A voter registration group and the NAACP have sued Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican, for failing to process over 40,000 voter registrations collected since last spring. Many of the new voters are minorities. If they can’t vote, that could tip two close Georgia races to Republican candidates, including one that may determine control of the U.S. Senate for the last two years of President Obama’s second term.
This lawsuit followed a scathing dissenting opinion issued yesterday by Judge Richard Posner, a federal appellate bench heavyweight, involving Republican legislative initiatives in Wisconsin purportedly aimed at preventing voting fraud that Posner slammed as nothing more than voter suppression. Posner’s opinion carries exceptional weight because he’s a conservative who was appointed by President Reagan.
Of course, it’s no secret Republicans try to keep Democratic-leaning voters from voting. This has become a major tactic of theirs in recent years, in which they invest huge financial and manpower resources, that has spread nationwide but especially focuses on crucial swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and places like Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas — anywhere GOP office holders can enact election laws and/or manage elections through their control of legislatures and/or state and local officials responsible for managing elections.
Apart from seeking to manipulate election laws and administration to their advantage, Republican operatives use a variety of other tactics to suppress Democratic votes, ranging from distributing flyers containing disinformation about where and when to vote, to limiting voting machines in poor and minority precincts in order to create long waiting lines at polling places that discourage people from voting. Sending operatives to polling places who challenge voters as they sign in also create delays and long lines.
An exceptionally despicable tactic was deployed for the 2004 election. The Republican National Committee, the GOP’s national governing body, coordinated an operating that used secret “caging lists” of registered voters to remove black soldiers deployed to in Iraq and Afghanistan from voting lists. The technique consisted of sending registered letters to home addresses of soldiers known to be deployed overseas, and when the letters returned unclaimed, challenging the soldiers’ voter registrations on grounds they didn’t live there anymore. (You don’t have to be physically present in your home; these registrations were valid and these soldiers had a right to vote.) http://www.gregpalast.com/massacre-of-the-buffalo-soldiers/ Don’t believe the GOP’s claims they defend soldier votes; that only applies to white soldiers voting for Republicans. If you’re black, or they have other reason to suspect you of being a vote for Democrats, they don’t want you to vote even if you’re wearing an Army or Marine uniform and packing a rifle in a combat zone. Republicans have no special affection for the troops; they tried to eliminate combat pay for troops in Iraq in 2003; it was the Democrats who blocked that move in Congress.
Their cynical strategy of trying to win elections, not by getting more votes, but by interfering with the other side’s right to vote, has cast the GOP as a party that sends Americans to fight and die for democracy abroad while they fight to keep American citizens from voting at home in their own country. It’s not without costs. While Republicans don’t appear to care about criticism or bad press, the strategy also is generating a backlash that sometimes hurts GOP candidates. Angry minority voters have endured the obstacles put in their way and voted in record numbers, a factor in President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories. The GOP campaign to suppress voting has spawned voter registration drives and voting rights protection campaigns. And a slew of lawsuits, many of which have gone against the GOP.
This Georgia lawsuit, in other words, isn’t an isolated event. Voting rights advocates and groups like the NAACP and ACLU have spent years preparing their legal challenges against GOP vote suppression campaigns. From a number of such lawsuits, they’ve gained experience in what works and doesn’t work in the courts, and have scored legal victories.
In the Georgia case, the GOP secretary of state has held up the 40,000-plus voter registrations for “investigation of possible fraud” and because the voter information submitted was “not suitable.” The outcome of legal cases always depends on the specifics of the case facts and applicable laws, and being unfamiliar with those in this case, I’m not in a position to speculate about what the court’s decision might be in this case, although based on the pattern established in similar cases, the GOP’s chances are iffy at best of winning a legal victory. But that’s beside the point. They doesn’t necessarily expect to win the legal case, and don’t have to: If a decision is delayed until after the election, and these registrations remain in limbo in the meantime, they will achieve their objective of depriving the Democrats of these votes in next month’s election. And that might be enough for their candidates to win an election that polls show to be excruciatingly close.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/10/13/voter-registration-drive-in-georgia-leads-to-lawsuit/
(Disclosure: The author of this article served as a volunteer voting rights attorney in the 2004 and 2012 elections.)
