Learn how to avoid falling victim to voter disenfranchisement

The League of Women voters is sponsoring a forum in Newark on Wednesday, June 27 2012 at the Newark Public Library’s Main Branch, 5 Washington Street, Newark NJ. You will learn about nationwide efforts to trample voting rights and what you can do to protect yours. Ryan P. Haygood, the national NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund director, will discuss his group’s legal work to protect voting rights. Here’s the background on why it’s so important to become educated on these measures and take pro-active steps to ensure that the vote you wish to cast next November will be both fairly and accurately counted.

RSVP for this event on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/384323418294684/.

In the United States, all people theoretically have the right to cast a vote in general elections and have it count for the candidate of their choice, but the GOP has been very busy during the past two decades making sure that many voters cannot exercise that right. How are they doing it? Answer: with diabolical cleverness. Watch and learn from the masters of spin, my friends. And, be sure to take your ID with you to the polls next time you go.

First, the GOP created a false crisis by implementing a well engineered public relations campaign intended to create buzz about voter fraud. There are stories of voter machines rigged to count down instead of up every time a vote is cast, and the security breach created when voting machine manufacturer Diebold company published a to-size image on its website of the single key needed to unlock all of their United States voting machines which are widely distributed around the country, which makes them vulnerable to vote tampering.

After people became totally scared that the votes they’re entitled to might not count, GOP politicians began proposing cures in the form of legislation drafted with ALEC’s help all around the country which instead of protecting voters, has made voting effectively impossible for many. People For the American Way takes a look at this manipulation and explains,

There is a reason the Right Wing has been so eager to invent the mythical problem of voter fraud and then offer gratuitous “solutions”: to disenfranchise the voters least likely to back conservative politicians. The abundance of new “anti-voter fraud” laws currently working their way through state legislatures attempt to drive down turnout among young and low-income voters who tend to live in cities, particularly African Americans and Latinos, all groups more likely to vote for Democrats. Frequently these laws require or request that poll workers ask voters to show photo identification.

Of all the states, Florida seems to have set the most notorious record for voter suppression and fraudulent disenfranchisement of legal voters. In year 2000, in a move that 15 years later still looks like a deliberate ploy to sway the Florida elections in GW Bush’s favor, brother Governor Jeb Bush blocked many legitimate voters from exercising their right to vote by purging them from voting rolls without providing the opportunity for challenges to be made in time for those voters to cast their (likely, Democratic) votes in November. At that time, the Republicans weren’t sure they could clinch the 2000 presidential election without Florida, which they badly wanted to win so they could begin to roll out their plans to destroy civil rights, environmental protections and transfer wealthy, property and control of communities out of the hands of the 99% to the coffers of wealthy Americans everywhere. The Right’s domination of America had slipped as average citizens became more knowledgeable and empowered through exponentially improved access to information and communication channels via the internet and they were eager to restore the balance of power they were accustomed to: heavily weighted on their side as it had been for several centuries. I guess the GOP feels its time to replace Obama with a man of their own, because they’re at it again en force now. Fortunately, some ethical people with the power to stop this travesty of justice from happening a second time are vigilantly guarding Florida citizens’ voting rights. Let’s pray they can be effective in protecting the people’s right to a fair election.

The American Prospect looks at this issue

Florida governor Rick Scott is attempting to engage in a purge of voters, requiring some voters to prove their citizenship within a limited time frame in order not to be disenfranchised, allegedly in order to address “vote fraud” that for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist. The Department of Justice told Scott to stop this illegal vote suppression

and reviews the 2000 voter rolls manipulation that helped GWB appear to win that state.

Florida state officials hired Database Technologies, a private firm with Republican connections, to purge the voter rolls of suspected felons. “Suspected,” it turned out, is the key word, because a substantial number of the purged voters turned out to be guilty of nothing more than the crime of being African-American.

In 2001, The Nation helped expose the “disappeared voters” issue of the previous year’s election and bring it into the national spotlight, where unfortunately it didn’t get the attention it deserved. I remember the American public as not having at the time, enough civic savvy to understand what was at stake for our nation and how important it was to stand up as a people and insist on our constitutional right to a fair and unobstructed, national election. Reporter Greg Palast wrote,

After reviewing The Nation’s findings, voter demographics authority David Bositis concluded that the purge-and-block program was “a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters.” Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC, notes that based on nationwide conviction rates, African-Americans would account for 46 percent of the ex-felon group wrongly disfranchised. Corroborating Bositis’s estimate, the Hillsborough County elections supervisor found that 54 percent of the voters targeted by the “scrub” are African-American, in a county where blacks make up 11 percent of the voting population.

Black Talk Radio Network reports on the federal court hearing about Florida’s present attempts to limit voter registrations and voting access,

“Florida’s recent discriminatory purge is but one aspect of its broader attempt to discourage political participation through the very channels that produced historic turnout in the previous two elections,” said Ryan P. Haygood, Director of the Political Participation Group at NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “Implementation of these additional discriminatory changes to Florida’s voting laws would be devastating for Black and other minority voters in the state.”
Most dramatically, under the proposed law, Florida would cut the number of early voting days available in half. This proposal is particularly problematic because Blacks make up a large percentage of early voters.

Mr. Haygood provided a statement entitled “NEW STATE VOTING LAWS: BARRIERS TO THE BALLOT?” at a Senate Judiciary
subcommittee hearing on “the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights”

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