Block the Vote

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October 15, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

 

 

Block the Vote

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

 

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