Undermining Democracy

It is the dirtiest form of politics, the kind usually practiced by unscrupulous political operatives who seek advantage, even at the risk of eroding and undermining our precious democracy. It goes against everything we stand for, and yet we've seen it practiced throughout our history. When some people feel they can't win an election fairly, they turn to voter suppression.

If you can keep your opponents from voting, you'll win! It's very undemocratic and thus, very un-American, but ironically, you often see it coming from those who claim to be the ultimate American patriots and defenders of our Constitution.

While it would be comforting to think that voter intimidation and suppression were vanished by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a 2004 report issued by two civil rights organizations concluded that African-Americans and other minorities "have faced calculated and determined efforts at intimidation and suppression" in every national American election since 1965.

"The bloody days of violence and retribution following the Civil War and Reconstruction are gone," noted the report by the National Association of Advancement for Colored People, NAACP, and People for the American Way. "The poll taxes, literacy tests and physical violence of the Jim Crow era have disappeared. Today, more subtle, cynical and creative tactics have taken their place."

Indeed, they have! If that was true in 2004, it's even truer in 2011. Back then, the report titled "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today" was mostly about scattered efforts to deny the right to vote to small groups of voters.

But now there is a new report, in the Sept. 15 edition of Rolling Stone magazine, which documents numerous efforts to prevent millions of Americans from voting the 2012 presidential elections.

In "The GOP War on Voting" investigative journalist Ari Berman asserts: "Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008." He shows how "a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots" and concludes that "taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year — perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP."

The 2004 report noted that plainclothes officers were used to intimidate elderly black voters in Florida, that there were efforts to place "vote challengers" in African-American and other minority voting precincts in Kentucky, and that Native Americans were prevented from voting in South Dakota because they didn't have photo IDs.

But now Berman reports that "the most important tactic in the Republican war on voting" is the number of states requiring a government-issued photo ID, with the intention of disenfranchising many minority voters. He notes that among the dozen states that have approved new obstacles to voting, six states will now require voters to produce government-issued IDs, including two that will also require proof of U.S.

The 2004 report cited the distribution of fliers urging Louisiana African-Americans to vote on the wrong date and brochures in South Carolina claiming that law enforcement agents would be "working" the 1998 election, warning voters that "this election is not worth going to jail."

But those were normally small-scale, anonymous cheap shots taken by the most extremist factions of the Republican Party.

Things are different now that those factions seem to be in control of the GOP. We now are seeing much more serious, formal efforts to suppress minority voters. Now these cheap shots are on a grand scale!

In his excellent article, Berman explains that — aside from the ID requirements — a GOP coordinated and funded effort to disenfranchise potentially democratic voters is concentrated in three other key areas:

— Creating barriers to voter registration by threatening to fine and prosecute volunteers in voter registration drives who fail to jump through a series of bureaucratic hoops. Berman reports that Florida and Texas already have made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters.

— Curtailing early voting, to prevent Democrats from securing minority voters even before Election Day, as President Barack Obama did in 2008. Berman reports that Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia already have cut short their early voting periods.

— Denying the right to vote to former prisoners, most of whom are blacks and Latinos, who tend to vote for Democrats. Or requiring former felons to apply for the right to vote once they are released from prison. Berman reports that Florida and Iowa already have barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters.

Amazingly, all this rush to diminish one of the most basic principles of democracy — our right to vote — is based on what Berman rightfully calls "the phantom menace of voter fraud." While Republicans claim voter fraud is rampant — the motive for all their efforts to change election laws around the country — while they tell us that illegal immigrants, dead people and other ineligible voters are electing Democrats, Berman quotes a 2007 New York University Law School report that asserts, "It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

According to "The GOP War on Voting," out of the 300 million votes cast between 2002 and 2007, "federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud — and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility."

Bottom line: Charges of voter fraud are a cheap excuse for suppressing minority voters who are likely to vote for Democrats. Many Republicans have been so viciously anti-immigrant during the past decade that they obviously figure there's nothing they can do to win over Latino voters, and thus, some resort to undemocratic tactics.

In a country where voter apathy is obviously a much bigger problem than voter fraud, instead of trying to increase the number of American voters, some politicians actually try to decrease voter participation. It's disgraceful.

But that's what you get when unscrupulous and un-American political operatives are so anxious to win elections that they are willing to suppress minority voting and undermine our democracy.

To find out more about Miguel Perez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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