Voting Rights Turnabout A victory for disfranchised Mississippi voters–and they happen to be white. from the WSJ:
Last week a federal district judge found direct evidence that the political machine in Noxubee County, Miss., had discriminated against voters with the intent to infringe their rights and that “these abuses have been racially motivated.”
Among the abuses catalogued by Judge Tom Lee were the paying of notaries public to visit voters and illegally mark their absentee ballots, manipulation of the registration rolls, importation of illegal candidates to run for county office, and publication of a list of voters, classified by race, who might have their ballots challenged. The judge criticized state political officials for being “remiss” in addressing the abuses. The U.S. Justice Department, which sued Noxubee officials under the Voting Rights Act, has called conditions there “the most extreme case of racial exclusion seen by the [department’s] Voting Section in decades.”…
Joseph Rich, the chief of Justice’s voting section until he resigned in 2005 to join the liberal Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, has said he thinks the Noxubee case had merit but wonders if it was “really a question of priority” for a department with limited resources. “The Civil Rights Division’s core mission is to fight racial discrimination,” Mr. Rich told TPMuckracker.com. “That doesn’t seem to be happening in this administration.”
More than 20% of the county’s ballots were routinely cast by absentee voters, despite requirements that everyone have a valid excuse to obtain one. A major reason for their proliferation was that Mr. Brown, in his capacity as head of the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee, would pay notaries public to complete absentee ballots for voters, sometimes without their knowledge or consent. According to Judge Lee, Mr. Brown and his allies then “put in place a nearly all black force of poll workers and managers, over whom they had effective influence and control, and who, under Brown’s direction, ignored or rejected proper challenges to the ballots of black voters.”…
Mr. Brown also went through the absentee ballots in other precincts the night before the Aug. 26, 2003, runoff and put Post-it notes on some ballots with instructions indicating they should be rejected. Judge Lee found that “witnesses who saw the yellow stickers maintained that every sticker seen was on the ballot of a white voter.”
The boss left nothing to chance. Witnesses testified that on the day of the runoff, as voters cast ballots in person at polling stations, poll workers walked up unsolicited to black voters “taking their ballots and marking them without consulting the voters.” Terry Grassaree, the chief deputy sheriff for the county, threatened Samuel Heard, a candidate for sheriff against Mr. Grassaree’s boss, that “I’ll put your ass in jail” after Mr. Heard complained about illegal distribution of campaign literature at the polls.
Mr. Brown sounded like Huey Long when he explained his actions. “This isn’t Mississippi state law you’re dealing with,” he told Libby Abrams, a poll watcher for Mr. Heard, Ms. Abrams testified. “This is Ike Brown’s law.” When Ms. Abrams responded that she planned to have four poll watchers on hand as votes were counted, Mr. Brown told her “Fine, fine, have as many as you want. I’ll send the police on around to arrest you.”
Remember this when people say that election fraud is not really a problem, just something that Republicans claim is a problem.
