GOP Voter Suppression and Obstruction Program Are a National Enterprise

- It's the GOP voter obstruction that could be decisive this November in close races across the country. UnAmerican and corrupt, the GOP-Tea Party Alliance works to prevent the wrong Americans from legally voting -

By Michael Leon

Madison, Wisconsin—Not exactly shocking that the Voter Suppression scheme among the Republican Party of Wisconsin, Americans for Prosperity, and Tea Party Groups is under way here in this important swing state. Thanks to the efforts of One Wisconsin Now the program to obstruct minority and college-age voters have been exposed.

GOP operatives like Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen know well that Republicans lose in high-voter turnout elections, thus the top state's top law enforcement official's energetic work in the corrupt stop-the-vote legal case that was tossed out of court in 2008.

See J B Van Hollen vs. Government Accountability Board et al, (Dane County Case Number 2008CV004085); and WI Elect Board Hits DOJ, GOP Voter Suppression; Brennan Center on Wisconsin Van Hollen 2008 Voter Suppression Decision, and Targeting Black Milwaukee Voters, and Black Voters Across the Nation (Andrew Hacker, New York Review of Books, Sept 25, 2008) for background.

Now, the Democratic Strategist reports the national GOP voter suppression efforts continues at crash speed:

Voter Suppression 2010 Style

By J.B. Green

Democrats have plenty to worry about over the next five weeks, but it nonetheless behooves Dems to get up to speed on the latest voter suppression scams. Toward that end, Demos and Common Cause have partnered to present a must-read report on the topic, "Voting in 2010: Ten Swing States: Problematic election laws and policies in ten swing states could impact enough voters to determine election outcomes." (PDF Executive Summary here)

The report profiles ten states (AZ, KY, CO, IL, LA, MI, MO, NV, NC and OH), where close elections are expected. The report focuses on laws and policies built into the structure of state election codes, rather than the illegal suppression practices that popped up in FL and OH during recent presidential elections.

The fact sheet on Kentucky, for example, reveals the obstacles Democratic candidates face in that state, including cutting off registration 28 days before the election, draconian felon disenfranchisement disqualifying 24 percent of African Americans, no legal mandate to disseminate voter information and a poor record of complying with the legal requirement to register people at public assistance agencies.
The report also credits each state for "exemplary voting laws" where applicable.

There are also reports of a voter caging operation underway in Wisconsin. According to Karoli's post, "Voter Suppression in Wisconsin, Courtesy of the GOP and Americans for Prosperity" at CrooksandLiars.com,

Here's how it works: A mailer is sent to registered voters. Any mailers returned by the post office are put in a database and those voters are submitted to be purged from voting rolls. Of course, the targets are never Republican voters. They're Democrats, and generally minority voters in particular....One Wisconsin Now has uncovered this plot with evidence, but don't assume this is limited to Wisconsin. I guarantee you it isn't. They are targeting as many states as they can, but particularly swing states. Expect Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona just to name a few to have the exact same operations afoot.

And here's a recent report on voter suppression in Texas.

In addition to the aforementioned laws and policies, and 'caging,' Dems should be ready for other suppression practices, like switching poll places, intimidation, parking obstruction, misleading and incorrect poll information, inferior computer equipment at polls in minority neighborhood polling places,

Stephen Ansolabehere and Eitan Hersh also have a contribution to the topic in their "Early and Often" post at the Boston Review, in which they note,

Registration problems create barriers to voting and make it difficult for administrators to communicate with voters, identify voters at the polls, and audit elections after the fact. Reforms following the 2000 election sought to improve the accuracy and currency of the voter-registration lists. Most important, all states now have statewide voter files. So how good are the files today?...

This summer the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University and the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project issued the first comprehensive, nationwide analysis of the quality of information stored on voter registration lists...Nationwide, approximately 1 in 16 entries on the registration lists is unmailable. The magnitude of the problem varies greatly throughout the country. In California, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., about 1 in 50 entries is problematic, but in Arkansas, that number is 1 in 5.

The authors provide a chart ranking every state. This is not just about incompetence and sloppy registration management. The states are all well-aware of their rankings and the reasons for it, and in most cases it's a matter of political manipulation -- almost always to the detriment of Democrats.

Georgia Voter Obstruction Halted by Obama DOJ

The GOP will use most any tactic to obstruct the wrong kind of voter from voting.

Via Election Law at Moritz, news from Georgia on GOP voter obstruction (echoing the failed attempt by the Wisconsin GOP last year).

DOJ Issues a Finding on Georgia Program

On Monday (6/1), the Department of Justice rejected Georgia's voter verification program, which included the use of Social Security numbers and driver's license data to determine citizenship (See the AP story from the Atlanta Journal Constitution for more details). The Georgia Secretary of State has also issued a press release commenting on the decision.

Similar voter obstruction efforts in Wisconsin in the GOP and former McCain-Palin co-chair and Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen's obstruction suit last year were tossed out of court here.

From the AP on the Georgia obstruction program:

In a letter released on Monday, the Justice Department said the (Georgia) state's voter verification program is frequently inaccurate and has a 'discriminatory effect' on minority voters. The decision means Georgia must halt the citizenship checks,
although the state can still ask the Justice Department to reconsider, according to the letter and to the Georgia secretary of state's office.

'This flawed system frequently subjects a disproportionate number of African-American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional, and more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote,' Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's civil rights division, said. King's letter was sent to Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker on Friday.

And from the decision tossing J.B. Van Hollen's obstruction suit that misstated the mandates of federal law (HAVA):

With respect to maintenance of this list, HAVA is explicit that removal of names occurs only in accordance with state law for states, like Wisconsin, which permit voter registration at the polls on the day of election. HAVA is also quite clear on each state's discretion. For purposes of HAVA's election technology and administration requirements, which include the voter list requirement, the law provides, HAVA provides, 'The specific choices on the methods of complying with the requirements of this subchapter shall be left to the discretion of the state.' ...

On November 4th each qualified voter in Wisconsin will go to the polls, as our Supreme Court said ... vested with the franchise. It doesn't matter if the DOT has misspelled his name or if her middle initial is missing on the voter list.

Neither HAVA nor state law require a database match as a precondition to voting. Nor do they require that the voter show any proof of eligibility, essentially to
reregister, in the event of a mismatch.

Hundreds of pages of paper have been filed and they boil down to this one reality. Nothing in state or federal law requires that there be a data match as a condition on the right to vote. HAVA does not supplant Wisconsin's constitutionally protected
right to establish its own voter eligibility standards.

Van Hollen's the Fraud

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen made good on his assurances to his fellow Republicans that he would use his office, per the Republicans' wishes, during a Van Hollen address at the Republican National Convention held in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Said Van Hollen to his fellow Republicans: "... We are out there front and center everyday and you'll be hearing much more from the Department of Justice in the coming months about doing what we can to make sure that those people who have illegally and illegitimately registered to vote, don't have the opportunity on election day to show up and take away your vote by casting one that is not legal." (WisPolitics)

Van Hollen was looking for organized voter fraud, shown to be a fiction, by the Brennan Center for Justice and a state-federal committee looking into past GOP allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 election.

The fact is Van Hollen just wanted to suppress voters and make it as difficult as he could for new and casual voters to vote, placing a burden on and slowing down many black voters, for example, who do not happen to have up-to-date driver's licenses in Milwaukee County.

Van Hollen has been roundly hit for his filing a legal complaint in light of the imperative of Wisconsin to establish a centralized voter registration list "coordinated with other agency databases within the State" such as the DOT, as mandated by federal law (specifically the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)) which Van Hollen cites in the DOJ Complaint, saying that HAVA requires additional verification, and linking the citizens' right to vote with bureaucrats' databases perfectly matching.

HAVA makes no such demand for perfect matches, but Van Hollen thought that he could use HAVA as part of the national GOP's hysteria that voting fraud was everywhere, a ruse used to cover the GOP engaged in an unprecedented effort to suppress legal voting.

Today's Journal-Sentinel reveals that a full 11 percent of the 2.9 million votes cast in Wisconsin in the Nov. 4 election did not match state's master list.

Van Hollen's wished to force an exact match before these one of nine Wisconsin voters could have cast their votes.

A Dane County circuit judge tossed Van Hollen's suit on several grounds, not the least of which is that Van Hollen did not read the federal law correctly.

Van Hollen rather tried to use HAVA for his own dishonorable ends.

There is no organized voter fraud, just a corrupt Attorney General's office and a despicable effort by a political party trying to ensure that only the right voters cast their vote.

Bush Seeks Forced Provisional Voting in Ohio

Incredible! Bush wants the US DOJ to look into the Ohio voting controversy, seeking forced provisional voting that suppresses legal voters.

After being shot down by the US Supreme Court on using the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) for the purpose of declaring eligible voters to be tentatively ineligible because of database mismatches - a purpose that the text of HAVA expressively forbids - Bush and the Republicans will not give up.

As the Milwaukee Branch of NAACP and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association write in their amicus brief in the Van Hollen v. GAB Wisconsin case, provisional voting is inherently suppressive, and many provisional voters will not be able to come back the next day to further corroborate their legal voting status, and will leave the polling place not knowing if their votes count.

A provisional ballot is a second-class vote. The voter leaves the polling place not knowing whether his or her vote will count. He or she will only find out by calling a toll-free number or checking a website. If the answer is that the vote was not counted, the voter will be given a reason, but by then it will be too late to correct. That voter will have been directly and absolutely deprived of the right to vote without a meaningful remedy. (Link to brief filed by Milwaukee Branch of NAACP and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association in Van Hollen v. GAB.)

This will not be a problem in Wisconsin, but the GOP is not giving up on stealing Ohio, again.

From RollCall:
President Bush is asking the Justice Department to look into whether 200,000 Buckeye State poll-goers must use provisional ballots on Election Day because their names do not match state databases.

White House spokesman Carlton Carroll confirmed Friday that the president will forward a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), requesting that the Justice Department look into whether the state’s voter rolls comply with the Help America Vote Act.
In a letter dated on Friday, the House GOP leader wrote that with Election Day 'less than two weeks away, immediate action by the Department is not only warranted, but also crucial.'

Folks, we have a major political party, the Republicans, who will do almost anything to stay in power. It's time for mass civil disobedience, something, to disrupt this outlaw element in the American political body. This is not a Party that is deserving of any respect whatsoever in our democracy.

Wisc Judge Tosses GOP Vote Suppression Lawsuit

Update IV: Opinion - Order and Hearing Transcript (Case No 08CV4085)

Update II: GOP AG to appeal. Hoping to get to the Wisconsin Supreme Court where the GOP enjoys a 4-2-1 majority, though the case (J B Van Hollen vs. Government Accountability Board et al, (Dane County Case Number 2008CV004085)) is so clear-cut, even the WI SC might rule against the GOP. In any event, this will not result in any new voter suppression rules that the GOP had hoped for.

Update: Judge: "Nothing in state or federal law requires that there be a data match as a prerequisite for a citizen's right to vote," Judge Maryann Sumi said in dismissing Van Hollen's lawsuit that tried to use the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) as a voter suppression tool.

Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi has "dismissed a lawsuit by Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen to require the state elections agency to check voter registrations against other state databases dating to 2006, which critics said could have thrown hundreds of thousands of registrations into doubt," the Wisconsin State Journal reports.

Nationwide, the GOP is attempting to suppress Democratically leaning voters to stave off a landslide defeat, and is unquestionably attempting to use HAVA to this purpose.

The case deals a political and legal body blow to Wisconsin Attorney General and John McCain co-chair J.B. Van Hollen, and delivers a victory to the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board and other voting rights advocates.

Lester Pines, a lawyer for the board, called the ruling 'an absolute validation of the position of the board.' 'Judge Sumi's decision was exceptionally scholarly, well-reasoned and supported by law,' Pines said.

Similar voter suppression efforts by Republicans are under way in Ohio and numerous other states.

The opinion will likely be posted soon at Election Law-Moritz.