Greg Palast nailed it in the Guardian:

Don't kid yourself: the Republican party's decision yesterday to "delay" the renewal of the Voting Rights Act has not a darn thing to do with objections of the Republican's white sheets caucus. Complaints by a couple of good ol' boys to legislation have never stopped the GOP leadership from rolling over dissenters.

This is a strategic stall that is meant to decriminalise the Republican party's new game of challenging voters of colour by the hundreds of thousands.

In the 2004 presidential race, the GOP ran a massive, multi-state, multimillion-dollar operation to challenge the legitimacy of black, Hispanic and Native American voters. The methods used breached the Voting Rights Act, and while the Bush administration's civil rights division grinned and looked the other way, civil rights lawyers began circling, preparing to sue to stop the violations of the act before the 2008 race. . . .

In the 2004 election, more than 3 million voters were challenged at the polls. No one had seen anything like it since the era of Jim Crow and burning crosses. In 2004, voters were told their registrations had been purged or that their addresses were "suspect".

Denied the right to the regular voting booths, these challenged voters were given "provisional" ballots. More than 1m of these provisional ballots (1,090,729 of them) were tossed in the electoral dumpster uncounted.

A funny thing about those ballots: about 88% were cast by minority voters.

This is an issue of life or death for the Democratic Party, and, indeed, for the preseverance of any opposition to the efforts of the Republicans to create a one party state, yet, one wonders whether it will do anything beyond obligatory votes in Congress. This is much bigger than Diebold, but doesn't generate anywhere near the level of grassroots activity that the use of electronic voting machines has done.

Middle and upper middle class liberals have tended to focus exclusively upon Diebold, despite Palast's past revelations about how the Republicans prevailed in Ohio (and possibly elsewhere) through reliance upon tried and true methods to disenfranchise poor people and people of color:

Step 1: "Spoiling" ballots -- 1,389,231 of them. In the vote-count game, these are called "undervotes" and "overvotes." You can recognize these lost ballots by their hanging chads, punch cards without punches (an Ohio specialty), paper ballots eaten by scanners, and touch screens that didn't know you touched them.

Step 2: Rejecting "provisional ballots"-- 1,090,729 in this pile. Voters finding themselves at the "wrong" precinct, or wrongly "scrubbed" from voter rolls get these back-of-the-bus ballots first inaugurated in 2002. In '04, provisional ballots were passed out like candy to voters in the poorest precincts. They handed them out -- then threw them away -- one million dumped in all. In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell changed state rules, allowing him to toss out the ballots of legal voters who cast ballots in the wrong precinct although these citizens were told their vote would count after confirming their registration.

Step 3: Not counting absentee ballots -- 526,420 of them. At least, that's what we figure from official stats. But it's anyone's guess how many mailed-in votes were dumped. (However, in one case, in Palm Beach, Florida, Jeb Bush's candidate for Elections Supervisor, Theresa LaPore, counted more absentee votes than absentee ballots mailed in. Not the brightest bulb in the vote-fix biz, that Theresa.)

Step 4: Scrub'm, Purge'm, Block'm. These are the voters who never got to vote at all. This group includes those who found their registrations were never entered on the voter rolls. In Ohio, about one-fourth of those registered by Jesse Jackson's 2004 voter drive, found their registrations delayed beyond the election date or lost.

Add to this un-voter group, those who were wrongly "scrubbed" from registries as "felons." For example, there was Bernice Kines, purged in Florida in 2004 because she was convicted of a felony on July 31, 2009. I repeat: 2009. There was something especially odd about the Ohio felon purge: ex-cons are ALLOWED to vote in that state, Mr. Blackwell.

How many lost their chance to vote by scrubbing, purging and blocking? That's anyone's guess, but one million would not be an unfair estimate -- and that's not included in the 3.6 million tally of ballots uncounted.

Furthermore, there is more mischief concealed within new voter identification laws:

And there's some new tricks for these old dogs. For the 2006 and 2008, the GOP is pushing new Voter ID requirements. Your signature won't be good enough anymore.

What's wrong with the new ID laws? This: in the 2004 election, 300,000 voters were turned away from the polls for "wrong" ID. For example, in the "Little Texas" counties in New Mexico, if your voter registration included a middle initial but your driver's license had none, you were kicked out of the polling station. Funny, but they only seemed to ask Hispanic voters. We should see the number of voters rejected for ID to quintuple by 2008 based on the new "voting reform" laws recently passed in several states.

By the time the Diebold machines are tossed onto the scrap heap, the Republicans will have created an electorate that has been permamently shaped to its advantage. Or, to be more precise, and hence, less hyperbolic, we can be fairly sure that the Republicans have accomplished their goal when they agree to paper ballot receipts and sharing of source software.

Palast, along with the Congressional Black Caucus, have been voices in the wilderness in their efforts to highlight the consequences of such mass disenfranchisement. Perhaps, it is time to put Sherlock Holmes on the case. After all, he solved a similar mystery about a dog that didn't bark.

Labels: Democrats, Elections, Racism, Voting Rights