Today the Dallas Morning News editorialized on the recent attempts by the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbot, to find any evidence of widespread voter impersonation fraud or illegal voting by non-citizens. Project Vote reported on his failure to find any evidence of organized or widespread fraud earlier this week.
Reports out of Texas over the past month show a pattern familiar to voting rights groups: top law enforcement officials engaged in deeply politicized efforts to push prosecutions and policies that disenfranchise low-income and minority voters. Steve Rosenfeld, writing in the Texas Observer, lays out the the whole story in detail, but the general gist feels a lot like the politicization scandal the US Department of Justice brought to light over the course of 2007.
This diary is cross-posted from Project Vote's Daily Kos entry and our own blog, Voting Matters.
Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
As we count down to the new year - a time when the Supreme Court will weigh-in on the voter ID debate and we will cast ballots for the next president of the United States - Texas lawmakers continue to aggressively present the alleged issue of non-citizens voting. This week, voter ID was added to the list of topics to be studied by the House State Affairs Committee for the 2009 legislative session, an action deemed a partisan ploy to reintroduce the "discriminatory and divisive" legislation of 2007. Stirring the so-called voter fraud plot in Texas to greater heights, a coalition of legislators requested Secretary of State Phil Wilson "implement more stringent proof of citizenship requirements before casting a ballot in Texas" in November 2008.
A 2006 cynical smear campaign and voter suppression scheme orchestrated by Republican State House Representative Tony Goolsby (HD102, Dallas), along with Dallas County Republican Party Chair Kenn George and a Dallas GOP consultant, may have backfired. Monday, former challenger Harriet Miller, with support from the Lone Star Project, filed a lawsuit in the 192nd State District Court showing that their attack "constitutes slander" and was committed with "actual malice."
The Goolsby/George scheme entailed the blatant misrepresentation of election returns in order to file a false voter fraud complaint against Goolsby's Democratic challenger, Harriet Miller, with the Dallas County District Attorney. The false complaint was then used as a political prop to libel and attack Ms. Miller, while also suppressing African American voter turnout in House District 102. The Lone Star Project detailed the scheme in a special report last year.
For complete details, the complaint, the background, research, and supporting evidence, take a look at the Lone Star Project website.
There are a lot of Texans who live on and near the Texas coast. For the sake of all the coastal Texans of all political backgrounds, I don't want to go through another Hurricane season with Thelma Bush and his Louise GOP.
Please count Ohio's ballots now, during Hurricane season to save all our families on the coast. And, please count Ohio's ballots now, because the Climate is collapsing faster than scientists had earlier thought.
Also, time is running out as bee colonies are dying out this year. Bees need to be recovered this year.
If voter disenfranchisement bills pass in Texas, my vote in 2008 and beyond may not ever count again. That is already a big problem with the Republican owned "No Evidence" and "Hidden Evidence" Voting machines (kept in place if Holt's HR 811 passes) with which you have had to deal (will deal?). Our political power is being taken by elites who do not have the skills (nor intention if apocalyptic or profiting from catastrophy) for us to survive global warming.
Instead of waiting voteless and so powerless, for a meaningless 2008 election while our rulers drive us all over a cliff with Climate Collapse, we need to consider something different and meaningful.
If you are waiting to be asked, then I am begging, please count Ohio's votes now. And, if you won (which you may well know beforehand as each ballot has been copied/photographed for documentation), then hire Al Gore, John Edwards, Jim Webb, and James Lee Witt, among many other strong, caring and competent people to clean up the Bush/GOP disasters, help us through hurricane season, and save our Democracy, our Climate, and therefore, Us.
Texas is one of several states subject to the Voter Rights Act Section 5 pre-clearance whereby election practices or procedures are frozen until the new proposed procedures have been subjected to review by the US Department of Justice. You wouldn't be too surprised by our state neighbors in the VRA Section 5 pool. You also wouldn't be too surprised that under the Bush administration DOJ pre-clearance has been relatively easy.
LA Times 3/25/2007 Justice Department tugged to the right
Under Bush, the department has been tainted by politics, many say.
(snip)
The Civil Rights Division veterans focused their criticism on major voting case decisions over the last six years that they say have generally benefited the GOP.
The most recent case concerned a 2005 Georgia law that required voters to provide photo identification. Staff attorneys raised concerns about the law after the Georgia secretary of state supplied data showing that tens of thousands of voters might not have driver's licenses or other prescribed forms of identification. They said the plan could effectively disenfranchise large numbers of black voters.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and his office will be the subjects of a lawsuit filed investigating the enforcement of a recent voter fraud law. An article that ran on Tuesday in the San Antonio Express-News and will run Wednesday in the Houston Chronicle details how Abbott has used the law, among other things, to spy into the bathroom window of a 69-year old African-American woman. From the Express-News:
Gloria Meeks of Fort Worth, also 69, said she stepped out of her morning bath last month and screamed. Two voter fraud investigators from Attorney General Greg Abbott's office were peeking in the bathroom window, Meeks said in a sworn statement.
Meeks sworn statement can be found here, courtesy of the Lone Star Project. A lawsuit will be filed this week by J. Gerald Hebert, executive director of the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center and former head of the Justice Department's voting section of the civil rights division, on behalf of Texas Democrats.
In total, Abbott's office has indicted 13 people for voter fraud. As the Lone Star Project reported yesterday, on a follow up of a report from May 18, the breakdown of those 13 people are fairly telling:
13 of 13 are Democrats
12 of 13 are minorities (9 African-American, 3 Hispanic)
10 of the 13 are accused of simply possessing another's absentee ballot for delivery to election officials or to a mailbox
8 of 13 are over the age of 50
5 of 13 are over the age of 60
The Chronicle article also details how a power point presentation, meant to instruct citizens on how to stop voter fraud, exclusively depicts African-Americans in their illustrations of voter fraud:
Abbott's PowerPoint primer on voter fraud, "Investigating Election Code Violations," illustrates the discriminatory nature of his enforcement, Hebert argues, because it cues law enforcement to link voter fraud with black voters.
One slide alerts authorities to look for evidence of fraud on documents, especially specialty stamps. It depicts a sickle cell anemia stamp of a black woman holding a black baby, a stamp often used by blacks.
Another slide shows five black people in line for early voting, noting "all laws apply," while no white or Caucasian people are shown voting in the 71-slide presentation.
