Pontiuth Pilate
Republican Jesus!
The Washington state Republicans (smarting over their close defeat in the 2004 elections) decided it was time to pull out the dirty tricks. And what better way than sleazy voter suppression?
Actually I doubt whether there is any demographic guru working behind the scenes here. It's just a universal Republican tenet: stop people from voting and we increase our chances.
This is voter obstruction at its worst. Just take a random list of voters, and file obstructions without even verifying the charges beforehand. They are automatically reduced to "provisional" voters. And their votes will never be counted unless they come to court to prove they live where they say they do. How many will bother? How many will even vote if their registration is challenged?
And if most of them turn out to be poor or transient, well, that's even better right?
Seattle PI said:The GOP looked up addresses for commercial storage facilities and postal-box services in the Yellow Pages and cross-referenced them with voter-registration addresses to generate an initial challenge list, Vance said. The party then dispatched researchers with digital cameras to confirm the illegal registrations, he said.
But the Watermarke mistakenly ended up on the final list, even though it's a three-story brick apartment building with no signs of commercial activity on the premises.
So did the single-family house at 902 First St. in Kirkland, its owner, Steve Meuter, said Friday; the registrations of both he and his wife, Linda, have been challenged, he said.
"We got these miserable letters," he said. "For us to correct this, we have to go to downtown Seattle, and God knows what kind of line you're going to stand in down there."
A regular voter and a resident of Kirkland for 30 years, Meuter said he's lived with his wife at 902 First St. since 2002.
The GOP system flagged the registration of Barbara Taylor at 3600 Stone Way N. in Seattle, the address of a Public Storage Co. locker facility. But Taylor said Friday that is where she lives: She's a manager for the company and has lived in an apartment on the site for 12 years.
Voters who did not list proper residential addresses on their registrations can submit valid ones today and vote freely Tuesday. Otherwise, challenged poll voters will be given provisional ballots Tuesday that will be set aside pending hearings by the county Canvassing Board prior to certification of the vote Nov. 29; absentee ballots from challenged voters will be treated similarly.
Concerted efforts to purge voters from the rolls -- especially GOP efforts -- are nothing new. A 2004 report by professor Chandler Davidson and other researchers at Rice University in Houston documents numerous "ballot security programs" mounted by Republicans across the country in the past 50 years. Most of them were targeted at black and other minority voters who traditionally vote Democratic, the authors said.
And Harvard Law School professor Heather Gerken, an authority in the field, said Friday, "There's always one side that's in favor of making it easier to vote, and then on the other side there are people who argue about integrity and fraud. It's always Democrats on the first side and Republicans on the second, and this is not a coincidence."
The arguments are important and real, she said, but colored by self-interest. Generally, she said, higher voter turnouts favor Democratic candidates, lower ones Republican candidates.
The purge campaigns often are driven by an educated guess about which voters would be disqualified by them, she said. The Sotelo challenges, for example, might be expected to fall most heavily on more transient, lower-income voters, who belong to a socioeconomic group that leans Democratic, she said.
"The odds that very wealthy people are using a mail box (as a registration address) are slim," she said.
But Vance denied the GOP challenges were aimed at any particular group of voters.
Actually I doubt whether there is any demographic guru working behind the scenes here. It's just a universal Republican tenet: stop people from voting and we increase our chances.
This is voter obstruction at its worst. Just take a random list of voters, and file obstructions without even verifying the charges beforehand. They are automatically reduced to "provisional" voters. And their votes will never be counted unless they come to court to prove they live where they say they do. How many will bother? How many will even vote if their registration is challenged?
And if most of them turn out to be poor or transient, well, that's even better right?
