I can’t think of anything un-health-related that is more traumatizing than losing your home. But maybe that is a good analogy. What if the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County (Michigan) announced that he was going to challenge the right to vote of every cancer-survivor he could identify? Would that be much different from this?
The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.
“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.
It’s remarkable that Mr. Carabelli would come right out and admit his plan to disenfranchise the traumatized. And it’s not an isolated incident.
Carabelli is not the only Republican Party official to suggest the targeting of foreclosed voters. In Ohio, Doug Preisse, director of elections in Franklin County (around the city of Columbus) and the chair of the local GOP, told The Columbus Dispatch that he has not ruled out challenging voters before the election due to foreclosure-related address issues.
Hebert, the voting-rights lawyer, sees a connection between Priesse’s remarks and Carabelli’s plans.
“At a minimum what you are seeing is a fairly comprehensive effort by the Republican Party, a systematic broad-based effort to put up obstacles for people to vote,” he said. “Nobody is contending that these people are not legally registered to vote.
“When you are comprehensively challenging people to vote,” Hebert went on, “your goals are two-fold: One is you are trying to knock people out from casting ballots; the other is to create a slowdown that will discourage others,” who see a long line and realize they can’t afford to stay and wait.
Strangely, we don’t hear about any such efforts in Utah or Wyoming. That’s evidence that this is an effort to win states through disenfranchisement, and not a principled stand against election fraud.
David Lagstein, head organizer with the Michigan Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), described the plans of the Macomb GOP as “crazy.”
“You would think they would think, ‘This is going to look too heartless,’” said Lagstein, whose group has registered 200,000 new voters statewide this year and also runs a foreclosure avoidance program. “The Republican-led state Senate has not moved on the anti-predatory lending bill for over a year and yet [Republicans] have time to prey on those who have fallen victim to foreclosure to suppress the vote.”
Here’s my suggestion. Obama and Biden need to talk about this relentlessly until everyone in the nation knows about it and associates the Republican Party with cheating and heartlessness.
Do they really have a legal leg to stand on here?! I don’t understand why having a home in foreclosure drops you to the level of a second class citizen.
The article doesn’t really seem to actually settle the question of whether you are technically eligible to vote if you are in fact occupying a house that is in foreclosure.
Also, based upon this
“But poll workers are not allowed to ask the reason” for the challenges, Rozell said. In other words, Republican vote challengers are free to use foreclosure lists as a basis for disqualifying otherwise eligible voters.
it sounds like if they are challenged, they are out. Who makes the decision as to whether the challenge is valid, or bogus?
I live close to Wayne County. I am going to look into whether I can do anything to help at the polls on election day. This can’t be allowed to occur.
The argument is probably that you no longer live there, so your registration is invalid because you didn’t re-register at your current address. This would be true in Illinois, except that if you move 30 days or less before the election, you can still vote because the Registrar has closed registration and you had no chance to re-register.
But most people whose houses are in foreclosure are still living there. People do not tend to move out of their houses until the foreclosure process is complete and they are given a vacate by date, or they are forceably evicted, which will be months after the vacate by date.
Didn’t say I agreed. Said that was the argument.
This is so awful.
I argued the other day that at this point in time, the American public and it’s defenders are so tied up, so tired, so morally exhausted, that they/we can’t keep putting fingers in all the holes in the proverbial leaking dike. That this state of fractiousness, this creation of chaos by the Right/Republicans, has gotten so common, that all decency and civility are out the window, and all the faults of laws on the books exploited, that the Republicans don’t care how ruthless or cruel they look; the nation’s mindset has been cultured and propagandized for the last 30 years to accept this degradation and legalistic hammering of the public.
I was just young enough to see the beginning of the video game revolution (’78?, ’79?), with Space Invaders and Pacman; now I see how wanton cruelty and killing with no consequences has raised a generation of young people who have no outrage, who don’t and can’t care, because if you press “play again” you get all your lives back, and your toy enemies lives back again. But reality is about social communication and mutual support. That spirit is being bloodlet amongst the older folks here, and was never quite instilled in the younger folks.
This latest travesty of our culture doesn’t surprise me, but it raises my anxiety level another notch, that’s for sure.
I live in Canada and I am allowed to vote from my last US address. If the people who are in foreclosure are still in the house, they still get to vote. If they are “homeless,” I have to wonder if they, like me, can vote from their last address.
Good point because it can take some time to complete a foreclosure and eviction.
Surprisingly, homeless can register a street corner as their address – i.e., 4th and Broadway, in California. They can then go vote. I’m happy for that, but I’ll bet precious few take advantage of that privilege. Oops, right. It should be a right. It’s not, but it should be.
I think, because your house is in foreclosure does not mean you are not living at that address. Republicans only want to deny the right to vote, any other theory would be crazy. Because as you point out they are not doing this in Red states.
Right on the money, BooMan.
And while they’re talking, they should ask how many times McCain votes? He owns seven homes, and can vote at one that is in a separate state without penalty, as I understand it…
This is absurd. The foreclosure process takes months to conclude, during which the house remains the legal residence of the person being foreclosed upon. After foreclosure is completed, if the residents do not vacate voluntarily, they have to be evicted, and that can also take months and months.
This CAN’T be legal. It sure as HELL isn’t moral or ethical.