A Friday Flowers "Voting Rights Act" Fraud

I’ve been kicking around today’s mess of an opinion column by Christine Flowers, and I’ll admit that I’m having a hard time trying to digest it. Let me try to summarize, then.

(And oh yeah, I forgot - I also posted here.)

She starts off by expressing support for the Iranians who voted for Mir Hossein Mousavi (whose whereabouts are apparently still unknown), which is commendable. Then, she equates it with the days before the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, telling us that her father helped African Americans register to vote in 1967 (also communicating the following anecdote)…

He came back with stories of little children using the "n-word" and "Yankee lawyers" dodging spit - and worse. He wrote in his diary that "It made me feel very ill to know that there were people in America who differed very little in my judgment from those who manned Auschwitz in 1944."

And that's why, 40 years ago, that law was a godsend.

Is Flowers telling us that the black kids were resentful of the whites, or that the whites were primarily the ones behind the injustice (yes, I know history gives us the answer, but still).

And then, in a startling turnaround, she tells us this…

But as Chief Justice Roberts noted in his majority opinion, today "minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels." He also observed that when Congress renewed the act in 2006, it relied on data more than three decades old. Talk about back to the future.

Of course it relied on data dating back that far (???); actually, it relied on data further than that, as noted in this Find Law article written in 2006 when the law was last renewed. As Laughlin McDonald of the ACLU tells us…

Since its passage in 1965, and in recognition of the ongoing racial polarization and discrimination that has continued to infect the political process, the VRA was extended and strengthened in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 1992, with the support of five Presidents -- Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Ford, and George H.W. Bush. The act was expanded in 1975 to include protections for citizens with limited English proficiency -- speakers of Spanish, Asian, Native American, and Alaskan Native languages - meaning that millions more Americans gained new tools to ensure fundamental fairness in the voting process.

Over the years, the VRA has guaranteed millions of Americans the equal opportunity to participate in the political process. It is one of the most successful civil rights laws ever enacted.

And then, Flowers completes her fit of literary jujitsu…

At the very least, if we want to maintain the fiction that black voters are still denied their full rights at the ballot box, we could also acknowledge that white voters who are intimidated by Black Panther thugs at Philadelphia polling places should get the same federal protection.

But when the Justice Department shelves the prosecution of those thugs, you have your answer. I guess the times are indeed a-changin' - in some unexpectedly interesting ways.

(God, the stupid…so awful…)

OK, let’s begin with Flowers’ claim that “black voters…denied their rights at the ballot box” is “fiction.”

I have two words: voter caging.

This tells us the following…

In the fall of 2008 the Republican Attorney General of Wisconsin, J.B. Van Hollen—who was also co-chair of that state’s McCain-Palin campaign—filed a lawsuit against the state's Government Accountability Board to force them to cross-check more than 240,000 voter registrations against driver's license records. The impact of the lawsuit would have been to force the voters to use provisional ballots, calling their votes into question and tying up the polls on Election Day. The court dismissed the Attorney General’s case in October and the appeal was subsequently dismissed.

In Colorado, Common Cause and other election advocates succeeded in obtaining a preliminary injunction order against Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman. Plaintiffs claimed that state officials violated the NVRA by removing the names of voters from the statewide voter registration database within 90 days of the election for unauthorized reasons, including the return of an address confirmation postcard to reach new registrants.

In Wisconsin, the GOP issued a call to policemen, security personnel, and firefighters to serve as “volunteer poll watchers “in inner city precincts. According to the Washington Post “Jonathan Waclawski, the party's election day operations, wrote in a Sept. 8 e-mail that he needed contact information for people "who would potentially be willing to volunteer ... at inner city (more intimidating) polling places. Particularly, I am interested in names of Milwaukee area veterans, policemen, security personnel, firefighters etc. ... If you have any connections with such organizations, please pass that information on." The move was reminiscent of a disturbing history of attempts to intimidate voters in predominantly minority precincts.

In 2008 in Ohio, Greene County sheriff Gene Fischer announced that he was “seeking information” about hundreds of people who registered to vote and cast a ballot during Ohio’s five-day window of same day registration and voting. Despite rulings from four different federal and state courts upholding the lawfulness of Ohio’s five-day window, from September 30 to October 5, in which voters could register and cast an absentee ballot on the same day, the County announced they were attempting to “determine whether there was any voter fraud or not," according to a quote in an Associated Press story from Tom Miller, chief of the prosecutor’s civil liberty division. Fischer claimed to have been “flooded” with phone calls about alleged voter fraud; yet no actual evidence for an investigation was given. Following public outcry and media attention, the Greene County prosecutor’s office announced that that investigation had been cancelled.

And this tells us of a bill introduced by John Kerry in 2007 to make these types of practices illegal; no word on what happened to the legislation (my guess is that it expired at the end of the session – cannot locate further information on it at the moment).

Also, this tells us more of the alleged incident of “white voter intimidation” by “Black Panther thugs” Flowers refers to (Malkin-esque nuttiness here, people – actually, the first commenter…wow, comments are allowed this week!...sums it up pretty well also)…

So we have a bit of a dust-up about a couple of guys up at 12th and Fairmount standing outside a polling place. Wearing clothes with the emblem of the New Black Panther Party. And holding a night stick.

And of course, this leads to an episode where the wingnuts can claim the same type of oppression as those voters who are “caged” (and of course, no charges were filed...as if those claiming to be oppressed would even BE in that neighborhood unless they were looking to stir up some right-wing umbrage).

Please (and DON’T get me started on Ohio in ’04 or Florida ’00, by the way).

It’s admirable that Flowers’ father actually performed some heroic work during the civil rights era helping those who had been denied the vote for so long in this country. But given that, what can the whitewashing of his daughter on behalf of those who would stomp that legacy into dust be but an utter betrayal of that sacrifice?