Supress the Vote

According to the WSJ (subscription required; link courtesy of Political Wire), both the Democratic and Republican Parties are involved in efforts to suppress the other side's voters. Which one does not belong?

Democrats "see suppression efforts in Republicans' well-advertised plans to vigorously check the registrations of those who show up to vote. In their eyes, such efforts are designed to convince voters that trying to cast a ballot will be too much of a hassle."

Republicans "see suppression efforts in Democrats' attempts to sow doubts about Mr. Bush's character and his fealty to social conservatives. They believe Democrats will use the Internet to spread fresh rumors about Mr. Bush's youthful behavior among conservative Christians."

One sounds very much like voter intimidation while the other sounds like free speech. A bunch of yahoos on Democratic Underground does not voter suppression make.

Meanwhile, Ed Gillespie—chair of the same Republican National Committee that hired the voter registration firm Sproul and Associates, who misrepresented themselves in several states and destroyed Democratic voter registration cards—accuses the Democratic Party of Tammany Hall–era voter registration fraud:

Republican Party chairman Ed Gillespie charged on Sunday that Democratic-backed groups had registered thousands of fraudulent voters.

In Ohio, he said there were "people with fictitious characters being registered to vote, Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins. In New Mexico, we've seen 13- and 15-year-olds get registration cards in the mail they didn't even ask for. In Nevada, we've had illegal immigrants being registered."

In other words:

In [swing state], we will challenge Democratic voters.

No wonder The Economist reports that 90% of Republicans assume that the election will be fair, whereas nearly 2/3 of Democrats have declining confidence in the election.

This is all astonishing and scary stuff—but here's the deal. I think we ought to put the most apocalyptic visions out of mind. (Though the story about 60,000 mailed absentee ballots "missing" from Democratic Broward County is almost titillating, it's so screwy. . . .) I'll say this: This election has turned a significant stripe of the GOP leadership into a roving band of motherfuckers. But it's still entirely reasonable and probable that GOP staffers, while hoping that their guy wins, would not entertain cheating (Stroll and Associates, an extension of the motherfucking GOP leadership, notwithstanding).

Anyone will tell you that the sort of voter suppression some GOP bandits or Democratic doomsayers envision actually comes, if it happens, likely in the form of delays: polls being moved; polls opening late (forcing people to abort and get back to work); polls closing early; excessive voter challenges (creating bottlenecks, which may mean that voters leave without voting); etc. This is what voter supression looks like:

Thousands of Cook County voters were disenfranchised after the March primary, their votes thrown out due to election judge mistakes.

Records show most of those mistakes were made in Chicago precincts.

Provisional ballots, used for the first time in Illinois, were issued to 9,982 Cook County voters because their registrations couldn't be verified at the polling sites that day.

Post-primary research led to 8,615 of those ballots being rejected, but that includes more than 4,000 that were rejected because voters cast them at the wrong precinct or didn't fill out an affidavit with the ballot.

Voter intimidation is a soft bigotry—not the product of menacing Excel spreadsheets and Rovian machinations (Florida's distinctly flawed voter-purge data notwithstanding). The best defense against voter intimidation is, well, voter access protection statutes at the federal level. But observation also helps, and if you have the legal background to help with the Election Protection Program, consider doing so.

Posted by Kriston at October 27, 2004 11:57 AM