State Rep. John Pappageorge, R-Mich., committed a major gaffe earlier this year by telling the Detroit Free Press, \If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."" He was referring, of course, to the fact that Detroit, which is 83 percent black, often swings Michigan to the Democrats. He might as well have been speaking about Milwaukee, Miami, Cleveland or Philadelphia because there have been documented reports of Republican attempts to suppress Democratic votes, particularly black Democratic votes, in nearly every battleground state in the country.
Last week, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a co-chair of President Bush's campaign in Wisconsin, refused Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's request for additional ballots. This left the state's most populous city, which is expecting a record voter turnout, with fewer ballots than in 2000 or 2002. After hundreds protested and media sources all over the nation blasted the decision, Walker relented and grudgingly handed over the ballots. But the intent was clear.
In Concord, N.H., former Republican consultant Allen Raymond pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy for his role in helping Milo Enterprises, an Idaho company on the Republican payroll, to jam the get-out-the-vote phone lines of the New Hampshire Democratic Party on Election Day in 2002. In February, 2003, federal authorities announced they were launching an investigation of the incident, and Republican State Committee Chairman Chuck McGee abruptly stepped down the very same day.
In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, chose to enforce an archaic law requiring voter registration cards to be printed on 80-pound stock paper. With only a few days until the Ohio registration deadline, such enforcement could have thrown out tens of thousands of registrations simply for being printed on normal paper. Though he backed down on this issue after a deafening public outcry, he has also inhibited voting rights by refusing to provide provisional ballots to newly registered voters who come to the wrong polling location and do not have time to get to their correct one. He also denied ballots to voters who filled out registration forms without providing driver's licenses or social security numbers even though they are allowed under law to show some other form of identification at the polls on Election Day.
In Nevada, former employees of Sproul & Associates, a company hired by the Republican National Committee to run a voter registration organization called Voters Outreach of America, reported that their supervisors explicitly sorted out and destroyed Democratic voter registrations.
In Florida, there are too many voting rights violations to recount in the space of this article, so I'll just mention the biggest one. Last May, it came out that the state possessed a list of thousands of people who were being purged from the voter rolls supposedly because they were ex-felons. However, Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Glenda Hood, incidentally the co-chairs of George Bush's Florida campaign, refused to release the names on the list. It took massive demonstrations by voting rights advocates, $100,000 in state legal fees and a court order to force the state to release the list. An analysis by People For the American Way Foundation revealed many of the names on the list were of people with similar names to ex-felons, people who were ex-felons but had had their voting rights restored, and hundreds of people who were on the list for no reason at all. The study also found that a wildly disproportionate number of people on the list were blacks living in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade and Broward Counties.
The point of this piece is not simply to grind a partisan axe, although given the abundant evidence, it isn't hard to do so. We all need to realize, though, that voter suppression is alive and well, and it is almost certain to hit this very campus in less than two weeks. My piece next week will specifically lay out your rights at the polls, but for now, lock this clearly into your minds: If you are a U.S. citizen and have lived in the state of Wisconsin for more than 10 days, you can vote in Wisconsin no matter what (Minnesotans: you will not lose your tuition reciprocity if you register to vote here). If you meet both of these qualifications but are still unable to cast your vote, call the Election Protection hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE. If you are interested in helping protect the vote in Milwaukee on Election Day, come to the Election Protection Coalition info session tonight at 7:00 p.m. in room 1221 Humanities.
Nick Barbash is a sophomore majoring in political science and international studies. He can be reached at opinion@dailycardinal.com. Part two of his series on getting out the vote will run next Thursday in The Daily Cardinal.
