2004-10-05 - 2:55 p.m.

shit i'm spazzed out. that coffee this morning was too sharp. i'm cracked out! god damn.

ooo
now it's 10.35pm. i'm exhausted. too much to tell. that party wwas interesting. more later. met new "friends" and i'm still utterly done and uninterested in discussing anything about guys in any way in which i should invest or care in a piece of it. to just be totally unattached.

PSS. this is unbelieveable about election intimidation, it's like precivil rights america. is this okay with you?

Sept. 21, 2004 | Philadelphia's 2003 mayoral election did not set
> especially high standards for civic discourse in the city where
> American democracy was born. Talking to Philadelphians about the
> bitter contest between John Street, the African-American incumbent
> Democrat, and Sam Katz, the white Republican challenger, is like
> discussing an election in some upstart Latin American democracy.
> During the course of the race, Street's office was bugged by the FBI,
> a Katz field office was "firebombed" by an unlit Molotov cocktail,
and
> on Election Day, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, 84
voting-related
> incidents were called in to police, including "assaults,
disturbances,
> threats, harassment, vandalism" and one bona fide "polling-place
> brawl."
>
> Amid the general ugliness of the race, though, there's one incident
> that Democrats in the city remember with a distinct sense of unease.
> The story, which was first reported by The American Prospect in
> February, and has since been broadcast by activist groups like
> MoveOn.org, goes like this: In an attempt to intimidate
> African-Americans and deter them from showing up at the polls, the
> Katz campaign, or one of its associates, put together a team of men
> dressed in official-looking attire -- dark suits, lapel pins bearing
> insignia of federal or local law-enforcement agencies -- and sent
them
> into areas of the city with large black populations. According to
> Sherry Swirsky, a local antitrust attorney who is active in
Democratic
> politics and who worked as an election monitor that day, the men
> carried clipboards and drove around in unmarked black vans.
>
> "Some of them were just driving around neighborhoods, looking
> menacing," Swirsky recalls. "But others were going up to voters and
> giving them misinformation about the kind of I.D. they needed in
order
> to vote. The truth is, you don't need any I.D. to vote. But they were
> telling them they needed a major credit card, a passport or driver's
> license. They were telling them it was risky to vote if they had any
> outstanding child support bills. Imagine the menacing presence of a
> bunch of big white guys in black cars who look like they're
> law-enforcement people telling you all these things."
>
> Swirsky has monitored several elections in Philadelphia and
elsewhere
> and headed the Democrats' presidential recount effort in New Mexico
in
> 2000. But what happened in Philadelphia, she says, is the most
> sophisticated election intimidation campaign she's ever seen. It was
> not a sick prank by one or two racists but instead a systematic
effort
> that required planning and not-insignificant outlays of money (the
> uniforms, the vehicles and the men, some of whom were reportedly
> recruited from out of state). "There was such a level of coordination
> there that if its objectives were not improper, I would say I admired
> it for the professionalism," she says.
>
> Swirsky met dozens of voters who were intimidated by strange men in
> uniforms; in a survey of black voters taken after the election, 7
> percent reported being accosted by voter-intimidation efforts. "I
> talked to a number of them and tried to assuage their concerns," she
> says. "I told them they should go out and vote: 'Those people were
> wrong. You don't need that kind of identification. No, you're not
> going to get arrested if you owe child support and you go out to
> vote.'" But despite her efforts -- and even though, in the end,
Street
> won the race -- Swirsky is certain that many black voters stayed away
> from the polls that day.
>
> The voter-intimidation campaign that Republicans mounted in
> Philadelphia was not an anomaly. Instead, it marked a routine
> occurrence in American elections, a national scandal that rarely
makes
> the front page. The sad fact is that voter-intimidation efforts aimed
> at minorities have been carried out in just about every major
election
> over the past 20 years. The campaigns are almost always mounted by
> Republicans who aim to reduce the turnout of overwhelmingly
Democratic
> minority voters at the polls. Now, in what's shaping up to be a
> razor-thin presidential election, Democrats across the country are
> pointing to what occurred in Philadelphia as an example of what they
> have to fear from Republicans this election year.
>
> To Americans today, the idea that a major political party actively
> plans to disenfranchise minority voters may seem anachronistic; we'd
> like to believe that such tactics would no longer be tolerated in our
> nation. But over the last two decades, various arms of the Republican
> Party, or groups working for Republican candidates -- at the
national,
> state and local levels -- have carried out well-documented projects
> designed to intimidate blacks and other minorities.
>
> Under the guise of "ballot security" measures, supposedly designed
to
> preserve an election's "integrity" and reduce "voter fraud,"
> Republicans have organized off-duty cops to patrol heavily minority
> precincts, put up threatening signs, and mailed out sternly worded
> "bulletins" warning of the consequences of voter fraud. They've also
> systematically challenged the residency of thousands of minority
> voters in several elections, and they've rigged voter rolls to
exclude
> minorities eligible to vote, which occurred in Florida in 2000. These
> were not ad hoc efforts. As in Philadelphia's mayor's race, they were
> often planned and executed for the specific purpose of reducing black
> turnout in order to boost Republican political fortunes.
>
> The Republican Party denies any plans to suppress the minority vote
> this year; in fact, President Bush has recently attempted to court
> black voters. Swirsky and other Democrats who fear that the GOP may
> attempt to suppress the black vote can produce no proof that
> Republicans are up to no good. But many independent observers are
> suspicious. "As we look at the last 12 months or so, we are extremely
> concerned about incidents indicating that Republican officials may be
> planning to challenge minority voters," says Ralph Neas, president of
> the nonpartisan People for the American Way Foundation.
>
> Neas is referring not just to the Philadelphia mayor's race but also
> to a widely publicized absentee ballot-fraud investigation conducted
> by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Orlando this summer.
> In that investigation, elderly African-American voters were visited
at
> their homes by police officers curious about their voting behavior.
> While Florida officials deny any attempt to intimidate voters,
critics
> say the investigation is emblematic of the kind of under-the-radar,
> state-sponsored intimidation program that Republican officials have
> conducted in the past. On Friday, the Justice Department disclosed
> that it has initiated a civil rights investigation into what occurred
> in Orlando.
>
> Currently the NAACP, People for the American Way Foundation, Lawyers
> Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and other voting-rights groups
> are putting together what they call a historic effort to forestall
> voter-intimidation tactics this year. In the days before the vote and
> on Election Day itself, these groups will send an armada of lawyers
to
> polling places across 17 states to watch for and react to any legal
> challenges that come up -- an attempt to derail the most outrageous
> intimidation campaigns.
>
> Many black voters themselves are intensely aware of the prospect of
> suppression tactics -- and they're ready for them, says Julian Bond,
> chairman of the NAACP. "This is part of the folklore of black
America,
> especially since 2000," he says. "Many people have tales to tell
about
> this happening to people they know."
>
> Still, despite the counter-intimidation efforts and increased
> awareness, elections experts still predict that suppression programs
> will likely succeed in turning away many voters at the polls this
> year. How many? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Nobody knows. But Bond
> notes that it took less than 600 votes in Florida to swing the
> election to Bush last time, and he believes that more than 600
> African-American Gore voters were disenfranchised there. If this
> year's "election is as close as everyone believes it will be," Bond
> says, "and if they frighten just 600 voters away from the polls,"
> minority voter-intimidation tactics may very well determine the next
> president of the United States.
>
> In July, John Pappageorge, a Republican state representative in
Troy,
> Mich., attended a local party meeting to discuss with colleagues the
> Republicans' chances of winning the state for Bush in November. In
the
> course of the discussion, according to an account published in the
> Detroit Free Press, Pappageorge declared, "If we do not suppress the
> Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."
> Detroit, of course, has a huge minority population; about 83 percent
> of its residents are African-American. Pappageorge's statement was
> roundly condemned and he quickly apologized for it, insisting that he
> wasn't suggesting anything racist or illegal in calling for a
> suppression of the Detroit vote. As a matter of politic strategy,
> Pappageorge was probably right.
>
> A concise political axiom underlies the Republican rationale for
> mounting voter-suppression campaigns aimed at blacks:
> African-Americans don't vote for Republicans. In the 2000 election,
> Bush received about 9 percent of the black vote and nobody believes
he
> has a chance of improving on that this year. His father received
about
> the same percentage of the African-American vote, as did Ronald
Reagan
> and Richard Nixon.
>
> It's true that despite those consistently low numbers, Republican
> presidential candidates sometimes make a play for African-American
> voters, as Bush recently did in his much-heralded speech to the Urban
> League. But these efforts are obviously disingenuous, Democrats
> contend, because the last thing a Republican candidate would want is
> more people from an overwhelmingly Democratic demographic coming to
> the polls. The likelier reason that Republicans occasionally attempt
> to woo black voters is as a way of signaling to whites that they're
> compassionate.
>
> Indeed, strategists say, both the Republicans' and Democrats' efforts
> to win black voters rarely have anything to do with specific policies
> that might be of importance to African-Americans. Since Democratic
> presidents and governors usually can't win without huge
> African-American turnouts, and since Republicans can't win with such
> turnouts, each party's approach to African-American voters is at best
> a numbers game. Democrats are forever working on methods to increase
> the minority turnout, while Republicans try to keep as many
minorities
> at home as possible on Election Day. That is not a scurrilous charge
> against the GOP, though it sounds like one; it's the way politics is
> practiced in America.
>
> At least it's the way politics has been practiced since the early
> 1980s, when Republicans first began implementing their most brazen
> voter-intimidation campaigns. In the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial
> election, the RNC and its affiliates devised a program that they
> claimed was aimed at reducing voter fraud. The party hired police
> officers to patrol minority neighborhoods in Passaic County and put
> up signs warning that the election was being monitored "by the Ballot
> Security Task Force." The plan was obviously meant to intimidate
> voters rather than secure the polls. When Democrats filed a civil
> rights lawsuit against the Republicans over the tactics, the national
> GOP and the New Jersey Republicans were forced to sign a consent
> decree promising to refrain from the sorts of suppression activities
> they employed in the 1981 race. (The election, incidentally, was won
> by the Republican candidate, Thomas Kean, who later went on to chair
> the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.)
>
> But the pull of voter intimidation was too strong for the
> Republicans, the math of suppression irresistible. In 1986 the party
> hired an outside company to conduct another ballot-security
> initiative, this one aimed at challenging the voting eligibility of
> 31,000 voters in Louisiana, the vast majority of whom were black.
> According to a 2002 study of voter-intimidation practices that
Swirsky
> wrote for the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, when
> Democrats again sued over the ballot-security initiative, they
> unearthed a Republican planning document that stated that the
> Louisiana program "could keep the African-American vote down
> considerably."
>
> In 1987, because of that evidence, the RNC was once again forced to
> enter into an agreement with Democrats, this one requiring the
federal
> courts to preapprove all of the Republicans' ballot-security
programs.
> But as Swirsky reports in her study, even this order "did not end
> Republican efforts to depress minority voter turnout."
>
> In the 1990 Senate contest between Jesse Helms and Harvey Gannt in
> North Carolina, the state Republican Party mailed out "voter
> registration bulletins" to 150,000 homes in minority precincts,
> warning that voters would need to bring a raft of personal
information
> to the polls on Election Day, and adding, falsely, that a voter "must
> have lived in [a] precinct for at least the previous 30 days" to be
> eligible to vote there. The mailings also warned of penalties for
> providing inaccurate information to elections officials. The Justice
> Department later brought a legal challenge against the state party
> over the mailings and Republicans agreed, once again, to curtail
their
> efforts to suppress minority-voter turnout.
>
> You can guess what the Republicans did after that -- more of the
> same. In August, the People for the American Way Foundation and the
> NAACP released a report detailing the past two decades' sorry history
> of voter-intimidation efforts. The report reads like a chronicle of
> the Jim Crow South, except the dates are in the 1980s and 1990s, and
> the locations are not limited to points below the Mason-Dixon line.
>
> In 1988 in Hidalgo County, Texas, the Republican Party ran ads
> targeted at Latino voters. They warned of prison sentences for
> non-U.S. citizens who go to the polls, adding that officials "will be
> watching." In South Dakota in 2002, the state attorney general
devised
> an anti-voting-fraud plan that involved sending law-enforcement
> officials to question 2,000 newly registered Native American voters.
> There was no similar probe, the report notes, "to investigate new
> registrants in counties without significant Native American
> populations, despite the fact that those counties contained most of
> the new registrations in the state."
>
> In Dillon County, S.C., in 1998, Son Kinon, a Republican state
> official, mailed out 3,000 brochures to black voters warning, "You
> have always been my friend, so don't chance GOING TO JAIL on Election
> Day! ... SLED [South Carolina Law Enforcement Division] agents, FBI
> agents, people from the Justice Department and undercover agents will
> be in Dillon County working this election. People who you think are
> your friends, and even your neighbors, could be the very ones that
> turn you in. THIS ELECTION IS NOT WORTH GOING TO JAIL!!!!!!"
>
> To many African-Americans, the most notorious effort to
> disenfranchise blacks occurred in Florida in 2000. During the
> election, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,
Republican
> state officials "failed to fulfill their responsibilities." In the
> aftermath of the debacle, numerous media reports surfaced of
organized
> efforts to keep blacks away from the polls -- tales of police
> roadblocks erected in black neighborhoods, of election officials
> asking voters for unnecessary identification, of people being
forcibly
> turned away from the polls by police. A few of these stories were
> discredited. Yet when the commission investigated the election, it
> corroborated many of them.
>
> Floridians told the commission that they saw police cars illegally
> patrolling areas near polling places. They testified that in minority
> neighborhoods, polling places were closed early or were moved without
> any notice. The commission declared that election problems in
Florida
> resulted "in an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of
> disenfranchisement, with a significantly disproportionate impact on
> African American voters."
>
> Much of the disenfranchisement was caused by antiquated voting
> machines used in minority neighborhoods; while just 11 percent of
> Florida's voters are African-American, more than half of the spoiled
> ballots -- more than 90,000 of the votes tossed out -- were cast by
> blacks. But another major source of disenfranchisement was the
state's
> erroneous purging from voter rolls of thousands of suspected felons,
> the vast majority of whom were African-Americans. The purging
> occurred, the commission concluded, as a result of the "overzealous"
> efforts of Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris to
> combat voter fraud. "African American voters were placed on purge
> lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters,"
> the commission also noted. Could it be, many Democrats wonder, that
> Hispanic voters were not purged because, at least in Florida, they
> tend to vote Republican?
>
> Year after year, race after race, Republicans have launched efforts
> to deter minorities from the polls. Yet they have suffered few legal
> or political costs stemming from the shameful practices. Why? Part of
> the reason, voting-rights activists say, is it's very difficult to
> prove the connections between specific vote-suppression tactics and
> the candidates who've apparently launched them. The candidates and
> campaigns who plan these efforts often hire third-party consultants
to
> take care of the dirty work, so plausible deniability can always be
> maintained. Moreover, when Republicans are caught trying to suppress
> the vote, they often offer a reasonable-sounding explanation. It's
all
> about "voting integrity," they say, an attempt to safeguard the
> polling place from fraud.
>
> Just listen to Vito Canuso, a Philadelphia lawyer who is the
chairman
> for the Republican City Committee. Told about Democrats' allegations
> that black voters in the 2003 mayoral race were questioned by men
> dressed as law-enforcement officials, Canuso categorically denies
that
> any such effort had been pursued. "That's untrue," he says. So how
> might he explain why so many people had seen such men that day? "Did
> we have more people in the street than we've ever had before? Yes,"
he
> says. "Did we have more people backing us up than we had before? Yes.
> We did have a group of lawyers in the streets and I'm sure they were
> dressed like lawyers, and in some neighborhoods you don't see people
> dressed like lawyers. But we weren't going to put them in jeans and a
> sweatshirt. A lot of people were accusing them of being federal
agents
> but they were lawyers."
>
> Canuso says Republicans brought out so many lawyers because the
party
> suspected that voters were cheating. "The number of people registered
> to vote almost exceeds the number of people who live in the city," he
> says. "We have every reason to believe that there are people with
> double and triple registrations on the rolls." Therefore, he says,
> challenging voters was necessary, and lawyers had a legal right to
> question anyone who appeared to be out of place at a particular
> precinct.
>
> How would the lawyers make such a determination in deciding whether
> to challenge a voter's right to vote? Swirsky says the lawyers
> concentrated on minorities, with a special emphasis on people who
> seemed economically less well-off or appeared to be homeless. Canuso
> responds that the lawyers were instructed to challenge "people who
> seem to be out of place, who walk like they don't know where they
are.
> This is supposed to be their neighborhood, so they should look like
> they know what they're doing."
>
> Some conservative scholars have singled Philadelphia out as one of
> the cities with a curiously large number of registered voters,
> approaching or exceeding the number of eligible voters in the state.
> But this is a problem in many parts of the country, even in places
> where there are few minority voters. Some entire states -- Montana
and
> Alaska, for instance, states not known for large African-American
> populations -- have more registered voters on their rolls than
> voting-age residents who live in the state. The phenomenon is most
> likely due to poor registration maintenance procedures, not active
> fraud on the part of voters, experts say. Moreover, if fraud existed
> in Philadelphia, there is no evidence to indicate that black voters
> should have been the ones most often challenged.
>
> The idea that minorities at polling places should be scrutinized for
> vote fraud is "based on at least one racist assumption, and that is
> that black people cheat," says Bond of the NAACP. "I have never seen
> these tactics applied to whites. I've never seen them used in a
> partisan way by white Republicans against white Democrats. They are
> applied only against racial minorities. And although they may not be
> illegal, they are disgraceful. They are calculated to frighten and
> intimidate -- and for them to argue that this is simply hard-knuckled
> partisan politics is disingenuous in the extreme."
>
> The Republican Party's Canuso maintains that he can't see why anyone
> would be intimidated by such tactics at polling places. "I only vote
> once, and if somebody wanted to challenge my vote, I'm willing to
> defend my right to vote," he says. "Why does someone else get
> intimidated? When I go to vote, I make sure I am properly prepared
for
> anybody that will question my right to vote. It shouldn't intimidate
> them if they know they have every right to vote."
>
> That's not the same thing, Swirsky says. Canuso is a lawyer and a
man
> of not a small measure of clout in his city; of course he wouldn't be
> intimidated if someone came up to him and challenged his right to
> vote. But that doesn't stand up "when you're dealing with a culture
> that has a long history of disenfranchisement," she says.
>
> For many blacks in America, voting is still a tenuous, fragile
right,
> one exercised with as much fear as pride. "People often ask me, Why
> don't the Democrats retaliate in the suburbs?" Swirsky says. "The
> answer is obvious -- it's a bit difficult to intimidate a white
> middle-class or affluent population in the same way you can
intimidate
> a minority population. In these areas, there is a fear of authority
> figures, there is a fear of any official communication." These fears
> are not irrational. And they are easily exploited.
>
> In a speech to members of Congressional Black Caucus Foundation on
> Sept. 11, John Kerry briefly addressed minority voters' fears about
> possible voting irregularities this year. "We are hearing the same
> things you are hearing," Kerry said. "What they did in Florida in
> 2000, they may be planning to do in battleground states all across
> this country this year. Well, we are here to let them know that we
> will fight tooth and nail to make sure that this time, every vote is
> counted and every vote counts."
>
> The Kerry campaign did not respond to several requests to discuss
the
> problem of minority voter intimidation; neither did the Bush
campaign.
> But Tony Welch, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee,
> says that Democrats are concerned that Republicans may be planning to
> suppress the minority vote. He says that the party will launch a
> comprehensive vote-monitoring effort to combat the problem on
Election
> Day.
>
> There's no evidence that Republicans plan any sort of
> voter-suppression campaign this year, but proof rarely surfaces
before
> Election Day. Given what's happened in previous elections, Democrats
> are wise to be wary. When asked about the issue, Christine Iverson, a
> spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, says Republicans
> have devised a specific plan to combat minority voter intimidation at
> the polls this year. The plan, though, is bipartisan, meaning that it
> won't go forward until both parties agree to it.
>
> Specifically, the RNC plan calls for both Republicans and Democrats
> to each choose precincts around the country that they believe are
> susceptible to problems, and then for each party to send
> representatives to every precinct on the list. These monitors will
> work together in a bipartisan fashion, Iverson says, to ensure a fair
> election. "We say that if the Democrats truly believed their own
> charges," she says, "they would jump at the chance to have Democrats
> join with Republicans to have bipartisan teams" monitoring polling
> places.
>
> Ed Gillespie, chairman of the RNC, outlined this plan in a letter he
> recently sent to Terry McAuliffe, the DNC's chairman. But the
> Democrats rejected Gillespie's offer; they say that they won't join
> with the Republicans. "We don't trust them," Welch says, explaining
> that he doesn't believe that Republicans really want to ensure that
> minority voters get to the polls. In the meantime, the DNC will
> monitor the program independently of Republicans. "Theirs was a
> gimmick," Welch says. "They sent a letter, and they haven't done
> anything since. Here's the test: What will they do now? Will they
> complain that their letter wasn't taken seriously or will they spend
> time and money to make sure that African-Americans can vote in
> Florida? They've got 45 days left."
>
> It's unlikely that the Republicans will take up the challenge; the
> party has no reason to spend money to launch a program designed to
> make sure that African-Americans vote on Election Day. But will the
> Republican Party at least renounce any efforts to suppress the
> minority vote in November? Bond of the NAACP has publicly challenged
> the party to do so, and it has not responded.
>
> Of particular interest to some Democrats is whether John Ashcroft's
> Justice Department will act to protect minorities if irregularities
> are discovered on Election Day. One reason election monitors worry
> that 2004 will be a particularly bad year for voter suppression is
> that the federal legal atmosphere has been dramatically altered since
> the last presidential election -- and not for the better.
>
> In 2002, in response to the problems uncovered in the 2000 election,
> President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, which many lawmakers
> had hoped would reduce incidents of voter suppression. But HAVA, as
it
> is known, could actually make the polling experience more difficult
> for many voters. Swirsky says it outlines a new set of onerous rules
> concerning the kind of identification that people need to bring with
> them when they go to the polls. In this week's New Yorker magazine,
> Jeffrey Toobin reports that the Justice Department has interpreted
> HAVA to mean that states should "verify" the Social Security numbers
> people submit when they mail in their registration forms. In other
> words, the Justice Department wants first-time voters to come to the
> polls with a driver's license or a Social Security card in order to
> vote, a requirement that voting-rights activists believe will turn
off
> minority voters.
>
> The Justice Department's I.D. requirement is in keeping with
> Republican sensibilities toward voting law. The party is generally
> more in favor of protecting against vote fraud than on prosecuting
> voter suppression and intimidation tactics. Ashcroft in particular
> would seem to a poor guardian of minorities' voting rights. As was
> revealed during his contentious confirmation hearings, the attorney
> general has in the past opposed school desegregation efforts and has
> expressed sympathy and admiration for the Confederacy. "We've seen a
> lack of federal enforcement" on laws to protect voters' rights, says
> Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat. "It's almost as if the
> Ashcroft Justice Department has ignored the history of voter
> intimidation. They have sanctioned voter terrorism."
>
> But this state of affairs may also have its benefits. Since Bush's
> election, African-American voters have come to understand, once
again,
> the fragility of their vote, and they are ready, once again, to
fight.
> "They are very much aware of what happened in 2000 -- there's not one
> black person in America that's not aware of what happened in
Florida,"
> says Donna Brazile, Al Gore's former campaign manager and the head of
> the DNC's Voting Rights Institute.
>
> Black voters are angry, Brazile says. They are angry about their
> disenfranchisement and perhaps that alone will bring them to the
polls
> this year. But there's a lot more that African-American voters have
to
> seethe over, and Republican intimidation campaigns may not be able to
> hold them back. "They're angry over the loss of jobs," Brazile says.
> "They're angry over slipping back into poverty. They're angry over
the
> misguided war in Iraq. There's enough anger to go around in the black
> community for a long time."
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> About the writer
> Farhad Manjoo is a staff writer for Salon Technology & Business.