On Monday, Raising Kaine broke an interesting story: an account of an apparent voter-suppression phone call placed by the Republican National Committee. The transcript goes a little like this:
Hello, this is an important election alert. Our records indicate that you may not be properly registered to vote at this address. The race for Virginia’s next governor will be close. Every vote will count. That’s why it is so important that you are properly registered to vote. You’ll be receiving a form in the mail in the next couple of days. Please, take a moment to fill it out and return it by October 11 so you can exercise your right in the upcoming election on November 8. Paid for and authorized by the Republican National Committee 05077. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee. www.gop.com
(You can
But what if that call was targeted to a different group entirely? What if the may of the targets were strong Democrats? Would the RNC really want to offer them a friendly reminder like this? Or would the intent more likely be to suppress their vote? Given the number of complaints received by Democratic Party officials within Virginia, it looks like at least some people on their list are decidedly not Republicans.
Bob Gibson picked up on this in today’s Daily Progress:
Confusion and consternation has been a result across the state because most of those receiving the calls in some localities are properly registered, registrars said.
Twenty calls in Albemarle County were from “persons all legally registered to vote,” said acting Registrar Linda Helf. Of the 20 voters who have called her office since Friday, “some were upset,” Helf said. “Basically, people are confused.”
In Fairfax County, most of the approximately 100 people who called registrars “were already registered,” said Jean Jensen, secretary of the state Board of Elections. “A few had changes of address,” she said.
Jensen sampled e-mail responses from more than 20 registrars to her office in Richmond and said a majority of those who had received the call and then called officials were already registered voters. Local registrars “are still getting calls of complaint and concern,” she said.
The RNC tells Gibson that the calls are going to Republicans who favor Kilgore, but wouldn’t say how many calls were being made or how they assembled their list. They deny any suppression, of course.
There are two possible conclusions to draw. The first is that the RNC is hopelessly incompetent at voter-targeting. This is at odds with their 2004 presidential election strategy, though, the results of which left the RNC bragging that they had the best lists in the nation, able to target specific houses with far more accuracy than the DNC. It could happen that they’ve just become horribly incompetent in the past year. But I doubt iti. The second possible conclusion is that RNC is engaging in voter suppression. Without seeing their lists, it’s impossible to say for certain. But it sure looks like voter suppression to me.
Warning, totally OT:
I dreamed last night that I was reading Waldo Jaquith. Can anyone elighten me as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing? If it’s a bad thing, what steps should I take? *grin*
(btw, your Live Preview ain’t working…)
Conspiracy Theorists UNITE!
I dreamed last night that I was reading Waldo Jaquith. Can anyone elighten me as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing? If it’s a bad thing, what steps should I take? *grin*
Funny thing — I had some kind of blogginess in a dream last night, too. I can’t remember what it was now. I think that was a first for me.
(btw, your Live Preview ain’t working…)
Hm. I’ll have to boot up the ol’ VirtualPC Windows XP emulator and see what’s going on, since things work good on the Mac side. Thanks for mentioning it.
Maybe it’s just me, but if I got a call like this it wouldn’t keep me from voting or make me afraid to go vote.
What it would do is make me actually check and be doubly sure that I was registered to vote at my current address
(I’ve only lived at this address about two years).
I suppose it could be some voter suppression technique, but it doesn’t seem like it would be a very effective one.
Perhaps it would work as suppression depending on what demographic you target (I don’t know – who would this scare? Elderly?
People who are traditionally skeptical of “the establishment”).
I think the RNC is setting themselves up for trouble, however, in making themselves responsible for sending out the
voter registration forms and for receiving them back in a timely fashion.
Why would a party choose to put that level of responsiblity on themselves via a “promise” — when they have little control
over the outcome?
What if, come election day, hundreds of people try to go vote across the state because they “think” they’ve filled out the form and sent it back and they didn’t send it back, or it got lost at the post office, or the form never got mailed to them in the 1st place,
or a million different things.
I would never take the responsibility for the outcome of any project in which I didn’t have some modicum of control
over each of the steps in the process.
The RNC has GOT to know (ought to know) that if there are any foul-ups in this “wonderful” plan, they will be pilloried
in the press. Why set yourself up for that?
I suppose it could be some voter suppression technique, but it doesn’t seem like it would be a very effective one. Perhaps it would work as suppression depending on what demographic you target (I don’t know – who would this scare? Elderly? People who are traditionally skeptical of “the establishment”).
I think either people to whom voting is not natural, or bewildering. The elderly, as you point out, but also anybody who doesn’t really “get” the process. Come November 8, they may well think “dang, I’d vote, but I got that call about not being registered and I never got around to doing anything about it…”
Olivia:
The RNC is being pilloried already for their endless lies and corruption.
Why not risk it if it can win you some elections?
In the ’04 election there were rumors of voter registrations where the Democratic registrations were simply trashed. At this point I don’t put anything past the GOP. There’s too much money in their kind of politics. And in our judicial system Money can often beat a legal wrap. I’ll be watching the DeLay indictment unfold. I hope you will too.
I tried to explain this before: they did the exact same thing in the battleground states last year. Yes, it is targeted mainly at Democrats. Yes it is about voter suppression (skating the thin edge of legal/illegal). The point of the game is the mailing they promise. That mailing contains a “Do Not Forward” order and a return part. If no one responds to the mailing or the phone call, they then use this as evidence to file “voter challenges” with the local Boards of Election that the voter’s status might be faulty. If the voter cannot be tracked down to appear at a hearing to defend themselves, then the BOE can throw them off the voter rolls for that year. The whole point is to create as many extra hoops towards voting for Democratic voters to jump through as possible (especially African Americans who are wary of being summoned to legal hearings): many of whom won’t bother to contest it for an off-year election. Last year many many angry people contested the challenges. The most outrageous story was of a Marine fighting in Iraq who was PISSED to find that Republicans were trying to strike him off the rolls. Some of the local Republican lawyers that were recruited to do the challenges were in tears by the time they had faced angry voters and judges: they didn’t know what they were getting into. But the Republican party at large still wins: they waste tons of time and resources from the Dems (who have to track these folks down to get them to fight for their right to vote: often people that work late shifts or are away from home, absentee, etc.), and at the price of a few local people they don’t care what happens to.
Yes, it is voter suppression, yes it is slimy, and no this isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s history, playing again in Virginia. The RNC has ALREADY prepared fillings for something like 6000 such challenges based on this tactic in Hampton Roads alone.
Pretty ironic, considering that Kilgore’s folks make a habit out of using voter fraud, like “voting gravestones,” illegal absentees, and so on, to control their home territory.