Homestead mailing list

[Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

Anywhere Blacks and Hispanics can be intimidated.  The Florida KKK 
Katherine Harris and GlendaHhood barring minorities from the voting 
booth four years ago and today, are just egregious examples.


The New York Times
------------------------------------------------------------------------


         October 7, 2004

*CAMPAIGN 2004: THE BIG ISSUES*


   The Poll Tax, Updated


When members of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino group, were registering voters 
recently on a Miami Beach sidewalk outside a building where new citizens 
were being sworn in, the Homeland Security Department ordered them to 
stop. The department gave all kinds of suspect reasons, which a federal 
court has since rejected, but it looked a lot as if someone at Homeland 
Security just didn't want thousands of new Latino voters on the Florida 
rolls.

The suppression of minority votes is alive and well in 2004, driven by 
the sharp partisan divide across the nation. Because many minority 
groups vote heavily Democratic, some Republicans view keeping them from 
registering and voting as a tactic for victory - one that has a long 
history in American politics. It is rarely talked about publicly, but 
John Pappageorge, a Republican state legislator from Michigan, recently 
broke the taboo. He was quoted in The Detroit Free Press as saying, "If 
we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in 
this election cycle." Detroit's population is more than 80 percent black.

A recent report by the N.A.A.C.P. and People for the American Way 
includes page after page of examples of how this shabby business works. 
On Election Day, "ballot security" teams head for minority 
neighborhoods. They demand that voters produce identification when it is 
not required, take photographs of voters and single out immigrant voters 
for special scare tactics.

Two years ago in the governor's race in Maryland, leaflets appeared in 
Baltimore saying that before voters showed up at the polls, they had to 
pay off all parking tickets and overdue rent. The same year in 
Louisiana, fliers were distributed in African-American areas to tell 
voters, falsely, that if they did not want to vote on Election Day, they 
could still vote three days later.

What is particularly discouraging this year is the degree to which 
government officials have been involved in such efforts. In South 
Dakota's hard-fought statewide Congressional race, poll workers turned 
away Native American voters who could not provide photo identification, 
which many of them do not have, even though the law clearly says 
identification is not required. In one heavily Native American county, 
the top elections official, who is white, wrote out instructions saying 
no one could vote without photo identification. In Texas, a white 
district attorney threatened to prosecute students at Prairie View A&M, 
a large, predominantly African-American campus, if they registered to 
vote from the school, even though they are entitled to by law.

And in Florida, the secretary of state, Glenda Hood, had a list prepared 
to purge felons from the voter rolls; the list had many errors and would 
have turned away an untold number of qualified black voters. She 
abandoned the list only when news organizations sued to make it public, 
then pointed out its many inaccuracies.

In addition to these blatant forms of vote suppression, elections 
officials have been adopting policies that appear neutral on their face 
but often have the effect, and perhaps the intent, of disproportionately 
disenfranchising minorities. With huge registration drives under way 
among minorities in swing states, some secretaries of state have adopted 
bizarrely rigid rules for new registrations.

In Florida, Ms. Hood is insisting that thousands of registration forms 
on which a citizenship box is not checked are invalid, even though 
elsewhere on the forms each applicant has sworn that he or she is a 
citizen. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell was insisting 
until recently that any registration form that came in on anything less 
than 80-pound paper stock had to be rejected. The continued 
disenfranchisement of convicted felons in many states also has an 
unmistakable racial component.

The suppression of minority votes has continued because it is perceived 
as a winning tactic, and because it is rarely punished. This needs to 
change.

Trying to prevent members of minorities from voting can be a violation 
of federal and state law. Election officials, poll watchers and voters 
should be on the lookout for vote suppression, and should report it. And 
prosecutors should look for criminal cases to pursue. A few high-profile 
prosecutions of political operatives, and even elections officials, 
would go a long way toward ending a disgraceful American tradition.

/Making Votes Count: Editorials in this series remain online at 
nytimes.com/makingvotescount 
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/campaign-issues.html?pagewanted=all>./


Copyright 2004 
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> The New 
York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/> | Home 
<http://www.nytimes.com/> | Privacy Policy 
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/privacy.html> | Search 
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/advanced/> | Corrections 
<http://www.nytimes.com/corrections.html> | RSS 
<http://www.nytimes.com/rss> | Help 
<http://www.nytimes.com/membercenter/sitehelp.html> | Back to Top 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/opinion/07thu2.html?pagewanted=print&position=#top>