by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
Last Friday US Attorney General Alberto
Gonzalez declared he "couldn't remember" or "didn't recall" 74 times in a single day of sworn testimony before the
US Senate. But the most palpable stink in that room did not come
from the president's lying lawyer. It wafted from the unmentioned
subject of those all meetings the attorney general couldn't recall
attending, the topic of all the memos and emails he didn't remember
reading and writing, the reason for firing all those federal
prosecutors which not a single Democratic senator in or out of the
hearing will utter aloud. The dead dog in the room whose name nobody
will call is the national Republican strategy of suppressing hundreds
of thousands of black and brown voters in the months between
elections and on election day.
Cowardice in the Face of Crime
The hypocritical and potentially
self-defeating silence of Democratic leaders and presidential
candidates who absolutely depend on a big black and Latino vote each
November is co-signed by the corporate news media, who uncritically
convey bogus Republican allegations of widespread vote fraud whenever
too many of the wrong people register and vote. A lone exception was
the Greg Gordon's April 19 McClatchey-Tribunearticle
published the same day Gonzalez was to testify.
"For six
years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political
appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter
turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican
political candidates, according to former department lawyers and a
review of written records.
"The
administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's
popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm
battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
"Facing
nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups,
the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed
proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws...
"Questions
about the administration's campaign against alleged voter fraud have
helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight
U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they
failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican
politicians. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales could shed more
light on the reasons for those firings when he appears today before
the Senate Judiciary Committee."
But he didn't.
And since neither the Attorney General's memory nor the resolve of
Senate Democrats and presidential candidates brought the issue of
voter suppression to the fore, corporate media and mainstream pundits
have invoked one of the most cowardly rules of American
"professional" journalism - the one that says unless something
comes from the mouths of high officials of both political parties, it
ain't news.
Disenfranchisement as Policy
Every day the
mounting evidence
that the US Justice Department and its civil rights division, for a
generation the guardian and enforcer of voting rights for minority
communities, have been flipped into partisans actively
working to disenfranchise those constituencies becomes harder
and harder to ignore. According to Joseph Rich and other former
Justice Department civil rights attorneys, dozens of longtime civil
rights lawyers have been driven out of the Bush era Justice
Department. Potential replacements with sterling credentials and
actual interest in civil rights have been passed over in favor of
Republican hacks with no prior experience or demonstrated interest in
civil rights.
Under Bush, the
Justice Department has given its blessing to an arsenal of
state-level legal strategies to lower turnout in black and minority
communities, such as burdensome voter ID laws in Indiana and Georgia,
onerous restrictions on nonpartisan community-run voter registration
drives, requirements for exact name and birth date or other
information in other government databases before a new registrant can
be added to the voter rolls. Before every election federal
prosecutors in battleground states call press conferences showcasing
the widespread menace of "voter
fraud" and their intent to vigorously prosecute it, if only
they can find any. But they can't. In fact, widespread vote fraud
is a myth.
According to
Lorraine Minnite, author of The Politics of Vote Fraud, the
Department of Justice has been unable to find a single case where
people casting fraudulent ballots came anywhere near tipping a
federal election. Even after lowering the required standard for
"vote fraud" prosecution from "intentional" attempts to tip
an election to making felons out of individuals who mistakenly fill
out a second registration form, the Department of Justice has came up
with fewer than two dozen vote cases in 2006, and could not win
convictions in federal court on most of those.
Obama's Meek Remedy
Presidential
candidate Barack Obama has introduced a bill, S 432, which makes
illegal some Republican election day strategies like phone calls to
deliberately misinform voters about polling place locations, times,
and would penalize private organizations and political campaigns who
threaten or intimidate voters at the polls. But the candidate who
has likened himself to Joshua has yet to blow his horn on either the
voter intimidation tactics of federal prosecutors or on the Justice
Department collusion with efforts to restrict registration and voting
in minority communities. The fact is that the effective most voter
suppression tactics are deployed through state and local laws and
acts by local authorities weeks and months before the election.
Obama's bill does not address spurious purges, barriers to ballot
access, or the near criminalization of voter registration drives like
the one Obama himself headed in Chicago back in 1992.
Outside the kind of
meetings the Attorney General cannot recall or the memos and emails
he is unable to remember, Republicans don't talk about voter
suppression because it's patently illegal. Republicans prefer to
discuss what they term "vote fraud." The historic legal definition of
"vote fraud" has been the "intentional corruption of the
electoral process by the vote." The practical definition of vote
fraud is that it's what happens when too many black and Latino voters
register or show up at the polls.
But why don't
Democratic office holders talk about it? For black and Latino
communities most of all, the silence of leading Democrats on the myth
of "vote fraud" and the reality of voter suppression is far more
troubling. Democrats depend on a solid and substantial registration
and turnout of black and Latino voters. But white Democrats, and
even present-day black presidential candidates emphatically don't
want to be seen championing the causes of African American
communities. Those who doubt the willingness of national Democrats to
shoot themselves in the foot by their silence on this issue need only
remember the unseemly haste with which John Kerry and John Edwards conceded
the 2004 presidential election early on Wednesday morning even though
it was clear that tens or hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes
had been suppressed in Ohio alone, not to mention New Mexico, Florida
and other battleground states.
Those who imagine 2008's Democratic presidential candidates would shrink from
committing the same treachery as their predecessors should remember
that Barack Obama's very first act as a US senator was his refusal to
back the demands of the Congressional Black Caucus and California
Senator Barbara Boxer, that the Senate not accept the electoral vote
resulting from Ohio's flawed election.
If Democratic
voters are to expect any different in 2008, they will have to stand
up now, and force their candidates and Democratic leaders on every level to take a stand on protecting their vote, and on Republican efforts
to suppress the it.
For more information on the Republican strategy of voter suppression, the issue Republicans can't recall and Democrats won't talk about, we refer our readers to the web site of Project VOTE at www.projectvote.org.
BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon can be contacted a Bruce.Dixon(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
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