Ghosts of Joe Slovo

I'm going to reporduce here some recent blog posts that I've helped shepherd as part of my day job.

I'm putting these up (1) because most of my two readers are progressives and they need to know about this stuff, especially in an election year and (2) they directly relate to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movemement.

The are a comprehensive look at the recent war on voting rights carried out by conservatives, often using partisan organizations, and which culminated in the the complete subversion of the national voting rights enforcement infrastructure for partisan political gain at the Department of Justice. You may remember something about a scandal involving US Attorneys. Well, that was about this stuff.

Here's the first one, on GOP voter suppression dirty tricks in a Dallas Congressional race in 2006, originally posted on the Project Vote blog, Voting Matters:

Art Levine, writing at the Huffington Post, has an article up that sheds fresh light on a stunning example of voter suppression in a Texas Congressional race from 2006 and the complicity of the Department of Justice in letting it stand. He starts this way,

Since the resignations of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others involved in the U.S. Attorneys and Civil Rights Division scandals, you might expect that the Justice Department would come clean and show a new commitment to voting rights.

Think again. At recent hearings before a House Judiciary subcommittee, new revelations emerged about how the Justice Department failed to investigate illegal mailers sent to African-Americans in Dallas threatening criminal punishment if they registered to vote through a community reform group called ACORN."

There are two striking aspects to the story. First, Levine does a great job connecting the dots between partisan attempts to shape the electorate and the politicization that took hold like a cancer in the belly of the Department of Justice.

Moreover, the Justice Department's response was part of a striking pattern of indifference to alleged intimidation violations. In fact, The Huffington Post has learned, President Bush's Justice Department hasn't brought a single prosecution or lawsuit in more than seven years on behalf of any African-American voters who faced direct voter intimidation threats and challenges -- despite receiving, by some estimates, roughly 12,000 criminal civil rights complaints of all kinds annually.

'The Justice Department hasn't handled these cases because they've had an unreasonable focus on voter fraud. They're more interested in disenfranchising voters," observes Tanya Clay House, the Public Policy Director of People for the American Way. (The Justice Department, and the local and national FBI, declined to answer questions about the Dallas incident and the broader lack of prosecutions aimed at voter intimidation.)'

The partisan interest in disenfranchising voters, which the Department of Justice had rushed to support under the stewardship of Alberto Gonzales and which does not seem to be abating under the new Attorney General Michael Mukasey, can be seen in the swarm of attacks leveled against the community organization ACORN, an advocate for low-income families.

"Indeed, part of what amounts to a wide-ranging GOP disenfranchisement strategy is attacking the non-partisan low-income advocacy group ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The organization has been a favorite target of Republicans promoting the myth of widespread voter fraud because of its success in registering Democratic-leaning minority voters since 2004, according to reports by McClatchy Newspapers, The American Prospect, and other outlets. The drumbeat of voter-fraud hype is then used to justify a host of GOP-backed laws and policies, from restrictive photo ID voting laws to the Justice Department' promotion of mass purges of registered voters. Yet voter fraud, in fact, is so rare that even an intensive, four-year anti-fraud initiative by the Justice Department couldn't even find one person in the country to charge with impersonating another voter -- out of nearly 215 million votes cast in federal elections."

The other striking aspect is Levine's clear outlining of the method by which operatives bent on keeping certain voters away from the polls run voter suppression operations. Levine goes step-by-step through the voter suppression scheme implemented in the 2006 Dallas-area Congressional race, from using inflammatory and misleading press released to generate bogus stories of voter fraud in the local media, to creating attack ads based on those media stories, to circulating fliers linking the group named in the press release to suspicions of voter fraud, to a letter to the local District Attorney claiming the Democratic candidate's 2004 campaign had engaged in voter fraud. The entire scheme, Levine notes,

perfectly symbolizes the no-holds-barred Republican politics of voter fraud. The intimidating flier was part of a brazen vote-suppression and smear campaign designed to undermine a Democratic candidate, Harriet Miller, in a tight local race in 2006 to challenge Texas House Rep. Tony Goolsby in a racially mixed North Dallas district.

The entire article should be read by everyone concerned with defending voting rights and by those interested in being able to clearly identify voter suppression attempts in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential Election.