"It may not be with bullets, and it may not be with rockets and missiles, but it is a war, nonetheless. It is a war of ideology, it’s a war of ideas, it’s a war about our way of life. And it has to be fought with the same intensity, I think, and dedication as you would fight a shooting war."
During a speech in Dallas, Texas in 1980 from a podium shared by Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, Weyrich made the following statements: "How many of our Christians today have the ‘Goo-Goo’ good-government syndrome? They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Efforts to suppress legitimate votes go back to the Jim Crow laws in the segregated South enacted to prevent African Americans from voting by requiring the payment of "poll taxes" and the imposition of unrealistic voting qualifications and literacy tests.
As commonly practiced today, voter suppression is an election fraud designed to illegally reduce the total vote for opposition candidates, instead of legitimate efforts to change opinions or to appeal to reason. Tactics include "caging" lists to eliminate potential voters from the opposition party’s voting rolls by challenging voters who may have moved and not changed their addresses with the registrars. Other tricks include efforts to mislead voters as to the dates and locations for voting and overt and subtle threats that voting will lead to arrests.
Republicans ordinarily defend voter suppression efforts as a response to Democratic voter registration drives which may sweep up unqualified or illegal voters. Democrats seek to register and motivate individuals who are less inclined to vote, but who are more likely to vote Democratic if they make it to the polls. These include the young, poor, students, and racial minorities.
It is this most vulnerable class of people that the voter-suppression conspiracy targets for disenfranchisement.
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft (who suffered the humiliation of being defeated in his last senate campaign by a dead man) ordered a comprehensive "Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative" in 2002 requiring all U.S. Attorneys to work on voter fraud. As a result of this high priority effort, only 24 people were ever convicted of voter fraud, none of whom were ever charged with impersonating another person.
Nonetheless, Republicans have pushed through legislation in 24 states requiring all voters to present some form of identification prior to voting, and seven of these states require voters to show photo Ids. Opponents argue that these laws disenfranchise poor, elderly or disabled voters who may not have an up-to-date driver’s license, a passport or other government-issued identification.
A majority of the Supreme Court upheld the Indiana photo ID law in August 2008 ruling that the law "is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process." Dissenting Justice Souter said the law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state’s citizens."
Current voter suppression efforts are being concentrated in a handful of "swing" states where the outcome could tilt the balance in the Electoral College in favor of one candidate or the other:
- Republicans in Michigan are planning to challenge voters whose names appear on lists of foreclosed homes;
- Republicans in Ohio want to challenge all voters who may have moved and not notified the registrar;
- the Wisconsin Attorney General has filed a lawsuit demanding that registrars verify all voters’ identification prior to the November election;
- the Florida Secretary of State will enforce the state’s "no-match, no-vote" law; and
- a Virginia registrar threatened college students with the loss of funding if they vote on campus.
The Obama campaign just joined local Democrats in filing a lawsuit in Michigan seeking an injunction against a Republican plan to challenge the registrations of voters on a list of foreclosed homes. Calling the plan an illegal effort to harass voters, the complainant alleges the Republicans want "to create havoc in the polling place, to create long lines, a clogged process."
