“We shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the African-American voter-turnout machine”

The excerpt from the quote that is the title of this post was recently reported by the Columbus Dispatch, quoting Doug Preisse, chairman of the Franklin County, Ohio, Republican Party. The full quote was:

It was spoken for the purpose of rationalizing the limiting of early voting in Ohio, which in turn is part of a very large national effort to suppress the vote of minorities and the poor in order to get Mitt Romney into the White House and provide him with a Republican Congress.

The Republican Party explained the quote by saying that Preisse thought his comments were “off the record”.

Of course, this should be no big deal, except for the fact that the racism exhibited by the comment, as well as the many right wing actions that accompany such thinking, are promising to be rampant in the 2012 national election. And they very well could make the difference in who is elected President and which Party controls Congress.


Rampant racism promises to be in full force at voting precincts this Election Day

"True the Vote", a group with strong ties to Republican entities such as the Tea Party, the Koch brothers and Judicial Watch, plans to send out a million volunteers on Election Day to do "poll watching". While its purported purpose is to ensure the integrity of our elections, evidence abounds that its more direct purpose is to suppress Democratic voting. As Bill Ouren, True the Vote's national elections coordinator has repeatedly said with regard to his training program, the job of his poll watchers is chiefly to make voters feel like they’re "driving and seeing the police following you." And an article titled "How the Tea Party's Building a Poll Watcher's Network" provides clues to the true intent of True the Vote’s “election integrity” program, with a quote from Tom Fritton of Judicial Watch, a featured guest speaker at True the Vote training programs:


A guide produced by True the Vote provided recommendations for:


A New York Times editorial provides an apt analogy to the Jim Crow era:


The article goes into detail on how this voter suppression works:


An article in Atlantic Magazine dealt with the vigilante flavor of these groups. It described a Tea Party rally in which a speaker



Why this is important

The voter intimidation is all part and parcel of a larger effort to suppress the minority, poor, and Democratic vote in general. It is on par with the massive efforts to limit early voting, require strict voter IDs that disenfranchise the poor and minorities, voter “caging” operations, and the purging of voter lists of suspected illegal aliens and felons.

Some might wonder whether this kind of voter intimidation is actually effective. It certainly was in recent previous national elections. Many minority voters are scared into believing that they will get into trouble with the law if they vote. Others feel physically intimidated. The incessant challenges slow down voting lines and force working voters with stringent time constraints to leave their polling places before voting. If that doesn't work, election officials with right wing sympathies may go along with the challenges and require that voters vote by provisional ballots, which may never be counted. An article on these right wing vigilante poll watching groups provides an explanation:


A Democratic strategy group co-sponsored by Common Cause expounds on its implications:


Some may object that this is an exaggeration – that the use of electronic voting machines that produce unverified results and can be easily programmed for fraud poses a far worse threat to our election system. But there is little need to argue about that. The presence of a worse threat to our election system is no reason to not be concerned about the resurgence of this blatantly racist threat.


The "voter fraud" myth as the excuse behind the voter suppression

No discussion of this issue would be complete without noting the so-called “voter fraud” myth that rationalizes the reason for all this voter suppression. Yet the issue of "voter fraud" as a threat to our elections has been shown over and over again to baseless. An editorial cartoon figure puts the issue in perspective:



An analysis of voter fraud in the United States by Lorraine Minnite found it to be "rare and isolated". Art Levine puts the "voter fraud" scam in perspective:


On Election Day 2000, outrage over “voter fraud” in St. Louis inspired the GOP to make a big deal of it and press charges. Levine explains:


Later, in October 2002, Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General initiated an effort to combat voter fraud – the “Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative”. Yet, though “voter fraud” was declared a high priority, Professor Minnite found that only 24 people were convicted of illegal voting between 2002 and 2005. Not a single person was even charged with impersonating another voter – the claimed rationale for the restrictive voting laws. Fourteen of the 24 convictions were of noncitizens who were apparently confused about election laws.


What can be done?

The above mentioned strategy memo co-sponsored by Common Cause provides some recommendations for averting the kind of voter intimidation described in this post. It notes that even if the Obama campaign is successful in thwarting the worst voter suppression abuses and wins the election, the Republican Party is sure to invoke “voter fraud” as the reason for their loss and use that as an excuse to delegitimize an Obama victory and/or a Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress, in an attempt to force compromises on many policy issues. It recommends the following:



My book on the myriad problems with our election system has been recently published in different electronic formats by Biting Duck Press and can be found at the link in my sig line.