Blocking the vote

Yesterday Rep. Mark Green and Rep. James Sensenbrenner issued a statement on the Elections Board decision to stop allowing people to vote with the last four digits of their social security number and instead have them fill out a provisional ballot if they don't have a driver's license. I have been wondering why these two have been fighting so hard to limit the amount of voters and now I know why.

Green is taking a page out of the national Republican Party playbook on how to push an election your way if you don't have the votes.

I recently read Robert Kennedy Jr.'s article in Rolling Stone magazine about the 2004 election and it makes the motivation behind Green's and Sensenbrenner's efforts crystal clear, especially for Green.

Kennedy's article should scare the pants off of every voter in this country. It is a shocking tale of voter intimidation, fraud and old-fashion ballot box stuffing by the Republican Party. To give you a small taste of just how bad the election process was in our country in 2004:

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

Ohio, because it was the battleground for the election, had all the makings of an election in a third world country:

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

So Green and his pals in DC are laying the groundwork for the voter suppression they need to happen to ensure a victory in the race for governor. The first step is to keep people that may not have drivers licenses from voting. People like seniors that won't like these votes from Green and students that won't like these votes from Green. The other steps outlined in the Rolling Stone article are sure to follow later this year.

The Elections Board was trying to do the right thing by making it easier for people to vote, but Green doesn't think the Elections Board decision goes far enough to keep people that don't support him from voting. He can try to hide behind HAVA all he wants but the bottom line is this: Why is any candidate for governor trying to keep legitimate voters from being able to vote easily this November?