Subject: [Homestead] KKK alive and well in Florida voter attack
Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2004 08:37:49 -0700
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
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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.