Prometheus 6

Signs of Voter Fraud Appear
Registrations that are faked or tossed out have emerged in key states struggling to comply with ballot reform and a flood of new signups.
By Richard Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writers

October 27, 2004

LAS VEGAS — Broke, disabled and living at the Daisy Motel in downtown Las Vegas, Tyrone Mrasek Sr. took a temporary job late this summer registering voters here.

The employer primarily wanted President Bush supporters, but they were not easy to find. So Mrasek handed out cigarettes to drunks and ex-felons at a homeless shelter in exchange for signatures. Later he found a stack of signed registrations for Democratic voters in a trash can outside the company's office, he recalled.

"They had some shady things going on," Mrasek said.

The illusion of even-handedness would suggest I should point out Republican allegations of Democratic malfeasance. But I don't, for a number of solid reasons:

• Republicans have made such charges before, and they never find supporting evidence…except in those cases where the malfeasance turned out to be on the part of Republicans themselves
• Republicans had to settle a lawsuit brought by the NAACP over voter fraud committed in Florida during the 2000 campaign.
• As noted by People For the American Way:
  • Most recently, controversy has erupted over the use in the Orlando area of armed, plainclothes officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to question elderly black voters in their homes. The incidents were part of a state investigation of voting irregularities in the city's March 2003 mayoral election. Critics have charged that the tactics used by the FDLE have intimidated black voters, which could suppress their turnout in this year’s elections. Six members of Congress recently called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate potential civil rights violations in the matter.
  • This year in Florida, the state ordered the implementation of a “potential felon” purge list to remove voters from the rolls, in a disturbing echo of the infamous 2000 purge, which removed thousands of eligible voters, primarily African-Americans, from the rolls. The state abandoned the plan after news media investigations revealed that the 2004 list also included thousands of people who were eligible to vote, and heavily targeted African-Americans while virtually ignoring Hispanic voters.
  • This summer, Michigan state Rep. John Pappageorge (R-Troy) was quoted in the Detroit Free Press as saying, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election.” African Americans comprise 83% of Detroit’s population.
  • In South Dakota’s June 2004 primary, Native American voters were prevented from voting after they were challenged to provide photo IDs, which they were not required to present under state or federal law.
  • In Kentucky in July 2004, Black Republican officials joined to ask their State GOP party chairman to renounce plans to place “vote challengers” in African-American precincts during the coming elections.
  • Earlier this year in Texas, a local district attorney claimed that students at a majority black college were not eligible to vote in the county where the school is located. It happened in Waller County – the same county where 26 years earlier, a federal court order was required to prevent discrimination against the students.
  • In 2003 in Philadelphia, voters in African American areas were systematically challenged by men carrying clipboards, driving a fleet of some 300 sedans with magnetic signs designed to look like law enforcement insignia.
  • In 2002 in Louisiana, flyers were distributed in African American communities telling voters they could go to the polls on Tuesday, December 10th – three days after a Senate runoff election was actually held.
  • In 1998 in South Carolina, a state representative mailed 3,000 brochures to African American neighborhoods, claiming that law enforcement agents would be “working” the election, and warning voters that “this election is not worth going to jail.”

  and

  As this report details, voter intimidation and suppression is not a problem limited to the southern United States. It takes place from California to New York, Texas to Illinois. It is not the province of a single political party, although patterns of intimidation have changed as the party allegiances of minority communities have changed over the years.

  In recent years, many minority communities have tended to align with the Democratic Party. Over the past two decades, the Republican Party has launched a series of “ballot security” and “voter integrity” initiatives which have targeted minority communities. At least three times, these initiatives were successfully challenged in federal courts as illegal attempts to suppress voter participation based on race.

  The first was a 1981 case in New Jersey which protested the use of armed guards to challenge Hispanic and African-American voters, and exposed a scheme to disqualify voters using mass mailings of outdated voter lists. The case resulted in a consent decree prohibiting efforts to target voters by race.

  Six years later, similar “ballot security” efforts were launched against minority voters in Louisiana, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana. Republican National Committee documents said the Louisiana program alone would “eliminate at least 60- 80,000 folks from the rolls,” again drawing a court settlement.

  And just three years later in North Carolina, the state Republican Party, the Helms for Senate Committee and others sent postcards to 125,000 voters, 97 percent of whom were African American, giving them false information about voter eligibility and warning of criminal penalties for voter fraud – again resulting in a decree against the use of race to target voters.

Allegations are easy, and the Republicans have been making them for quite a while. But their accusations have never borne fruit, whereas Republicans have been proven to, well, lie when raising the issue. Republican complaints about voter fraud are very much like their complaints about playing the race card (Alan Keyes, anyone? Clarence Thomas, anyone?), their insistence than calling an out gay person by their chosen gender is unfair because it reminds the Republican base that people they are truly offended by are deep in the mix in their party.