"Voter terrorism"

For decades, Republicans have mounted highly organized operations to discourage minorities from voting. Experts say there's no reason to believe this year's presidential campaign will be any different.

By Farhad Manjoo

Sept. 21, 2004 | Philadelphia's 2003 mayoral election did not set especially high standards for civic discourse in the city where American democracy was born. Talking to Philadelphians about the bitter contest between John Street, the African-American incumbent Democrat, and Sam Katz, the white Republican challenger, is like discussing an election in some upstart Latin American democracy. During the course of the race, Street's office was bugged by the FBI, a Katz field office was "firebombed" by an unlit Molotov cocktail, and on Election Day, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, 84 voting-related incidents were called in to police, including "assaults, disturbances, threats, harassment, vandalism" and one bona fide "polling-place brawl."

Amid the general ugliness of the race, though, there's one incident that Democrats in the city remember with a distinct sense of unease. The story, which was first reported by The American Prospect in February, and has since been broadcast by activist groups like MoveOn.org, goes like this: In an attempt to intimidate African-Americans and deter them from showing up at the polls, the Katz campaign, or one of its associates, put together a team of men dressed in official-looking attire -- dark suits, lapel pins bearing insignia of federal or local law-enforcement agencies -- and sent them into areas of the city with large black populations. According to Sherry Swirsky, a local antitrust attorney who is active in Democratic politics and who worked as an election monitor that day, the men carried clipboards and drove around in unmarked black vans.

"Some of them were just driving around neighborhoods, looking menacing," Swirsky recalls. "But others were going up to voters and giving them misinformation about the kind of I.D. they needed in order to vote. The truth is, you don't need any I.D. to vote. But they were telling them they needed a major credit card, a passport or driver's license. They were telling them it was risky to vote if they had any outstanding child support bills. Imagine the menacing presence of a bunch of big white guys in black cars who look like they're law-enforcement people telling you all these things."

Swirsky has monitored several elections in Philadelphia and elsewhere and headed the Democrats' presidential recount effort in New Mexico in 2000. But what happened in Philadelphia, she says, is the most sophisticated election intimidation campaign she's ever seen. It was not a sick prank by one or two racists but instead a systematic effort that required planning and not-insignificant outlays of money (the uniforms, the vehicles and the men, some of whom were reportedly recruited from out of state). "There was such a level of coordination there that if its objectives were not improper, I would say I admired it for the professionalism," she says.

Swirsky met dozens of voters who were intimidated by strange men in uniforms; in a survey of black voters taken after the election, 7 percent reported being accosted by voter-intimidation efforts. "I talked to a number of them and tried to assuage their concerns," she says. "I told them they should go out and vote: 'Those people were wrong. You don't need that kind of identification. No, you're not going to get arrested if you owe child support and you go out to vote.'" But despite her efforts -- and even though, in the end, Street won the race -- Swirsky is certain that many black voters stayed away from the polls that day.

The voter-intimidation campaign that Republicans mounted in Philadelphia was not an anomaly. Instead, it marked a routine occurrence in American elections, a national scandal that rarely makes the front page. The sad fact is that voter-intimidation efforts aimed at minorities have been carried out in just about every major election over the past 20 years. The campaigns are almost always mounted by Republicans who aim to reduce the turnout of overwhelmingly Democratic minority voters at the polls. Now, in what's shaping up to be a razor-thin presidential election, Democrats across the country are pointing to what occurred in Philadelphia as an example of what they have to fear from Republicans this election year.

Next page: It's not a scurrilous charge -- it's the way American politics is practiced