[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Block the Vote

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Block the Vote

October 15, 2004
 By PAUL KRUGMAN 



 

Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates
(operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a
firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register
voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors
systematically tore up Democratic registrations. 

The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear
credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation
into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon. 

Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong -
and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't
been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic
voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of
Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any
means possible. 

Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve
dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in
New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic
get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone
banks. 

But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example,
Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an
archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of
new, heavily Democratic registrations. 

That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county
executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a
record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than
it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling
places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters. 

And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress
Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular. 

Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter
registrations would be deemed incomplete if those
registering failed to check a box affirming their
citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the
same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are,
sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some
officials have both used this rule and other technicalities
to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying
would-be voters of problems with their applications until
it was too late. 

Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post
examination of rejected applications in Duval County found
three times as many were from Democrats, compared with
Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection
of blacks' registrations. 

The case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials,
as in 2000, to try to wrongly disenfranchise thousands of
blacks - has been widely reported. Less widely reported has
been overwhelming evidence that the errors were deliberate.


In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast,
who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list,
reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting
rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials
have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get
back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those
attempting to get their votes back have been required to
seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go
through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are
not felons with similar names. 

And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting
difficult for those blacks who do manage to register.
Florida law requires local election officials to provide
polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval
County is providing only one such location, when other
counties with similar voting populations are providing
multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early
voting sites are miles away from precincts with black
majorities. 

Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes
of Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully
counted if they are cast. Mr. Palast notes that in the 2000
election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were rejected
because they were either blank or contained overvotes.
Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate
that 54 percent of the spoiled ballots were cast by blacks.
And there's strong evidence that this spoilage didn't
reflect voters' incompetence: it was caused mainly by
defective voting machines and may also reflect deliberate
vote-tampering. 

The important point to realize is that these abuses aren't
aberrations. They're the inevitable result of a Republican
Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote
are rewarded, not punished. It's a culture that will
persist until voters - whose will still does count, if
expressed strongly enough - hold that party accountable. 

E-mail: krugman at nytimes.com


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/opinion/15krugman.html?ex=1098862007&ei=1&en=e55353c3a21caa1e


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