How far will they go to steal this election? When Congress passed the Help America Vote Act following the 2000 debacle, presumably it intended exactly what the Act's title said: help Americans vote. If a citizen had difficulty, he could file suit to seek redress. The Justice Department is now claiming it and it alone has the right to "bring lawsuits to enforce its provisions. These include a requirement that states provide "uniform and nondiscriminatory" voting systems, and give provisional ballots to those who say they have registered but whose names do not appear on the rolls." In other words, if you object to a poll tax or some other impediment to your ability to vote, you have to petition DOJ to get Mr. Ashcroft to take action. Now, if you're in a swing state that's very close, what are the odds that Mr. Ashcroft will agree with you?
What does a former lawyer in DOJ's voting-rights section think about this claim? "It is pretty rare for the Department of Justice to take a position that there is no private right of action to enforce a federal statute guaranteeing voting rights."
Here's more about the tactics being used by the RNC, with a little historical background. One of the favorites seems to be sending mail to newly-registered voters, and if it's returned, challenge.
In 1986, the RNC tried to have 31,000 voters, most of them black, removed from the rolls in Louisiana when a party mailer was returned. The consent decrees that resulted prohibited the party from engaging in anti-fraud initiatives that target minorities or conduct mail campaigns to "compile voter challenge lists."Undeliverable mail is the basis for this year's challenges in Ohio. Republicans also sent mail to about 130,000 voters in Philadelphia, another heavily black and Democratic stronghold.
Now, I don't how that looks to you, but that seems to be in direct violation of the courts' rulings in the 1986 case.
Update: Here's a contemporary example from Ohio.
Posted by Linkmeister at October 29, 2004 09:07 AM