To Americans today, the idea that a major political party actively plans to disenfranchise minority voters may seem anachronistic; we'd like to believe that such tactics would no longer be tolerated in our nation. But over the last two decades, various arms of the Republican Party, or groups working for Republican candidates -- at the national, state and local levels -- have carried out well-documented projects designed to intimidate blacks and other minorities.
Under the guise of "ballot security" measures, supposedly designed to preserve an election's "integrity" and reduce "voter fraud," Republicans have organized off-duty cops to patrol heavily minority precincts, put up threatening signs, and mailed out sternly worded "bulletins" warning of the consequences of voter fraud. They've also systematically challenged the residency of thousands of minority voters in several elections, and they've rigged voter rolls to exclude minorities eligible to vote, which occurred in Florida in 2000. These were not ad hoc efforts. As in Philadelphia's mayor's race, they were often planned and executed for the specific purpose of reducing black turnout in order to boost Republican political fortunes.
The Republican Party denies any plans to suppress the minority vote this year; in fact, President Bush has recently attempted to court black voters. Swirsky and other Democrats who fear that the GOP may attempt to suppress the black vote can produce no proof that Republicans are up to no good. But many independent observers are suspicious. "As we look at the last 12 months or so, we are extremely concerned about incidents indicating that Republican officials may be planning to challenge minority voters," says Ralph Neas, president of the nonpartisan People for the American Way Foundation.
Neas is referring not just to the Philadelphia mayor's race but also to a widely publicized absentee ballot-fraud investigation conducted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Orlando this summer. In that investigation, elderly African-American voters were visited at their homes by police officers curious about their voting behavior. While Florida officials deny any attempt to intimidate voters, critics say the investigation is emblematic of the kind of under-the-radar, state-sponsored intimidation program that Republican officials have conducted in the past. On Friday, the Justice Department disclosed that it has initiated a civil rights investigation into what occurred in Orlando.
Currently the NAACP, People for the American Way Foundation, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and other voting-rights groups are putting together what they call a historic effort to forestall voter-intimidation tactics this year. In the days before the vote and on Election Day itself, these groups will send an armada of lawyers to polling places across 17 states to watch for and react to any legal challenges that come up -- an attempt to derail the most outrageous intimidation campaigns.
Many black voters themselves are intensely aware of the prospect of suppression tactics -- and they're ready for them, says Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP. "This is part of the folklore of black America, especially since 2000," he says. "Many people have tales to tell about this happening to people they know."
Still, despite the counter-intimidation efforts and increased awareness, elections experts still predict that suppression programs will likely succeed in turning away many voters at the polls this year. How many? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Nobody knows. But Bond notes that it took less than 600 votes in Florida to swing the election to Bush last time, and he believes that more than 600 African-American Gore voters were disenfranchised there. If this year's "election is as close as everyone believes it will be," Bond says, "and if they frighten just 600 voters away from the polls," minority voter-intimidation tactics may very well determine the next president of the United States.
In July, John Pappageorge, a Republican state representative in Troy, Mich., attended a local party meeting to discuss with colleagues the Republicans' chances of winning the state for Bush in November. In the course of the discussion, according to an account published in the Detroit Free Press, Pappageorge declared, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election." Detroit, of course, has a huge minority population; about 83 percent of its residents are African-American. Pappageorge's statement was roundly condemned and he quickly apologized for it, insisting that he wasn't suggesting anything racist or illegal in calling for a suppression of the Detroit vote. As a matter of politic strategy, Pappageorge was probably right.
A concise political axiom underlies the Republican rationale for mounting voter-suppression campaigns aimed at blacks: African-Americans don't vote for Republicans. In the 2000 election, Bush received about 9 percent of the black vote and nobody believes he has a chance of improving on that this year. His father received about the same percentage of the African-American vote, as did Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
It's true that despite those consistently low numbers, Republican presidential candidates sometimes make a play for African-American voters, as Bush recently did in his much-heralded speech to the Urban League. But these efforts are obviously disingenuous, Democrats contend, because the last thing a Republican candidate would want is more people from an overwhelmingly Democratic demographic coming to the polls. The likelier reason that Republicans occasionally attempt to woo black voters is as a way of signaling to whites that they're compassionate.
Indeed, strategists say, both the Republicans' and Democrats' efforts to win black voters rarely have anything to do with specific policies that might be of importance to African-Americans. Since Democratic presidents and governors usually can't win without huge African-American turnouts, and since Republicans can't win with such turnouts, each party's approach to African-American voters is at best a numbers game. Democrats are forever working on methods to increase the minority turnout, while Republicans try to keep as many minorities at home as possible on Election Day. That is not a scurrilous charge against the GOP, though it sounds like one; it's the way politics is practiced in America.
Next page: The pull of voter intimidation was too strong for Republicans to ignore