http://www.openleft.com/diary/13116/rnc-wants-out-of-consent-decree-prohibiting-them-from-voter-cagingRNC Wants Out of Consent Decree Prohibiting Them from Voter Caging
by: project vote
Sat May 02, 2009 at 00:00
Cross posted at Project Vote's Voting Matters Blog
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"The RNC claims that the lack of evidence of voter fraud is due to liberal voting laws that make fraud hard to detect," said Project Vote election counsel, Teresa James. "Yet legislatures in the past decade have pushed through the most restrictive voting codes we've seen since the Jim Crow era. Complicated voter ID rules, barriers to voter registration, and arbitrary rules on verifying provisional or absentee ballots all disenfranchise qualified voters, especially minority voters. Despite this frenzy of allegedly anti-fraud legislation, this political party wants carte blanche to also use questionable tactics that suppress targeted voters, all in the name of mythical voter fraud.
The GOP's history of "ballot security" programs hardly constitutes an argument that the consent decree is unnecessary; while the RNC has been officially restrained from conducting voter caging operations, the state parties have taken up the slack, most notably in 2004, when state Republican parties staged the most egregious and large-scale voter caging program to date, with caging operations that disproportionately targeted minorities in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky. (During a 2004 Detroit election campaign Michigan State representative John Pappageorge told a meeting of Oakland County Republican Party members that "if we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."
In 2008, only public outcry and media attention prevented further targeted challenges, with threats of partisan caging surfacing in Michigan, Ohio, and Montana, among other states. In fact, the same day that the RNC filed its motion to dissolve the dissent decree, the DNC filed a contempt motion alleging RNC violations. The DNC cited RNC involvement in the 2008 New Mexico "caging" of Latino voters, wherein private investigators were hired to obtain "Social Security numbers and other confidential information about voters for the purpose of alleging that the voters were illegal aliens and/or were impersonating other individuals," according to the DNC's brief in support of the contempt motion. "The hiring of private investigators by the RNC to investigate voters clearly does not constitute a `normal poll watch function' within the meaning of the 1987 Consent Decree but rather constitutes a `ballot security' effort within the meaning of that Decree, which the RNC is prohibited from undertaking without a determination by this court that such program complies with the terms of the 1982 Consent Order."
After several postponements, the hearing on the Republican National Committee's motion to terminate the consent decree will be held Tuesday, May 5 at 9 a.m. in the court of Judge Dickenson Debevoise, the judge who heard the original case.
"There is no basis to terminate the consent decree that prohibits the Republican National Committee from engaging in tactics that suppress the vote in targeted populations," said James. "The unfortunate truth is that the Committee has engaged, and continues to engage, in self-styled ballot-security programs that have the effect of restricting ballot access to eligible voters, particularly minority voters."
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