[Jonathan Alter, author of the new book “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies”, is joining us as a guest blogger this week in the Editor’s Blog highlighting and discussing some key findings and revelations in his new book. – jmm]
Day Two:
One of the most important stories of the campaign was what I call “The Voter Suppression Project”–a concerted effort to tilt the election to the Republicans. Like the Tea Party, it was not dictated from Washington but Republicans in the states knew just what to do to make sure voting rules prevented Obama from winning.
[Jonathan Alter, author of the new book “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies”, is joining us as a guest blogger this week in the Editor’s Blog highlighting and discussing some key findings and revelations in his new book. – jmm]
Day Two:
One of the most important stories of the campaign was what I call “The Voter Suppression Project”–a concerted effort to tilt the election to the Republicans. Like the Tea Party, it was not dictated from Washington but Republicans in the states knew just what to do to make sure voting rules prevented Obama from winning.
“With so many statehouses and state legislatures suddenly in Republican hands after the 2010 midterms, it wasn’t hard to roll back the small d democratic victories of Democrats. Starting in early 2011, the GOP, often using model bills drafted by the powerful but little-known American Legislative Exchange Council, launched quiet voter-suppression campaigns in forty-one states. It was the most systematic and pervasive effort to discourage voting in almost a century. GOP state legislators introduced 140 bills to restrict voting, including the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.
“Through the beginning of 2012 there was little publicity about these suspiciously timed efforts, but Democrats were under no illusions about what was happening. The White House believed the GOP was trying to rig or at least tilt the election. Bob Bauer, the president’s longtime attorney, called it ‘a remarkable piece of concerted execution.’
“Not every state enacted every provision in the ALEC model bills, but the similarities in many of the measures were striking. It was an open secret within the GOP that Republican governors were racing to see who could be the first to sign far-reaching election ‘reform.’
Republican secretaries of state, egging each other on at conservative conferences, recognized that their ticket to higher office was proving to donors and party officials that they would use their power to hold down Democratic turnout.
“Florida was typical of what happened behind closed Republican doors. On New Year’s Day 2011, Emmett ‘Bucky’ Mitchell IV, the attorney responsible for the notorious list of purged ‘felons’ in 2000, called a meeting with several political consultants and state officials.
“Jim Greer, the state party chairman, soon to plead guilty in a corruption scandal, said later that Mitchell’s meeting disturbed him. ‘I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting,’ Greer testified in a deposition.
“Republicans charged that the accusations were concocted to bolster his case, but three other former GOP officials backed the defense in Greer up in interviews with the Palm Beach Post and Tampa Tribune.
“At the New Year’s Day meeting, Mitchell, who had been elevated to general counsel to the Florida GOP, took on the assignment of writing the vote fraud bill to be introduced in Tallahassee. Passed in May 2011, the radical overhaul of election laws cut early voting days from fourteen to eight, made it more difficult to change registration to a different county (affecting African Americans, who move more often than other voters), and placed crippling restrictions on voter-registration efforts.
“Florida’s new law effectively ended all voter-registration drives, an activity the League of Women Voters had undertaken in the state for nearly a century. The statute required voter-registration volunteers to go to the county office and take an oath agreeing to be personally liable for thousands of dollars in fines if they didn’t deliver completed forms without the slightest error within forty-eight hours, among other restrictions.
“Republicans in Michigan went even further, requiring that voter registration volunteers attend training sessions but providing no funds or other provisions for such training–a state-sanctioned Catch-22. The League of Women Voters had no choice but to suspend its operations in Florida and Michigan and join with Rock the Vote and other organizations to file suit.
“By mid-2012 nineteen states had approved new legislation restricting voting, including seven of the nine battleground states in the general election. The total number of electoral votes potentially affected, 212, was more than three-quarters of the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.”
