If you can't win 'em over, chase 'em away

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Dec 03, 2009 at 14:35:21 PM MST

Dominic Holden:

Republicans want cops to patrol polling places where minorities vote, take photos of those voters, and use lists to challenge their voter registrations. The RNC argued that, now that a black man is in the White House and black people have been elected to numerous offices, those tactics couldn't amount to voter intimidation. They said that scrutinizing minority voters-in the name of stopping widespread voter fraud calculatedly perpetrated by lower-income minority groups-should be unbridled.

Federal judge Dickinson Debevoise (from the NYTimes link):

"It does not appear that the R.N.C.'s incentive to suppress minority votes has changed since 1982," Judge Debevoise wrote, citing statistics showing that most minority voters support Democrats. "It appears that the R.N.C. has been largely unsuccessful in its efforts to attract minority voters. Until it is able to do so, it will have an incentive to engage in the type of voter suppression that it allegedly committed in the actions that led to the enactment and modification of the consent decree."

The judge dismissed arguments by Republican advocates that voter fraud is a growing problem, and said suppression of minority voters was a more serious issue.

If you've been following this blog for any amount of time, you're familiar with the amount of posts we've written on the GOP's efforts to intimidate Democratic voters from the ballot box, evoking the myth of voter fraud. In short, Republicans want to discourage poor and minority voters - traditionally Democratic supporters - from going to the ballot box. But voter fraud is not a problem. The Bush administration made voter fraud a top priority for the Department of Justice - including pressuring US attorneys to pursue bogus fraud cases during election season - and found little or no actual cases of fraud. Most of the successful cases prosecuted by the Bush DoJ involved registration cards "mistakenly filled out" or voters misunderstanding their eligibility. Little or no deliberate criminal intent was discovered.

The bad news in this story is that the RNC is likely to appeal Debevois' decision. I say "bad," because the conservative justices on the SCOTUS seem to want to put Republican electoral victories ahead of voter rights, if previous decisions on voter ID are any indication. It's quite conceivable Roberts and Scalia will agree with the RNC's argument and allow authorities to photograph and interrogate voters on their way to the polls...