Democratic Underground - The GOP Plan to Disenfranchise Millions of Democratic Voters

Even as millions of Americans turn away from the Republican Party, Republicans continue their efforts to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters. They employ numerous methods to do this, including: 1) Restrictive voting laws; 2) Intimidation of grassroots voter registration organizations; 3) Illegal purging of legally registered voters; and 4) Dirty tricks.

Such efforts were required for George W. Bush to win presidential elections in 2000 and 2004. And as President, Bush has done everything he can to ensure that they continue and expand. Let’s consider some of these efforts:

Restrictive voting laws

Restrictive voting laws decrease voter turnout by making it more difficult for people to vote. They disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, the poor, and Democrats. To rationalize these anti-democratic laws, Republicans have been pushing for several years the myth of “voter fraud” – the idea that voters who impersonate other people and otherwise vote illegally represent a monumental threat to the integrity of our elections.

The roots of the recent Republican “voter fraud” movement

Art Levine discusses these issues in a recent article titled “The Republican War on Voting”:

On Election Day 2000, hundreds or thousands of St. Louis voters were turned away from the polls because their names didn’t appear on the voting rolls. Because of the resulting turmoil, the polls in St. Louis were ordered to stay open for an extra 45 minutes, so as to give more people the opportunity to vote. That was the election where John Ashcroft lost his bid for re-election to the Senate to Mel Carnahan, who had recently died in a plane crash. Republican leaders were outraged over this turn of events, and Missouri’s remaining Republican Senator subsequently made the unsubstantiated charge that dogs and dead people voted in that election. Levine describes what happened then:

What began in Missouri soon went nationwide. Starting in 2003, the Justice Department's civil-rights division issued a flurry of advisory letters, rulings, and lawsuits under the guise of fighting fraud that appear designed to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.

The truth about so-called “voter fraud”

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

Voter fraud is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a person, according to data compiled by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice… The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American elections is itself a fraud.

Getting back to the 2000 Election Day “outrage” in St. Louis, the GOP decided to make a big deal of it and press charges. Levine explains:

Missouri's then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt launched a trumped-up investigation that concluded that more than 1,000 fraudulent ballots had been cast in an organized scheme. A Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation, started before Ashcroft shifted the department's priorities, found no fraudulent ballots, however. Instead, it discovered that the St. Louis election board had improperly purged 50,000 voters from the rolls.

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, 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.

The effects of restrictive voting laws

In the introduction to his study on the effect of Indiana’s new Voter ID requirement, Matt Barreto notes that restrictive voting laws have been around for a long time, and he discusses their historical anti-democratic effect:

Several restrictive registration regulations remain in place in many states, including early closing dates for registration, purging of registration rolls, and the limiting of voter registration to specific times and places…

Disparities in rates of voter registration in this country are not inevitable. Rather, they are
the product of historical and continuing racial and socioeconomic bias in the operation of
our registration laws”…State registration laws decrease turnout… More rigid voting prerequisite requirements not only negatively impact the electorate, but also have a disproportionate effect on racial minorities and the poor.

The above discussion serves as background to Barreto’s study on the effects of Indiana’s new Photo ID requirement. His study found that only 71.7% of otherwise eligible Black voters in Indiana, compared to 83.2% of White voters, meet Indiana’s Voter ID requirements. Even among Blacks who are currently registered to vote in Indiana, only 78.2% meet those requirements. Translating that into Party identification, 86.2% of registered Republicans meet the ID requirements, compared to only 81.7% of registered Democrats, a difference of 4.5%.

We are looking at a massive disenfranchisement of Indiana’s otherwise eligible voting population for the 2008 election – one that puts Democrats at a large disadvantage. And this is for the proclaimed rationale of preventing a problem that has never even been shown to exist in Indiana.

Intimidation of grassroots voter registration organizations

Grassroots voter registration groups pose a big threat to the Republican Party. In the run-up to the 2004 election there was tremendous activity on that front, as indicated by this article: The 2004 Campaign: As Deadlines Hit, Rolls of Voters Show Big Surge:

A coalition of nonpartisan groups called National Voice announced last week a push for an additional 200,000 registrations in the last days…. claims more than a million registrations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington and other states. These nonpartisan community groups, as well as Democratic organizations like America Coming Together, have driven most of the increase, registration officials say. In Florida and Ohio, Republicans have mounted moderately successful campaigns… but the huge gains have come in areas with minority and low-income populations. In some of those areas in Ohio, new registrations have quadrupled from 2000.

Art Levine describes how Republicans have counteracted the efforts of voter registration organizations, through intimidation of the organizations that undertake them:

Lawsuits against voter registration organizations

Republican operatives, election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have limited voting access and gone after
voter-registration groups such as ACORN (The Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now)… Attacking ACORN has been a central element of a systematic GOP disenfranchisement agenda to undermine Democratic prospects before each Election Day…

The GOP in Missouri also turned to prosecutions and lawsuits, most either overblown or groundless…. All these campaigns have created a kind of GOP vote-suppression playbook that aims to limit voting rights in the states and attack registration groups such as ACORN. In most states where ACORN wages ballot-initiative and voter-registration campaigns, Republican lawyers, officials, and some prosecutors routinely file dubious lawsuits and complaints… The lawsuits seldom if ever succeed, but the bad press they engender creates a climate to pass restrictive voting laws.

Responding to the GOP-generated hysteria over voter fraud, criminal investigations were launched in 2004 and 2005 in Wisconsin, Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, with ACORN often a target. But by the end of 2005, the investigations ended after finding either no evidence of wrongdoing by ACORN or any pervasive voter fraud. Nationally, only six former ACORN employees were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election, offenses involving fewer than 20 forms. That's out of 1 million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle.

The (Florida) legislature passed one of the most restrictive voting-registration laws in the country. The new law fined every registration worker $5,000 for any lost application, potentially wiping out the entire budget of the state League of Women Voters if just 14 forms were lost and forcing the group to stop registering voters for the first time in over 70 years.

Complicity and corruption of the U.S. Justice Department

Even the Bush administration’s U.S. Justice Department has become actively involved in pushing unsupported criminal investigations for “voter fraud”, thereby making itself into nothing but a political arm of the Republican Party. We know now that several U.S. Attorneys were fired because they refused play along with the corruption of our Justice Department.

The case of David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, illustrates this process. Iglesias was so much a believer in the dangers of “voter fraud” that he was invited to lecture other U.S. attorneys at the 2005 annual Justice Department ballot-integrity conference. Yet, as the U.S. Attorney responsible for hunting down “voter fraud” in New Mexico, he was unable to find sufficient cause for prosecution to satisfy the Bush administration. Consequently:

Patrick Rogers, the Republican National Lawyers Association point person in the state, mounted a campaign to pressure Iglesias to bring criminal charges before the election, rather than form a task force. Even before Iglesias concluded in 2006 that there wasn't enough evidence to indict on voter fraud, major Republicans in the state had started asking the Bush administration for his removal. In early December 2006, Iglesias was one of seven U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department fired.

Today, Iglesias says of voter fraud: "It's like the boogeyman parents use to scare their children. It's very frightening, and it doesn't exist. U.S. attorneys have better things to do with their time than chasing voter-fraud phantoms."

Purging of legally registered voters

2000-2004

I’ve discussed in detail in a recent post how purging of legally registered voters in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 enabled George W. Bush to win two presidential elections. To summarize briefly: Greg Palast showed (See pages 6-44) how approximately 92,000 voters, most of them Black (54%) and Democratic (90%), were illegally and purposely disenfranchised for the Florida 2000 election, thereby enabling Bush to win Florida and the general election by 537 votes. A report by Victoria Lovegren described the apparently illegal purging of 165,224 voters from heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prior to the 2004 election, for no other specified rationale than that they hadn’t voted recently. In “Fooled Again – How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)”, Mark Crispin Miller documents how tens or hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from other Ohio counties as well, and how those purges were targeted against Democrats by using voting lists obtained from stolen computers.

2005-2007

Apparently, these cases did not get enough national attention to prevent repeat performances. State GOP interests have since continued to collaborate with our corrupt U.S. Justice Department. Art Levine notes:

Justice Department-backed secretive purging policies have targeted voter-registration applicants and current voters in several key states: In Ohio in 2006, 303,000 voters were purged in three major urban counties. Over the past few years, what began as local phony lawsuits and investigations escalated into a concerted drive by the Civil Rights Division to restrict voting. Since 2004, the goal of the state GOP vote-caging initiatives has become official Justice Department policy…. pressuring 16 states and cities to speed up their purging of hundreds of thousands of voters.

In November 2005, Bradley Schlozman, then the Justice Department's acting civil-rights chief, insisted on filing a lawsuit that accused Missouri's secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, a Democrat, of failing to purge supposedly ineligible voters under federal law. A federal judge, who found that the Justice Department did not produce any evidence showing fraud justifying the purges, dismissed the lawsuit in April 2007.

Indiana 2008

The Brad Blog reports that prior to the April 2008 Indiana primary, 1,134,427 voter registrations in Indiana were marked as cancelled. In response to questions about this, Indiana election officials explained that “cancelled” doesn’t actually mean that the registrations were … uh, cancelled. Rather, “cancelled” simply means that they were updated. Brad goes on to say this about the “cancelled” voter registrations:

So what is it really doing? And should Rokita's office be trusted here? He is, after all, the state Republican most responsible for pushing the reprehensible, unconstitutional Photo ID restriction law with misleading (at best) information, despite being unable to cite a single instance of in-person, polling place voter impersonation fraud – ever in state history – of the type the law was deceptively "designed" to protect against.

Indiana appears to be a swing state for the 2008 Presidential election. But with their Photo ID law and the apparent purging of large numbers of voters, Democrats will be hard pressed to bring it into the Democratic column this year.

Dirty tricks

The term “dirty tricks” is used to describe a bunch of heterogeneous methods used to disenfranchise voters. The list of dirty tricks used by the Republican Party to disenfranchise voters is too long to recount here. One of the best descriptions of the process is a report on the 2004 election in Ohio by John Conyers: Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio – Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff.

Perhaps the most costly dirty trick detailed in Conyers’ report was the withholding of voting machines for Democratic precincts in Franklin County, resulting in voting lines up to eleven hours long. The resulting net loss of votes for the Kerry/Edwards ticket was calculated to be about 7,000.

Other dirty tricks recounted in Conyers’ report included:

 Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell withheld provisional ballots from tens or hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.
 Intimidating minority voters with thousands of partisan challenges – referred to as “caging”.
 Failure to send voters absentee ballots on time, and then not issuing them provisional ballots on Election Day
 Widespread distribution of false information regarding the date and place for voting
 Telling people they could go to jail if they showed up to vote.

In “Fooled again”, Mark Crispin Miller describes how a Republican organization posing as a non-partisan voter registration organization effectively disenfranchised Democratic voters by pretending to help them register to vote, and then shredding their voter registration applications.

“Voter caging” is one of the methods most commonly used by Republicans to disenfranchise voters. The first step of the process is for election officials to send mail to targeted voters, with instructions to “return to sender” if the voter doesn’t pick up the mail. “Caging lists” are then compiled of voters whose mail is returned for any reason, with the rationale that the returned mail is evidence of “voter fraud” (though the National Voter Registration Act prohibits the cancelling of a voter’s registration based merely on the return of a single piece of mail). The caging lists are then used to mount massive challenges of minority voter eligibility at the polls on Election Day.

Teresa James sums up voter caging operations in 2004, in her report, “Caging Democracy: A 50-year history of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters”:

In 2004, political operatives targeted more than half a million voters in voter caging
campaigns in nine states. At least 77,000 voters had their eligibility challenged between
2004 and 2006.

Status of voter registration in selected swing states – 2008

In my volunteer work with the Election Defense Alliance, I have been working on a project to identify suspicious patterns of changes in the voter registration rolls of swing states that could be indicative of a repeat of the massive voter registration purges seen in recent years. The idea is that by identifying suspicious patterns, further investigation and corrective action may be possible prior to the election.

Comparison of voter registration changes since January 2008 in selected counties

For three swing states I have found websites that compare voter registration numbers by county and by party, over time. Looking at the changes since the beginning of 2008, the trends are so far very encouraging for Democrats:

Florida (Thanks to Patsy Stone for this info)
Miami-Dade County (12-07 to 7-08): Dems + 57,000 (+ 13%); Repubs +8,000 (+ 2%)
Broward County (12-07 to 6-08): Dems + 35,000 (+ 8%); Repubs +8,000 (+ 3%)

Pennsylvania
Allegheny County (11-07 to 7-08): Dems + 32,000 (+ 6%); Repubs - 39 (0% change)
Philadelphia County (11-07 to 7-08): Dems + 57,000 (+ 8%); Repubs - 6,000 (- 4%)
Montgomery County (11-07 to 7-08): Dems + 35,000 (+ 16%); Repubs -11,000 (- 4%)
Pennsylvania (11-07 to 7-08): Dems + 369,000 (+ 10%); Repubs - 61,000 (- 2%)

Colorado
Arapaho County (1-08 to 6-08): Dems + 7,000 (+ 7%); Repubs - 105 (0% change)
Denver County (1-08 to 6-08): Dems + 15,000 (+ 11%); Repubs + 142 (0% change)
Jefferson County (1-08 to 6-08): Dems + 6,000 (+ 6%); Repubs + 793 (+ 1%)

Other states

For Virginia and Michigan (Thanks to livvy for this info) I was able to obtain voter registration statistics over time, but not broken down by party. Virginia has shown a 3% increase in overall voter registration since January of 2008, and Michigan has shown a 1.4% increase.

In addition, there are three states for which I was able to obtain reasonably current voter registration statistics, but no previous dates for comparison. Presumably, the data will be updated as the election approaches, so that by going back to the same websites I will be able to observe changes in voter registration numbers as the election approaches. Those states include Nevada, New Mexico, and Indiana. Of those states, Nevada and New Mexico provide data by party affiliation, but Indiana doesn’t.

There are several swing states for which it is not necessary to keep track of voter registration, either because same day voter registration is allowed (Wisconsin, Iowa, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina), or because there is no voter registration (North Dakota).

Then there are two swing states (Ohio and Missouri) for which I could find no voter registration statistics. If anyone has any information on those, I would appreciate it.

Summary and overview

Republicans routinely undertake large scale efforts to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. They do so prior to elections by whining about “voter fraud”, in order to pave the way for restrictive voting requirements and harassment of voter registration organizations, and by targeted purging of voter rolls. And they do so on Election Day through massive ungrounded challenges of minority voter eligibility and a host of other dirty tricks.

It is necessary for them to do those kinds of things. It is often the only way they can win. If not for massive voter disenfranchisement in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush would today represent nothing but a distant memory to us, we would not be at war, and our standing in the world would be 100% better than it is.

So far in 2008, despite the best efforts of the GOP, new Democratic voter registration is far outpacing Republican voter registration. But that should be no cause for celebration. Democrats, Independents, members of other parties, and even Republicans who value our democracy must remain vigilant of the possibility and likelihood of aggressive and widespread attempts at voter disenfranchisement by Republican operatives, from now until the polls close on November 4th.

And don’t forget EarlG’s request for action to help prevent Republican election fraud.

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