On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> How much of this is going on?
It seems extraordinarily systematic in Florida. One gets the impression that this is how every Republican election official sees their job: to supress the maximum number of votes. When you see the extent of it, it casts the GOTV fight in an entirely different light. The Dems may have an advantage in physical volunteers and in funding for those groups. But vote suppression plays to the main Repug strengths, especially the willingness to play dirty. And in states where they control the courthouses, the picture becomes one of an organized, professional team who controls the referee playing against a larger team but with a much tougher task: the guards against the inmates.
NOW w/ Bill Moyer and David Branccaccio had Judith Browne on the other night. She's from the Advancement Project, the group bringing the suit Jenny mentioned (and the same group Connie Rice works for, for people who identify it that way). According to her, 10,000 voters in Dade and Broward county *alone* might be disenfranchised if their suit is refused. Those are sizeable numbers. And a suppressed registration is worth more than a successful one, because not every new registrant votes (the majority don't). But every suppressed one doesn't.
Jenny rightly points out that if you don't mark twice that you're a citizen, your form is thrown out in Florida. But that's only one of many illegalities on that form -- things that you are under no legal obligation to put down but which, if you don't fill them in (or fill them in wrong, in their discretionary judgment), they'll throw out the form -- like your driver's license number and your social security number. There are also boxes to check that you've never had a criminal record and are mentally competent, boxes with no legal meaning, since even if you check No, the registration officials have the legal obligation to check. If a No won't save you, then why is an unchecked box reason to invalidate? The main point is that each of these invalidation options provide several excuses for officials to make a mistake and invalidate you invalidly -- and there is sizeable evidence that is precisely their collective goal (evidence that starts with this form, which is put out by the state, and is in itself clearly a voter suppression device). And as Jenny also mentioned, Florida is pioneering a myriad ways to lock in these "mistakes" until after the election. Your friend's need for repeated efforts just to find out what happened, never mind to change it, seems like SOP. Third party groups like Advancement Project have sued to see the disallowed forms -- but so far Florida has successfully defended against them in court. And they only have to defend for 10 more days and then it will be too late.
It's getting to the point where I'm getting more afraid of voter suppression than electronic theft. When you add the size of the voter suppression to their own voter registration efforts (which include their own systematic dirty tricks, such as destroying democratic registration forms), it's conceivable that through the sum of the two, they could actually come on top in this battle. I sure hope that's not true. But I was happier before I thought it.
Michael