Archive for October 8th, 2008

OUTRAGE: NYT: Voter Purging Efforts in Louisiana and Other States Appear to Be Illegal

Scalia Rejects Third-Party Candidate from Appearing on Louisiana Ballot

I’ve written before about the controversial efforts of purging newly-registered voters from the rolls here in the Great State of Louisiana. Today, the New York Times (a paper Governor Palin is suddenly fond of quoting) is reporting that the voter purging efforts in many swing states appear to be illegal, and unfortunately, Louisiana is on the list (though we’re not considered one of those swing states).

In addition to this controversy, Louisiana has also battled court cases protesting the state’s registration deadline for placing nominees on our ballot. Apparently, the deadline occurred on the same day Hurricane Gustav hit, a storm that devastated parts of Baton Rouge (where the Secretary of State’s office is located) and forced the Secretary to extend the qualification period, though, importantly, this extension was allegedly not adequately advertised. The Secretary of State eventually denied the requests of the Libertarian and Socialists parties from being on the ballot. The Libertarian candidate, Bob Barr, sued, and the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court; they rejected Barr’s argument (more later).

Back to the New York Times. Quoting:

Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

Notably:

The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.

This is unfortunate.

Although much attention this year has been focused on the millions of new voters being added to the rolls by the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama, there has been far less notice given to the number of voters being dropped from those same rolls.

States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.

The six states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Some are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.

Some of the states are improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters.

In addition to the six swing states, three more states appear to be violating federal law. Alabama and Georgia seem to be improperly using Social Security information to screen registration applications from new voters. And Louisiana appears to have removed thousands of voters after the federal deadline for taking such action.

Under federal law, election officials are supposed to use the Social Security database to check a registration application only as a last resort, if no record of the applicant is found on state databases, like those for driver’s licenses or identification cards.

We’re removing voters EVEN AFTER THE DEADLINE.

THOUSANDS OF VOTERS AFTER THE DEADLINE.

Anyone who believes in the rule of the law and in a fair and equitable democracy should be outraged by these efforts. Purging voters from the rolls after the federal deadline is a violation of the law, and these efforts don’t just affect our political parties; they undermine our ability to function as a representative democracy.

Even more disturbing:

In three states — Colorado, Louisiana and Michigan — the number of people purged from the election rolls since Aug. 1 far exceeds the number who may have died or relocated during that period.

In other words, this isn’t responsible oversight; it’s out and out disenfranchisement.

The Secretary of State is duty-bound to correct these discrepancies and respond to these charges of illegal purging and disenfranchisement. Our Secretary of State should celebrate the increased voter registration, and he should resist using his office in order to disenfranchise voters who may not subscribe to his particular political agenda. I can only hope that Mr. Dardenne is instructing his office to adhere to the law and the deadlines proscribed by federal law.

But this is not comforting:

In Louisiana, at least 18,000 people were dropped from the rolls in the five weeks after July 23. Over the same period, at least 1,600 people moved out of state and at least 3,300 died.

That is a total of 13,100 voters removed.

A spokesman for the Louisiana secretary of state said that about half of the numbers of the voters removed from the rolls were people who moved within the state or who died. The remaining 11,000 or so people seem to have been removed by local officials for other reasons that were not clear, the spokesman said.

Secretary Dardenne, a Republican who considered running for the United States Senate this year, needs to make those reasons clear.

Why have over ten thousand voters been denied their fundamental right to vote in our representative democracy?

And getting back to the story about a third-party candidate taking his case against Louisiana all the way to the top: Perhaps it is also appropriate to ask why the inclusion of a third-party candidate on our State’s ballot could possibly become a case worthy of the Supreme Court’s attention.

With all due respect to the Secretary, the correct response about the verdict is:

“Of course, it’s unfortunate that this dispute wasted the time of the highest court in our democracy. My office would never attempt to subvert or neglect an eligible candidate from seeking any office, but we must adhere to deadlines to ensure equal opportunity.”

But unfortunately, they couldn’t issue such a statement, because as the New York Times points out, in Louisiana, deadlines are meaningless, depending, of course, on whether you’re hoping to be enfranchised or disenfranchised.

Instead, the statement was:

“Obviously we’re pleased that we will not have to reprint the presidential ballots, which already have been mailed to military and overseas voters.” Dardenne said. “Reprinting would have resulted in confusion, increased expense to the taxpayers, a setback in the absentee-by-mail voting process and, potentially delayed election results.”

Wow! Our arbitrary deadlines for our own purposes were held up, even as we allegedly violate deadlines for purging our voter rolls!

And guess who decided all of this?

Antonin Scalia!

Under Supreme Court rules, the case was presented to Justice Antonin Scalia who referred the case to the entire court. The Court denied the application in a one-sentence decision.

Monroe Man Arrested for Threatening and Yelling Racist Slur At Ouachita Parish Registrar of Voters

And it makes The Smoking Gun and, no doubt, will soon make the national wires. Quoting:

OCTOBER 8–Angered by a delay in the receipt of his voter registration card, a Louisiana man today threatened election officials, claiming that he urgently needed to cast a ballot to “keep the n****r out of office,” according to police. Wade Williams, 75, was arrested this morning on a felony terrorizing charge after allegedly calling the Registrar of Voters and warning that he would come to the state office and empty his shotgun unless he got his registration card. Using profanity and racial slurs, Williams told a state official “about needing to vote to ‘keep the n****r out of office,” according to an Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office affidavit, a copy of which you’ll find here. Though the document does not name the candidate to which Williams is so violently opposed, it seems likely he was referring to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. After being arrested at his Monroe home, Williams was booked into the Ouachita Correctional Center, where the below mug shot was snapped. En route to the jail, he “continued his ‘tirade’ about n****s and also stated that he had a shotgun, but had it hidden at his residence,” reported Lt. Michael Judd. (2 pages)

Not This Time

Updated with video: BloggerInterrupted interviews supporters outside of a Palin rally in Strongsville, Ohio. “Breathtaking ignorance” is how he describes it.

The talking heads and the national blogosphere are all over Senator John McCain’s and Governor Sarah Palin’s latest attempt to tie Senator Barack Obama to William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, an organization (if you can even call it that) which attempted to detonate small, homemade bombs in and around government buildings during the 1960s, as an expression of defiance against the Vietnam War. A serious crime, to be sure, and one that was committed when Obama was only eight years old.

After going on the run for nearly a decade, Ayers and his wife turned themselves in to the federal government, only to see the charges against them dropped because of prosecutorial incompetence.  Since then, both he and his wife have apparently rehabilitated their lives (if their standing in the community is to be taken seriously, though his remarks about “not bombing enough” definitely undermine his credibility), and Ayers is now a university professor, an education advocate, and, believe it or not, a man who has received bipartisan support in Chicago.

He has worked with Republicans and Democrats, and his work with Obama was on a project created by an Ambassador from the Reagan administration. NPR explains:

The Obama campaign says he first met Ayers in 1995, when Obama became chair of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million fund that awarded grants to groups trying to implement new programs to improve inner city education in Chicago.

Walter Annenberg, a lifelong Republican and former ambassador who was appointed by Presidents Nixon and Reagan, funded an ambitious program to reform urban education in many cities in the mid 1990s. Ayers was an important member of the group that developed and wrote the grant proposal to the Annenberg Foundation.

Obama and Ayers attended at least six meetings together over six years, Annenberg Challenge records show, and those knowledgeable of the school reform group say it is likely there were other informal sessions of the group that they both attended. But no one on the board or on the Annenberg Challenge staff remembers Obama being any closer to Ayers than to any other member of the board. The Annenberg board also included several civic, business and education leaders, many of them Republicans.

By the way, six meetings over six years equals one meeting per year.

The truth is uncomfortable, because it speaks directly to the cynical proclivity of people like Governor Palin to disingenuously play up this relationship as a way of casting doubt on Obama’s patriotism and his loyalties (all the while neglecting to tell Americans the real context of this relationship and Mr. Ayers’s numerous ties to elected Republican officials).

And by extension, it is an attempt to play directly into the divisive and, quite frankly, racist memes about Obama’s character and his judgment, lending credibility to all of the racist and inflammatory claims propounded by various, anonymous e-mailers.

There’s a reason people at McCain campaign rallies were heard shouting out racist hate speech and yelling out things like “terrorist” and “kill him” as a response to this ridiculousness.

For all of the talk about Obama’s judgment, one has to seriously doubt the judgment of a campaign that would purposely seek to stoke the flames of racism and divisiveness in order to tear down a campaign. Such a tactic is not honorable, and it does not put our country first. It is a smear, directed only at low-information voters and people who allow their news to be filtered through by talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly– all men who have a demonstrated record of dishonesty and cloaked bigotry. More from NPR:

“It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier,” said former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson, who worked with both Obama and Ayers over the years. “It’s ridiculous. There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It’s nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It’s so silly.”

Nelson says her fellow Republicans “might snort when they hear the name Bill Ayers, because they know he comes from a wealthy family, they know he became a radical activist early in his life … but beyond just snorting, I don’t think anyone gives it another thought.”

“I don’t remember ever hearing anyone raise concerns or questions or concerns about [Ayers'] background,” says Anne Hallett, who has worked closely with Ayers on the Annenberg Challenge grant and with Obama on education and other community and legislative matters. “And that included everybody I was engaged with,” including prominent Republicans, and corporate and civic leaders in Chicago, Hallett adds.

Hallett calls this attack on Obama’s association with Ayers and the Annenberg Challenge by further association, “a smear campaign. It’s a political diatribe that has no basis in fact. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was an extremely positive initiative. It was well-vetted, thorough, and the fact that it is now is being used for political purposes is, in my opinion, outrageous.”

In short, Palin and the McCain campaign are now engaging in the worst, most dishonest type of politics. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think McCain is an honorable man who has served his country throughout his life, and I have to believe- in my heart of hearts- that he can’t stand this line of attack. Incidentally, there was an article on Politico today that basically speaks to this sentiment: McCain probably hates this strategy.

But he is going negative. He is building his case on a tenuous web of misleading fear-mongering. And ultimately, he is writing his own history.