Last month John Pappageorge, a Republican state representative in Michigan, told a journalist that the Republicans would do poorly if they failed to "suppress the Detroit vote." Detroit, of course, is 83% black.

Democratic officials expressed their outrage, and Pappageorge eventually apologized for his words, but his statement spoke to a bigger truth: Republicans continue to actively suppress black and minority votes in order to win elections through intimidation, misinformation, and tampering with voter rolls and records. In 2000, the black voters who were not allowed to vote would have almost certainly swung the election in Al Gore's favor. And the practice continues: a recent report from the NAACP and the People for the American Way Foundation documents suppression tactics in use right now. http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oId=16368

Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote a column describing armed, plain-clothes officers from the Florida state police (which reports directly to Governor Jeb Bush) going into the homes of elderly black voters and interrogating them, supposedly as part of an investigation into voter fraud. While ostensibly random, several of those questioned were members of the Orlando League of Voters, a group that has been very successful in mobilizing the city's black vote. According to Herbert, this supposed "investigation" has resulted in a blanket of fear, leaving organizers afraid to work and voters afraid of contact with campaign workers.

Four years ago, Florida election officials removed over 52,000 voters from the rolls under the guise of "cleansing" the list of felons. Over 90% of those purged were not guilty of any crime and 54% were African-American, a group which, in Florida, are likely to vote Democratic over 90% of the time. The company that provided the purge list warned Florida officials that thousands of eligible voters would likely be disenfranchised in the process, but Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State who also served as state campaign manager for George W. Bush, went forward with the purge anyway. The result was thousands of voters not allowed to vote in an election that was decided by just over 500 votes.

It's not just Florida. A joint report from People for the American Way Foundation and the NAACP "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today" highlights recent attempts to suppress African-American and minority voting, documenting instances of the following:

· Challenges and threats against individual voters at the polls by armed private guards, off-duty law enforcement officers, local creditors, fake poll monitors, and poll workers and managers.
· Signs posted at the polling place warning of penalties for "voter fraud" or "non-citizen" voting, or illegally urging support for a candidate.
· Poll workers "helping" voters fill out their ballots, and instructing them on how to vote.
· Criminal tampering with voter registration rolls and records.
· Fliers and radio ads containing false information about where, when and how to vote, voter eligibility, and the false threat of penalties.
· Internal memos from party officials in which the explicit goal of suppressing black voter turnout is outlined.

Here are a few other incidents highlighted in the report and elsewhere:

In 2003, in Pennsylvania, men with clipboards bearing official-looking insignias were reportedly dispatched to African American neighborhoods. Tom Lindenfeld, who ran a counter-intimidation campaign for Democratic candidate John Street, said there were 300 cars with the decals resembling such federal agencies as the DEA and ATF and that the men were asking prospective voters for identification. In a post-election poll of 1000 African-American voters, seven percent said they had encountered such efforts.

In 2002, in Louisiana, fliers were distributed in African American communities stating, "'Vote!!! Bad Weather? No problem!!! If the weather is uncomfortable on election day [Saturday, December 7th], remember you can wait and cast your ballot on Tuesday, December 10th." In a separate incident, apparently targeting potential supporters of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Republican Party admitted to paying African American youths $75 to hold signs aloft on street corners in black neighborhoods that appeared to discourage African-Americans from voting.

Last month, in South Dakota, Native American voters were sent to the wrong polling places, and given misleading information about the ID they need to vote.

Stopping eligible voters from voting is a basic affront to democracy. It is an outrage for any political party to condone or encourage the practice, especially given the history of African-Americans and other minorities being disenfranchised in our country. In the vast majority of these cases, Republicans are the perpetrators or it's a Republican candidate that stands to benefit.

How They Could Steal the Election this Time
By Ronnie Dugger

"The secrecy of the ballot has been turned into the secrecy of the vote count." - David Stutsman

On November 2, millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.

***

The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire.

***

Rather than completely testing the vote-counting codes, there is some secretive testing of systems by three private companies that are chosen by the pro-voting-business National Association of State Election Directors. The companies consult obsolete pro-company and completely voluntary standards promulgated by the Federal Election Commission and get paid by the very companies whose equipment is being tested. The three private companies, speciously called Independent Testing Authorities, together constitute a Potemkin village to falsely assure the states and the voters of the security of the systems. Often their work is misrepresented as "federal testing." The states then test and "certify" the systems, and the local jurisdictions put on dog-and-pony-show "logic and accuracy tests," which are not capable of discovering hidden codes that would change vote totals.

***

... [I]n May 2002 Georgia agreed to pay Diebold $54 million for 19,000 DRE voting systems. ... At once Diebold set to manufacturing 282 of its AccuVote TS voting systems a day. Some of the earliest ones arriving in Georgia, sent out for use in the training of election workers, were left in a hotel conference room overnight, stolen and never recovered. Late that June the secret vote-counting codes inside nine to fourteen more of the Diebold machines were stolen. Diebold made an uncounted number of apparently illegal changes in the election-conducting code between June and November. The memory cards on which the votes on each of the computers were recorded on election day all over Georgia had no encryption. According to Rob Behler, who served as Diebold's production deployment manager in Georgia during the first half of that summer, those cards could be used to change the results manually, precinct by precinct.

The Nation, 29 July 2004 http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080304D.shtml

Suppression of Student Vote

A local Arizona Fox News reporter said that the University of Arizona Network of Feminist Student Activists (an affiliate of the Feminist Majority Foundation) might be committing an "unintentional felony" by registering out-of-state students to vote in Arizona. The feminist group was singled out at a student voter registration fair at the University of Arizona.

The Fox reporter interviewed an official with the Pima County Recorder's office, Chris Rhodes, who was quoted on-camera as saying that if students are "only here to attend school and their intention is to immediately return to where they came from when school is over then they are not residents of the state of Arizona for voting purposes and they cannot register to vote here." He erroneously stated that students would be committing a "felony offense" if they lied about their residency status.

The Arizona County Recorder official could not be more wrong. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lowered the voting age to 18. Voting is a federal right, and the rights of students to register to vote where they attend college is guaranteed by federal law in federal elections. The U.S. Supreme Court has expressly ruled that college communities must allow students to register to vote there (US v. Symm) and the Federal Voting Rights Act prohibits states from imposing "durational residency requirements."

Outraged over the apparent attempts to discourage students from voting, the students have formed a campus-wide coalition and are challenging the County Official 's statements. "We are redoubling our Get Out Her Vote registration activities," said Juliana Zuccaro, of the Network of Feminist Student Activists. "We're not going to be intimidated …. We are determined that students' voices are heard in this election and our issues addressed."

www.feminist.org

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oId=16362

Washington, D.C.
July 15, 2004

We must not let the election debacle we saw in 2000 happen again in 2004. We must do everything we can as a government and a free people to ensure that in this election, every voter has a chance to cast a vote that will be counted.

***

During the 2000 elections, the attention of the nation and the world was understandably focused on the voting fiasco in Florida.

Voters were confounded by confusing ballot forms.

Poorly trained poll workers gave voters bad information.

Voters were falsely told that polls were open when they were closed, and polls were closed when they should have been open.

People were wrongly purged from the voting rolls, and didn't find out until they arrived at the polling place, when it was too late.

In one of the closest presidential elections in our history, a tense recount revolved around the examination of hanging, dimpled and pregnant chads. After more than a month of uncertainty, the presidential election was decided by a single vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, ending the recount and leaving the nation bitterly divided.

While the greatest attention was paid to Florida, election problems were by no means limited to that state. In fact, a Caltech-MIT investigation launched immediately after the election estimated that nationwide, more than four million votes went uncounted during the 2000 election.

***

And as recent events in Florida have proven again, many of those problems will overwhelmingly disenfranchise poor and minority voters.
… In a troubling echo of the infamous "felon" purge list of 2000, the state of Florida this year distributed a new purge list to county election officials.

***

[T]he Miami Herald found more than 2,100 people on the list who had received clemency and in fact had every right to vote under state law. Just this past weekend, the world learned that the policy was even more troubling. Somehow, the state's database of "potential felons" to be purged, a list of nearly 48,000 names, contained just 61 Hispanic names, and in fact contained an overwhelming majority of African Americans.

In Florida, Hispanics of Cuban origin, who are the majority of Florida Hispanics, tend to vote Republican, while African Americans are largely Democratic voters. The state insists that despite the undeniable political implications, this was a mistake that somehow went unnoticed for months, while the state fought in court to keep the list secret.

Only because the news media went to court and demanded that the list be released under Florida's open records laws, and only because civil rights advocates fought for months, did the deep and discriminatory flaws in the state's policy become known. It took the news media just days to uncover the problems the state could not, or would not, find on its own.

***

Just last month, in South Dakota's special election for the U.S. House, Native American voters were sent to the wrong polling places, and given the wrong information about the identification they needed to present in order to vote.

Earlier this year, a district attorney in Waller County, Texas, challenged the right of students at a historically black college to register to vote -- the same county where nearly 30 years ago, a federal court order was required to prevent the local registrar from discriminating against the students.

In 2003 in Philadelphia, voters in African American areas were systematically challenged by men carrying clipboards, driving a fleet of sedans with magnetic signs designed to look like law enforcement insignia. The men were neither law enforcement nor poll workers.

In 2002 in Louisiana, flyers were distributed in African American communities telling voters they could go to the polls on Tuesday, December 10th -- three days after a state runoff election was held.

***

We are distributing millions of copies of the state-specific "Voters' Bill of Rights," a voter education tool tailored to reflect the voting laws and special circumstances of each state. The materials will be printed in English and Spanish (and Creole for distribution in Florida).

The Election Protection toll-free voter assistance hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE, is already up and running nationally, to provide voters with free legal advice and assistance, from now through Election Day and beyond.

***

We have been monitoring states to ensure that HAVA implementation does not unnecessarily burden voters, including the provisional balloting procedure that mandates that each state must provide a provisional ballot to any person who declares that he is registered and eligible to vote in a federal election.

***

It should be noted here that the massive problems caused by Florida's purge procedures are grounded in state law that permanently disenfranchises all people convicted of a felony, even after they have completed their sentence (unless they receive clemency). This sweeping permanent disenfranchisement places Florida among a small minority of states. People For the American Way Foundation is a partner in the national Right to Vote coalition, which is encouraging public consideration of the impact that laws erecting barriers to voting have on individuals and their communities. In the context of today's discussions I believe it is worth asking how democratic values are served by policies that stand in the way of people who are working to overcome past mistakes, rebuild their lives, and become full participants in their communities.

1 million black votes didn't count in the 2000 presidential election:
It's not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost
By Greg Palast

"First, let's shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida's black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote.

"This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county's procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage.

"In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote-spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing 1 million black voters' ballots."

San Francisco Chronicle, 20 June 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/20/ING2976LG61.DTL

Vanishing Votes
By Gregory Palast

"On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.

"First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. ... HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files."

The Nation, 17 May 2004
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040517&s=palast

Suppress the Vote?
By Bob Herbert

"State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November."

The New York Times
16 August 2004
http://nytimes.com/2004/08/16/opinion/16herbert.html?hp

also at the Arizona Daily Star http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/relatedarticles/35237.php

http://www.electionprotection2004.org

The Election Protection toll-free voter assistance hotline:

1-866-OUR-VOTE