How Republicans Quietly Hijacked Justice Dept. to Swing Elections

[kpete]

April 15, 2008 at 07:27:57

Headlined on 4/15/08:
How Republicans Quietly Hijacked Justice Dept. to Swing Elections

by Steven Rosenfeld

http://www.opednews.com

How Republicans Quietly Hijacked the Justice Department to Swing Elections By Steven Rosenfeld, Ig Publishing
Posted on April 15, 2008, Printed on April 15, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82348/

The following is an excerpted chapter by Steve Rosenfeld from the new book "Loser Take All," edited by Mark Crispin Miller (Ig Publishing, 2008).


Jim Crow has returned to American elections, only in the twenty-first century, instead of men in white robes or a barrel-chested sheriff menacingly patrolling voting precincts, we are more likely to see a lawyer carrying a folder filled with briefing papers and proposed legislation about "voter fraud" and other measures to supposedly protect the sanctity of the vote.

Since the 2004 election, activist lawyers with ties to the Republican Party and its presidential campaigns, Republican legislators, and even the Supreme Court -- in a largely unnoticed ruling in 2006 -- have been aggressively regulating most aspects of the voting process. Collectively, these efforts are undoing the gains of the civil rights era that brought voting rights to minorities and the poor, groups that tend to support Democrats.

...................

Will this history of vote suppression tactics repeat itself during the 2008 presidential election? While the Democrats are not saints when it comes to voter suppression -- recall how John Kerry's supporters disqualified signatories to Ralph Nader's presidential petitions in 2004 -- they do not have the same kind of vote suppression apparatus in place as the Republicans do. Indeed, it appears that Republicans are already following Chandler Davidson's inventory by seeking to regulate the voting process well before the 2008 election. The tactics that can be implemented well before the voting begins -- stricter voter ID laws, voter purges, registration drive curbs, tougher provisional ballot laws and easing rules for voter challenges -- are already underway in several states.

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

more at:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_steven_r_080415_how_republicans_quie.htm

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