City Pages: The War at Home

[question everything]

Steve Perry · · Vol 25 · Issue 1246 · PUBLISHED 10/20/04

URL: www.citypages.com/databank/25/1246/article12570.asp

The War at Home

Derail the vote 2004: A Karl Rove production

by Steve Perry

The Bush administration's long-anticipated October Surprise is upon us. Are you watching? The real magnitude of the story is not evident, because it's the sum of many local and regional stories. So do this. Go to Google's up-to-the-minute newswire site, news.google.com, and type these words into the search engine: voter registration fraud. As of Monday morning, that string yielded 1,940 returns from the previous couple of weeks. You will find mainly three kinds of tales. The first involves numerous instances of seemingly capricious legal and bureaucratic maneuvering by elected Republican officials where election rules are at issue. The second concerns allegations of fraud by paid operatives of the national Republican Party working in several states. The third, predictably, consists of blustery accusations by Republicans that the Democrats are preparing to commit election fraud and to falsely accuse Republicans of doing the same.

(snip)

The same sort of obstructionism is being tried, to potentially much greater effect, in the pivotal swing state of Ohio, whose secretary of state likewise happens to be a politically ambitious Republican hack. Last month the office of J. Kenneth Blackwell tried, unsuccessfully, to decree that all voter registrations in the state had to be filled out on 80-lb. paper stock, citing an obscure provision in the law that dated to pre- computer days when hard copies of registration forms had to be sturdy since they were the primary record retained. What was the practical impetus? Simply that not all new registrations were being collected on 80-lb. paper stock, and the fiat offered grounds for rejecting more of them.

(snip)

In Nevada and Oregon and possibly several other states, one paid Republican registration group has been accused of representing itself as nonpartisan in order to do registration drives at prime spots such as libraries, and then systematically destroying any forms they received from Democrats. And of course there is Florida, where another Bush administration's allies commissioned the scrubbing of voter rolls in 2000 and attempted to do the same thing again this year before they were caught in July. But there is no end to the shenanigans a resourceful bureaucrat can pull; as Paul Krugman wrote in his most recent column, "Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form."

(snip)

But this is different. I believe we are seeing a war over voting rights on a scale no American has seen since the fight that culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and no Northerner has seen since the age of the utterly powerful and utterly corrupt urban political machines. The Rove-led Republicans do not seem to care if they lay waste to public confidence in the ballot box once and for all. They care only about holding on to the White House, and they appear to be making all due effort to render it as difficult as possible for people to turn out in large numbers to vote against them. If they fail in this, they at least will have created a legal foundation for conjuring a crisis of succession that can be kicked upstairs to the Supreme Court once again.

(snip)

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

1. Excellent article.