Dismantling voting rights enforcement

[mmcirvin]

A little while ago I posted about perceptions of voter fraud and pointed out that to some extent, the administration's behavior in selective pursuit of fraud cases might be traced to a sincere (if, in my opinion, mistaken) view of the reality of threats to the integrity of the system.

That was the bending-over-backwards-to-be-sympathetic reading. Here is the unsympathetic reading, and it comes from someone who was actually there, in the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division:

From 2001 on there were repeated occasions on which I discovered after the fact that front office personnel (that is, the political appointees) had directly contacted attorneys I was supervising without first advising me or the section chief. Before this Administration such contacts were extremely rare and generally only occurred under exigent circumstances.[...]

Worse, such contacts could be less than well-intentioned, often seeming to occur after the front office had obtained some piece of information, or received a question or "helpful suggestion" from Republican officials or attorneys. This was a particular problem in a highprofile redistricting case involving the State of Georgia that we litigated from 2001-2003. I felt that it took every bit of my abilities to prevent the Voting Section from being hijacked in that case by pressure from the Georgia Republican Party. While I believe that with the unwavering support of my section chief Joe Rich I was successful in doing so, by late 2004 I became convinced that we no longer would be able to intercede in the same way.[...]

To put it bluntly, before 2004 the desire to politicize the Voting Section's work was evident, but it was tempered by a recognition that there were limits to doing so. That such constraints diminished over time is evidenced by the well-known and ham-fisted handling of decisions involving Texas' congressional redistricting plan in late 2003 and Georgia's voter ID law in 2005. My concerns also were greatly magnified by the evident intention of the political appointees to replace Joe Rich after the 2004 election with a new section chief who would be a willing "team player".[...]

It goes on. Notice what Kengle does not say: he is very careful to insist that this is not what always goes on, that "everybody does it" is not a valid response here. Before 2001, Kengle says, the Voting Section was cautious to separate attorneys and hiring decisions from partisan pressure from the administration; now this no longer happens. It's easy in these situations to fall into a kind of lazy universal cynicism, to assume that this sort of garbage has gone on since time immemorial and the only difference is that this time somebody got caught. But it actually isn't true, and realizing that it isn't true is part of understanding the true outrage here. This is in the section of the Justice Department devoted to protecting the integrity of the vote from discriminatory meddling, and there seems to have been a particular effort to erode those protections for partisan gain. This is a strike at the heart of democracy.

All this is, of course, conditional on whether we can actually believe Kengle. But everything he says is certainly perfectly consistent with the other revelations concerning goings-on at DOJ.

Comments

[mskala.livejournal.com]

This is something I was thinking about and planning to post in my Web log when I get the time to research it in more detail: apparently there's an email making the rounds claiming the blacks' right to vote will expire this year (http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/pending/voting.asp). It's not true, of course, but the grain of truth in the story is that a law giving the US Federal government special powers to force the states to allow blacks to vote, will expire in 2007.

Snopes (the urban-legends people, linked to above) take a positive view of the expiry of the Voting Rights Act: they say isn't it nice that we don't need such an act anymore. I'm not sure I'm so optimistic. I think the last couple of elections prove that the US does need such an act very much, though since the Federal government seems to be among the guilty parties in rigging the vote to disenfranchise blacks this time around, I'm not sure that the act really makes much difference. The voting-machine scandals seem related as well.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Snopeses have been snookered by administration happy-talk before. I like them and think they provide a great service, but you do have to remember that their natural inclination is to believe that things are basically all right. It's a good default instinct to have when chasing all-caps end-of-the-world email hysterics, but it can steer you wrong. They are, however, willing to issue corrections based on evidence.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Is it even a tiny bit realistic that so much as a 50-person county populated entirely by whites were to move to outlaw voting by blacks, it wouldn't find 3 branches of government clamouring to be the first to condemn the move either by law, executive order, or emergency session?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The original email was stupid, but the assurance that the Voting Rights Act's expiration should be regarded as a sign that progress has made it superfluous seems to involve an extra assumption.