Salon: "Voter Terrorism" (Repugs discouraging black votes)

For decades, Republicans have mounted highly organized operations to discourage minorities from voting. Experts say there's no reason to believe this year's presidential campaign will be any different.

Philadelphia's 2003 mayoral election did not set especially high standards for civic discourse in the city where American democracy was born. Talking to Philadelphians about the bitter contest between John Street, the African-American incumbent Democrat, and Sam Katz, the white Republican challenger, is like discussing an election in some upstart Latin American democracy. During the course of the race, Street's office was bugged by the FBI, a Katz field office was "firebombed" by an unlit Molotov cocktail, and on Election Day, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, 84 voting-related incidents were called in to police, including "assaults, disturbances, threats, harassment, vandalism" and one bona fide "polling-place brawl."

Amid the general ugliness of the race, though, there's one incident that Democrats in the city remember with a distinct sense of unease. The story, which was first reported by The American Prospect in February, and has since been broadcast by activist groups like MoveOn.org, goes like this: In an attempt to intimidate African-Americans and deter them from showing up at the polls, the Katz campaign, or one of its associates, put together a team of men dressed in official-looking attire -- dark suits, lapel pins bearing insignia of federal or local law-enforcement agencies -- and sent them into areas of the city with large black populations. According to Sherry Swirsky, a local antitrust attorney who is active in Democratic politics and who worked as an election monitor that day, the men carried clipboards and drove around in unmarked black vans.

(snip)

The voter-intimidation campaign that Republicans mounted in Philadelphia was not an anomaly. Instead, it marked a routine occurrence in American elections, a national scandal that rarely makes the front page. The sad fact is that voter-intimidation efforts aimed at minorities have been carried out in just about every major election over the past 20 years. The campaigns are almost always mounted by Republicans who aim to reduce the turnout of overwhelmingly Democratic minority voters at the polls. Now, in what's shaping up to be a razor-thin presidential election, Democrats across the country are pointing to what occurred in Philadelphia as an example of what they have to fear from Republicans this election year.

To Americans today, the idea that a major political party actively plans to disenfranchise minority voters may seem anachronistic; we'd like to believe that such tactics would no longer be tolerated in our nation. But over the last two decades, various arms of the Republican Party, or groups working for Republican candidates -- at the national, state and local levels -- have carried out well-documented projects designed to intimidate blacks and other minorities.



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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/21/intimidation/index.html

...they better bring more than a clipboard. (grrrr)