Ghosts of Joe Slovo

This was originally posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters and at Project Vote's diary on DailyKos.

Steve Rosenfeld, writing in the journal Social Policy, has authored a comprehensive look at the recent history of partisan attacks on the voting process itself and the unfolding attempts to roll back all of the voting rights gains of the past 50 years that have gained speed and urgency under the Bush Administration.

Pointing out that modern voter suppression attempts and larger projects to reshape the entire electorate to favor conservatives no longer rely on the open fear and intimidation that characterized past practices from American history, Rosenfeld opens his in-depth survey with this observation,

“Jim Crow has returned to American elections, only in the 21st century he is apt to be a lawyer carrying a folder filled with briefing papers, proposed legislation and talking points about “voter fraud” and protecting the sanctity of the vote.”

The entire article, which Social Policy has placed outside their subscriber wall (pdf), is worth reading in its entirety.

From the article, here’s the overall thesis:

The newest barriers include state laws that target various phases of the voting process. Registration by individuals has been made more rigorous. Mass registration drives face new deadlines and increased potential fines. Citizens must present new identification to register and to vote, and in some states newly registered voters face increased prospects that partisan challengers will question their credentials before voting. Civil rights groups have noted that all of these new laws and procedures disproportionately fall on people of color, poor people, senior citizens and the disabled.

The Department of Justice, which for decades fought to ensure all eligible citizens could vote, has encouraged states to take these steps in the opposite direction. Political appointees who advocate for stringent requirements before ballots are cast and votes are counted now drive much of the Voting Section’s actions. As a result, the Justice Department has been pushing states to purge voter lists, and to adopt newly restrictive voter ID and provisional ballot laws – actions all that are known to cause delays if not confusion at the polls. Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Voting Section has not enforced other federal laws, such as the requirement that state welfare offices offer public aid recipients a chance to register to vote. Similarly, the Bush Justice Department has filed few cases on behalf of minority voters.

The Department’s political appointees have also pressured federal prosecutors to pursue “voter fraud” cases against the Bush administration’s perceived opponents, such as groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which conducts mass registration drives among populations that tend to vote Democratic. Two former federal prosecutors have said they believe that they lost their U.S. attorney posts for failing to pursue those cases. The proponents of this renewed impetus to police voters are almost all from a powerful and well-connected wing of the Republican Party that believes steps are needed to protect elections from what they call “voter fraud,” or allegations that Democrats – or their allies - are fabricating voter registrations en masse, and voting more than once to win. It is “an article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas said in a May 17, 2007 Houston Chronicle report. The report continued, “He [Masset] doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3% to the Republican vote.”

Rosenfeld’s piece adds deeper context to the Art Levine piece we highlighted yesterday. Taken together, these two articles show the depth and breadth of recent partisan attempts to shape the electorate and the resulting corruption of independent non-partisan agencies and departments including the Department of Justice itself. They further show the mechanics of those attempts and how they centered largely on ACORN, a national organization fighting for the rights of low- and moderate-income families. (ACORN is also one of Project Vote’s field partners in our Voter Participation Program.)

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.

Martin Luther King, Jr. has now been dead more years than he was alive.

I am now one year younger than he was when we was killed by James Earl Ray in Memphis on April 4th, 1968.

Were I a man of great eloquence and insight, these facts would elicit, no doubt, some profound truths about the world, the country, and myself; profound truths that would read with something near the poetry that the Rev. King put into his most powerful prose.

However, lacking both eloquence and insight, I have only my own truth.

Reverend King changed America and I was privileged enough to grow up in a world that was just adjusting to what he and the cadres of famous, semi-famous, obscure, and faceless organizers and activists wrought through their courageous struggle before and after, but most spectacularly during, the Civil Rights Movement.

I went to first grade 8 years after King was killed. Two years after his assassination the public schools in my hometown in the South were desegregated, fully 16 years after Brown v Board (Thurgood Marshall's defining moment), the decision that was the catalyst for the "modern" Civil Rights Movement. Six years after desegregation, my elementary school, of which I've seen an early 70's newspaper photo of the last day of school with nothing but white kids bursting out the front door, was about 85%-90% black.

I recount that not to show that people benefitting from white skin privilege are sore losers (or willing to give into their fears easily), though the evidence there is stark, or to show that the advances of the Civil Rights Movement, most especially the destruction of de jure apartheid in America and the vigorous defense of voting rights for all people, were hollow or even pyhrric.

I recount that to show how fast change can come and how change can wash over everyone, even a 6 year old going to elementary school for the first time. At the time, I didn't know the context for what I was experiencing. I learned that later, in high school, and not through any curriculum, but through repeated viewing of Eyes On The Prize, the best documentary of the Civil Rights Movement in existence today.

Those experiences, which I won't detail here for lack of time and space, but which, in many ways mirror most American's schooling experiences with certain glaring exceptions, helped shape me, my values, and my world view.

And, to get back to my original point, they would never have been possible without the Civil Rights Movement and its towering champion, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Even in death, his life deeply affected mine. And I say that not as hagiography, not to place Dr. King in a space in which he is clawless to whites and flawless to blacks, to use Micheal Eric Dyson's artful phrase, but to recognize this deeply courageous, deeply committed, deepy introspective and gifted strategist, and deeply, deeply flawed man for the profound influence he had on my country and the little bubble of NathanHJ-ness that has grown up and prospered in the world that he, in a very real way, made.

Kick ass, take names, and birth a new world