned by his party and in deep legal trouble, blew the lid off what he claims was a systemic effort to suppress the black vote. In a 630-page deposition recorded over two days in late May, Greer, who is on trial for corruption charges, unloaded a litany of charges against the “whack-a-do, right-wing crazies” in his party, including the effort to suppress the black vote.
In the deposition, released to the press yesterday, Greer mentioned a December 2009 meeting with party officials. “I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting,” he said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. He also said party officials discussed how “minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party,” according to the AP.
The comments, if true (he is facing felony corruption charges and has an interest in scorning his party), would confirm what critics have long suspected. Florida Gov. Rick Scott is currently facing inquiries from the Justice Department and pressure from civil rights groups over his purging of voter rolls in the state, an effort that critics say has disproportionately targeted minorities and other Democratic voters. One group suing the state claims up to 87 percent of the voters purged from the rolls so far have been people of color, though other estimates place that number far lower. Scott has defended the purge, even though he was erroneously listed as dead himself on the rolls in 2006.
As Vanity Fair noted in a big 2004 story on the Sunshine State’s voting problems, “Florida is a state with a history of disenfranchising blacks.” In the state’s notoriously botched 2000 election, the state sent a list of 50,000 alleged ex-felons to the counties, instructing them to purge those names from their rolls. But it turned out that list included 20,000 innocent people, 54 percent of whom were black, the magazine reported. Just 15 percent of the state’s population is black. There were also reports that polling stations in black neighborhoods were understaffed, leading to long lines that kept some people from voting that year. The NAACP and ACLU sued the state over that purge. A Gallup poll in December of 2000 found that 68 percent of African-Americans nationally felt black voters were less likely to have their votes counted fairly in Florida.
Former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who has since become an independent and is rumored to be considering his next run as a Democrat, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post recently slamming Scott’s current purge. “Including as many Americans as possible in our electoral process is the spirit of our country. It is why we have expanded rights to women and minorities but never legislated them away, and why we have lowered the voting age but never raised it. Cynical efforts at voter suppression are driven by an un-American desire to exclude as many people and silence as many voices as possible,” he wrote. A recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School found that voter ID laws disproportionately affect poor, minority and elderly voters.
By: Alec Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 27, 2012
“It’s Not Just Freaks”: Who’s Affected By Pennsylvania’s Voter-ID Law?
The ACLU’s smart lawsuit shows it’s not just freaks who don’t have government-issued identification.
As the first big lawsuit against the Pennsylvania’s voter-ID law starts its third day at trial, arguments about the legality of the law have focused largely on who’s impacted by it. First, the secretary of the commonwealth estimated as many as 758,000 Pennsylvanians lacked the most common form of ID—those issued by the state Department of Transportation. A political scientist’s study showed that number to be around a million. Either way, it’s a lot of people, and we know a disproportionate number of them are poor, nonwhite, and elderly.
Still, those supporting strict voter-ID laws, which require citizens to show government-issued identification before voting, often cast suspicion on anyone without an ID. They argue that you need photo identification for pretty much anything these days, and people without them must be freaks or criminals—people we don’t want voting anyway. Republican Texas state Representative Jose Aliseda exemplifies this position; he recently said that anyone lacking a photo ID is probably in the country illegally or a recluse like the Unabomber.
In response, the ACLU, along with the other groups involved, made a brilliant move to publicize the stories of the ten plaintiffs. They’ve written up summaries of each person’s plight, made videos, and pushed the stories in the press. Those wondering just who these strange people without ID are getting an answer: Quite a few are little old ladies.
Of the ten people in the lawsuit, five are over 80. The chief plaintiff, Viviette Applewhite, is 93, and arrived in court in a wheelchair wearing “a gray sweater and a white lace hat,” according to Reuters. She was a civil-rights activist who marched in Macon, Georgia, with Martin Luther King, but even with all the time between now and the election, she’s probably not going to be able to get the necessary ID. Applewhite, who does not drive, took her husband’s name. That is the name she had on her Social Security card. But when her purse was stolen, the only document that she could get was a birth certificate—with her maiden name. Applewhite had a common-law marriage, so there’s no document to account for the mismatched name.
Applewhite isn’t the only elderly woman on the plaintiff list. There’s also Joyce Block, a spring chicken at 89, whose Social Security card and birth certificate were in her maiden name while her voter registration was in her married name. Block’s marriage certificate is in Hebrew and apparently the the clerks at the DMV were a little rusty in their ancient languages—they said the certificate could not be used as a proof of name change. Several of the other octogenarians in the case could not get copies of their birth certificates (necessary to get the IDs) because the state where they were born does not issue them.
Of course, older ladies aren’t the only ones in the lawsuit or the only ones with powerful stories. There’s Grover Freeland, a veteran whose only photo ID is his veteran’s card, issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. But that card is not an acceptable form of ID under the Pennsylvania law. The ten plaintiffs all have different reasons why they cannot get an ID, but almost all of them are regular voters who now stand to lose their ability to cast a ballot.
Voting is a citizen’s fundamental duty and right, and those who fall outside of the mainstream have just as much of a right to vote as the mainstream. However, for the purposes of winning public support in this case, the ACLU was smart to choose and highlight relatable people who are impacted by the law. As with Republicans’ claims that voter ID laws were motivated purely by the need to cut down on voter fraud (which is virtually nonexistent), their claim that there’s something downright weird about people who lack photo IDs is now being exploded.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 27, 2012
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