Submitted by Dirt Lawyer, Nov 16, 2006 17:09

Prof. McWhorter:

As a retired Republican congressional campaign manager, who once managed hotly contested races in northern Indiana, western North Carolina, western and eastern Virginia, and central Florida, the only credible evidence that I ever saw of wide-spread, systematic voter fraud emerged from predominantly black precincts, where ridiculously high (nearly 100% in some instances) voter turnout rates, multiple voter registrations with different surnames at single addresses, registrations at the addresses of empty lots or buildings, and demonstrably dead people voting, were just too ugly to ignore. When one congressman for whom I worked targeted black precincts where these shenanigans were statistically apparent for investigation, the local civil rights organizations screamed constitutional violations and sued to stop such investigations and fraud identification techniques. If there is no fraud, no one should be "intimidated." Period. Show your valid i.d., sign the register, and vote for the candidate of your choice. If someone tries to stop you, get a lawyer. If you can't afford one, there are numerous civil rights groups who will provide one for you.

I can't speak to the alleged voter suppression efforts in Ohio in 2004, but the vast majority of the allegations of minority vote suppression in South Florida in 2000, as investigated by the Civil Rights Commission, were little more than hyperbolically over-heated poltical rhetoric (there are other less polite words to describe such allegations, too), calculated to perpetuate the sense of victimhood among many black Americans. Many of these claims were laughable (i.e. a police cruiser parked 6 blocks from a polling station contributed to minority vote suppression); the few credible claims mostly related to accidental purges of the voter rolls (now cured by the availablity of so-called provisional ballots), and confusing paper ballots that were designed by a Democrat officeholder in predominantly Democrat Palm Beach County (now voted out of office).

Republicans aren't very good at the type of actual wide-spread voter fraud described above, mostly because middle-class working folks who have full-time jobs have a hard enough time getting to the polls to vote once, let alone multiple times in different precincts. Most Republican voters wouldbe just as likely to report to law enforcement any Republican operative who encouraged them to vote in a relative's name, or to send in their dead grandmother's absentee ballot. To the extent that Republican operatives engage in such activities, they cannot rely on the widespread support of Repubican voters. But I don't believe Republicans have any monopoly on electoral virture, and the Ohio Republican Party, like its Democrat counterpart, has a long history of periodic scandals, most resulting from the archaic influence of patronage jobs in electoral politics. People will do stupid and illegal things when there is money to be made or when their jobs depend on it. The Ohio party (and the national party, as a consequence) quite rightly paid a price in 2006. Ironically, there were no credible corruption allegations against Senator DeWine, whose re-election loss is the Democrats' new margin of control in the U.S. Senate, but that's life.

Nevertheless, I am receptive if you have credible evidence of minority voter suppression in Ohio. If the evidence is that would-be voters were denied the right to vote because they could not produce proper identification, or because they were not properly registered, my reaction is "tough noogies." You cannot fail to play by the rules, and then cry when the rules are enforced. But if the vast majority of voting equipment failures occurred in predominantly black precincts, that would certainly bear further scrutiny of a very different intensity. Another threshhold question: did these equipment failures occur in predominantly Democrat counties, where Democrat county commissioners and election officials controlled and managed the voting equipment (like Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000)? If so, unless you actually believe the Diebold conspriacy theories, you must blame the incompetence of the local Democrats, rather than some imagined conspiracy among Republican campaign operatives. The machinery of elections is controlled at the county level, and governors and secretaries of state do not determine which voting machines are delivered to which precincts, nor do the hire the county and precinct election staffs. These functions are invariably determined by county-level election officials. If, on the other hand, widespread voting equipment failures occurred in predominantly black precincts in counties that were otherwise controlled by county-level Republican officeholders and election officials, that would certainly smell awfully funny, and deserve further serious investigation.

Bottom line: being denied the right to vote because you cannot produce proper identification is not a civil rights violation, nor because you are not properly registered in the correct precinct or at your current correct address; producing fraudulent identification and voting in someone else's name is a felony. Engaging in a conspiracy to cause voting equipment to fail in predominantly minority precincts is a federal civil rights violation and is actionable under Section 1983. If credible evidence exists, those whose rights were violated need to sue in federal court. Until a suit is filed based upon credible evidence that survives the scrutiny of an empaneled jury, such allegations will not be seriously addressed, nor will a majority of Americans believe them.

Note: Comments are screened, and in some cases edited, before posting. We reserve the right to reject anything we find objectionable.