Voter suppression

Yesterday, Josh Marshall highlighted an article on the Kentucky GOP's intention to play a game in this year's gubernatorial race that's nauseatingly familiar to those of us who've been involved with campaigns in the Deep South: attempting to use the poll-watching process to make it difficult for black voters to cast a ballot.

Initially, I was going to take a pass on this story; after all, I'm not going to outblog a pro like Josh. But then (via Eugene Volokh) I found this post from Ralph E. Luker, and, as much as I usually enjoy his uncommonly erudite blog, I really feel the need to respond.

When I captained a bi-racial precinct in Orange County, North Carolina, I helped elect Chapel Hill's first African American mayor, Howard Lee, in a non-partisan local election. In doing so, we turned out a record breaking number of African American voters. But when it was time to further organize the precinct, it was impossible to recruit any African Americans to serve as Republican precinct officers. We had few African Americans registered as Republicans and I was determined to get one of them to work with me. Community pressure was such that none of them would do it. I'd make an appointment to meet with them and might as well have been the bill collector or an insurance man. Nobody home, don't know when she'll be here ... etc, etc, etc.

Like it or not, Republicans have a right to be represented at the polls in largely African American precincts. If African American Republicans won't risk community pressure to represent the party, it will send people into those precincts to represent it. You can demagogue the issue if you want to, but it's as simple and as complicated as that.

Yes, Republicans have a right -- a responsibility, actually -- to ensure that they are properly represented at the polls, and it doesn't matter a whit what color skin their representatives happen to be wearing on election day.

But that's not the issue here. This is about one thing -- the systematic abuse of the ballot-challenging process in certain precincts to intimidate some voters and to inconvenience the rest, as they're forced to queue up in lines that stretch around the block and into the next county.

As a southern Democrat who once got so tired of this "technique" that I didn't intervene as forcefully as I might have to stop an overzealous poll watcher of mine from doing the same thing to a lilly-white Republican precinct in the burbs, I'd like to assure everyone reading this that middle class white people really, really hate being treated that way when they're trying to vote. In fact, they call the cops when it happens to them, and they're shocked when they discover that it's perfectly legal and there isn't a damned thing they can do about it.

It's time for the national GOP to step in and put a stop to this outrageous practice. Or, if they won't, to at least quit bitching when Democrats accuse them of being racist jerks unfriendly to minorities.

Note to Kentucky Dems: Tired of this crap? Have your people show up at minority-majority precincts with video cameras, and keep them trained on the GOP poll watchers. You'll be amazed at the effect this has on their behavior.