Here’s something to ask your friends, family, and co-workers. Is it a legitimate form of political action to target groups that tend to vote against you with intimidation in an effort to dissuade them from casting a vote? In this case, it’s the Republican Party of Wisconsin, in league with Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin and various Tea Party groups, who is hoping to keep racial minorities and college students from voting in the midterms. Here’s how it works. You send mail to a huge list of blacks and college students. Your mail informs them that they may not be eligible to vote. This makes them wonder if trying to vote might get them in trouble or present some kind of hassle. So, that suppresses some votes. Then, since people move, a lot of the mail will bounce back to the sender. They make a list of all the returned mail and then they send volunteers to various precincts under the pretense of being neutral election observers. These volunteers watch the polls like a hawk, seeking to challenge the right to vote of anyone who had their mail returned as undeliverable.
Now, you might be thinking that there’s no problem with making sure people actually live where they say they live and that they are voting in the appropriate precincts. But this is no ‘clean election’ strategy, as it targets only racial minorities (usually blacks) and college students. Because blacks have lower levels of home ownership than whites, and because college students are college students, both groups have a tendency to change addresses between election cycles.
So, is this kind of behavior defensible in any way? Do we think elections should be decided by the deliberate suppression of just one or two segments of the electorate? In a democracy, shouldn’t we try to encourage people to participate? What does it say about a party’s philosophy that it relies on suppressing the political opinions of young people and racial minorities? Didn’t we have the Civil Rights Movement in this country so whites would stop using bullying tactics to keep blacks away from the polls? Ask people about this. See what they say.
