New Report Examines "Voter Suppression" of Minorities
The NAACP and other civil rights leaders yesterday
charged that recent events suggest the Republican Party is
mounting a campaign to keep African Americans and other minority voters
away from the polls this November. In a new report, the NAACP and
People for the American Way cite incidents from Florida to Detroit.
NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said efforts at intimidation and
suppression, once a tool of Democrats in the Jim Crow South, "have
increasingly become the province of the Republican Party" as it seeks
to counter the overwhelming advantage Democrats enjoy among black
voters. Studies suggest that as many as 4 million to 6 million
voters were disenfranchised in 2000, either because registration
problems prevented qualified voters from casting ballots or because of
errors caused by faulty, outdated technology. In Florida, the
Civil Rights Commission found that black voters were 10 times as likely
as whites to have their ballots rejected, a trend also
found in other parts of the country. To prevent against a repeat, more
than 60 nonprofit groups have banded together to form a "Voter
Protection Coalition." The group is planning to have 25,000 volunteers
-- including 5,000 lawyers -- staff Election Day hotlines, videotape
polls and go to court if necessary. In the meantime, the coalition
has been collecting anecdotes that form the basis of yesterday's
report. Incidents such as the following are cited in the report:
The use of armed, plainclothes officers from the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement to question elderly black voters
in Orlando as part of a state investigation of voting irregularities in
the city's 2003 mayoral race, which critics said intimidated black
voters, potentially suppressing this year's turnout.
The barring of Native Americans from voting in
South Dakota's June primary after they were challenged to provide photo
identification, which is not required by state or federal law.
This year in Florida, the state ordered the
implementation of a "potential felon" purge list to remove voters from
the rolls, in a disturbing echo of the infamous 2000 purge, which
removed thousands of eligible voters, primarily African-Americans, from
the rolls. The state abandoned the plan after news media
investigations revealed that the 2004 list also included thousands of
people who were eligible to vote, and heavily targeted
African-Americans while virtually ignoring Hispanic voters. [more ] and [more ] and [more ]
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