Page 163 - Freedom in the world_Neat

Despite the ban, an internal party document indicated that the RNC launched a similar
effort in 1986 in order to “keep the black vote down” in Louisiana, Georgia, Missouri,
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Indiana;51 the RNC worked to have 31,000 mostly black
voters purged from registration rolls in Louisiana alone.52 Likewise, in 1988 armed
guards were placed at polling places in heavily Hispanic precincts in Orange County,
California; in 1990, 125,000 postcards were mailed primarily to black North Carolinians,
intentionally misinforming them about residency requirements;53 and intimidating mailers,
fliers, and signs threatening jail time and deportation for those who did not follow
registration requirements were frequently deployed in minority neighborhoods in New
York City, Texas, and the Carolinas during the 1990s.54
Following the 2000 presidential election in Florida, there were similar allegations of
intimidation and improper purging of eligible voters from registration rolls in heavily
African American precincts. That election also brought to light the unequal allocation of
voting machinery, and its disparate impact on black voters. Throughout the state, 4
percent of all punch-card ballots were excluded, compared with 1.4 percent of optical-scan
ballots.55 Punch-card machines are located disproportionately in African American areas,
in Florida and elsewhere.
In response to concerns that the allocation of voting machines and the practice of purging
voter registration lists effectively dilute the vote of ethnic minorities, Congress passed the
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in October 2002. The legislation allows voters who have
been removed from voter registration lists to cast provisional ballots that may be counted
at a later time if they were in fact improperly purged. It also mandates minimum standards
for election machinery. Overall, HAVA seems to have significantly reduced the total number
of spoiled ballots nationwide. Charles Stewart III, an expert on voting behavior and
equipment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimates that HAVA saved about
one million votes across the country in 2004.56
Nevertheless, voters faced familiar problems at the polls that year. A court order to make
public a purge list of 47,000 “potential felons” in Florida revealed that thousands of those
listed were actually eligible to vote. It appeared that the list, which consisted
overwhelmingly of African Americans, had been deliberately cleared of Hispanics, who tend
to vote Republican in Florida.57 The list was scrapped nine days after it was made public.
The most extensive reports of vote suppression in 2004 were in Ohio. At the center of
most of the electoral controversies was Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, whose
position as cochairman of the Committee to Reelect George W. Bush in the state led many
to allege a conflict of interest. Blackwell was ultimately named in 16 election-related
lawsuits.
In the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election, there was an unprecedented
surge in the registration of new voters in Ohio, which was thought to favor the Democratic
Party. In a county-by-county analysis, the New York Times found that new registrations
between January and September were 250 percent higher than in 2000 in areas that
typically vote Democratic, but only 25 percent higher in Republican
neighborhoods.58 During this time, Blackwell took several steps to invalidate new voter
registrations, purge names from the existing rolls, and establish more scrupulous
standards for the state to follow when considering the validity of provisional ballots.
Certainly, some such measures are necessary to eliminate erroneous voter registration
applications and remove former residents from the current roll, but many in this case were
clearly intended to achieve partisan electoral advantage.

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