black…MYstory

I have been posting about the Justice Department’s fired attorney scandal quite a bit lately. The reason I keep hammering on this is that there is an assault on minority voting rights taking place in the highest levels of our government.

In Ohio, leading up to the election, I saw dirty tricks being played by our then-Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate, Kenneth Blackwell (thankfully, he now has neither job). One of the dirty tricks was threatening voter registration workers with fines and jail time for voter registration forms that were not hand-delivered to the secretary of states office (instead of using mail). So, each individual voter registration staffer would need to hand-deliver the forms of the people they registered. So, that sweet little old lady who took the time to sit at a table in a library in Cincinnati, Ohio to help people get registered to vote could have been facing jail time/fines for not driving the 100+ miles to Columbus, Ohio to deliver the forms filled out while she was on duty. What this also meant was that supervisors for these registration drives could not check out forms for quality and accuracy, meaning more registrations could be tossed out due to errors.

Why is this important? A majority of voter drives result in more Democratic registrants than Republican registrants. This is because the drives often aim at registering poorer and minority voters, who typically vote Democrat. Thankfully, a suit was brought against Blackwell that forced him to end this discriminatory practice.

What I didn’t realize, at the time, was that Ken Blackwell was part of a strategy the Republican Party had enacted in so-called “battleground” states that was done in conjunction with the U.S. Justice Department. They claimed to be cracking down on voter fraud but, in reality, it seems that they were just cracking down on voters.

It has come out that this was a process that has been in place for over six years with the goal in mind of keeping Democratic voters away. This is why the voter ID law in Georgia were enacted (which left many older folks out in the cold because, due to segregation-era policies, they were never issued birth certificates, a requirement for obtaining ID). This is also why Blackwell violated his own state law in Ohio by not making voter registration available at public assistance and Bureau of Motor Vehichles offices. Finally, we also know about how many voters were purged off the rolls in Florida and Ohio because their names didn’t match those in databases or they had the same names as someone on a felon’s list.

So, what we are seeing with the Alberto Gonzales situation is a case of what was done in the dark coming to light. The Republicans can’t win poor and minority votes so, instead, they chose to work to take them away. Again, this is why this scandal should be of concern to us.

Popularity: 16% [?]