Republicans again seeking to suppress black vote
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by Greg Palast, The Guardian
June 23, 2006
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 decriminalize the Republican party's new game of challenging voters of color 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 color 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
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To get a feel for what the Voting Rights Act is about, and what it means when Republicans try to let it die, take a look at
the government's own website:
United States Department of Justice
Civil Rights Division
Voting Section
Introduction To Federal Voting Rights Laws
The Voting Rights Act, adopted initially in 1965 and
extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982, is generally considered
the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever
adopted by the United States Congress. The Act codifies
and effectuates the 15th Amendment's permanent guarantee
that, throughout the nation, no person shall be denied the
right to vote on account of race or color. In addition, the
Act contains several special provisions that impose even
more stringent requirements in certain jurisdictions
throughout the country.
Adopted at a time when African Americans were substantially
disfranchised in many Southern states, the Act employed
measures to restore the right to vote that intruded in
matters previously reserved to the individual states. ...
Congress determined that such a far-reaching statute only
in response to compelling evidence of continuing interference
with attempts by African American citizens to exercise their
right to vote. As the Supreme Court put it in its 1966
decision upholding the constitutionality of the Act:
"Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was
inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination
in voting, because of the inordinant amount of time and energy
required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably
encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century
of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress
might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia
from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims."South Carolina v. Katzenbach,
383 U.S. 301, 327-28 (1966)
At the time the Act was first adopted, only one-third of all
African Americans of voting age were on the registration rolls
in the specially covered states, while two-thirds of eligible
whites were registered.
Now black voter registration rates are
approaching parity with that of whites in many areas, and
Hispanic voters in jurisdictions added to the list of those
specially covered by the Act in 1975 are not far behind.
Enforcement of the Act has also increased the opportunity of
black and Latino voters to elect representatives of their
choice by providing a vehicle for challenging discriminatory
election methods such as at-large elections, racially
gerrymandered districting plans, or runoff requirements that
may dilute minority voting strength.
Virtually excluded from
all public offices in the South in 1965, black and Hispanic
voters are now substantially represented in the state
legislatures and local governing bodies throughout the region.
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Another interesting tidbit, from Wikipedia:
No right to vote
U.S. citizens commonly hear of a "right to vote," yet
there is no such federal right.
However, the Voting Rights
Act and three constitutional amendments that prevent
discrimination in granting the franchise have established
in United States Supreme Court jurisprudence that there is
a "fundamental right" in the franchise, even though voting
remains a state-granted privilege. U.S. Representative
Jesse Jackson, Jr., re-introduced House Joint Resolution 28
in March of 2005 to amend the U.S. Constitution and create
a federal right to vote. The resolution had 58 co-sponsors
as of April, 2005.
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targeting voters of color 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 color of their skin; they don't like the color 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" provision because Katherine Harris's assistant assured the government the scrub was just a clerical matter. Civil rights lawyers are now on the alert for such mendacity.
The burning cross caucus of the Republican Party is bitching that "pre-clearance" of voting changes applies only to southern states. I have to agree that singling out the old confederacy is a bit unfair. But the solution is not to smother the voting rights law but to spread its safeguards to all 50 of these United States.
Republicans argue that the racial voting games and the threats of the white-hooded Klansmen that kept African-Americans from the ballot box before the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act no longer threaten black voters.
That's true. When I look over the "caging lists" and the "scrub sheets", it's clear to me that the GOP has traded in white sheets for spreadsheets.
As originally published
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We appreciate the heck out of everyone who helps.
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Commentary by Madeline Zane:
Southern legislators are now threatening to block what was going to be the routine renewal of the Voting Rights Act, allegedly because its protections for racial minorities are no longer necessary.
Okay, let's look at the logic here. These politicians are supposedly kicking up a fuss because the things the law says to do are already happening. So why would you risk the horrible PR of fighting against something called the "Voting Rights Act" if the law wasn't going to change anything? That would be like fighting against a law called the "Motherhood and Apple Pie Act" that says that the sun has to come up every morning.
The answer, of course, is that the Republicans hate having any laws on the books that promote democracy, for fear that they one day might theoretically in some hypothetical America actually be enforced.
Madeline Zane
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Commentary by Mr. Chuckles:
Right now, an anti-flag burning Constitutional amendment
has achieved a majority in Congress -- including 13 Democrats.
But for voting "rights"? Not so much.
The thing is intent. It makes some kind of sense to
require that people be able to read their ballots,
else why not grant chimpanzees the franchise? But if
the intent is not to prevent retards from randomly
casting ballots and destroying the country with chaos,
but to discriminate against oppressed minorities, that
is unConstitutional.
And the problem with things being
"unConstitutional" is that to argue that point, your
case may need to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Look at the Wikipedia article below, and consider
the states, counties and towns that now receive special attention
from the DOJ/courts under the Voting Rights Act. Think
about what kinds of places those must be... Think of the
horrors...
Who needs Anne Rice when we already have
North Carolina?
Mr. Chuckles
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