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Sunday, October 12, 2008
A Republican wonders if early voting shouldn’t be part of the debate over election theft
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the early years of this century, voter fraud was a fixation reserved for one particular party.
The emphasis had its origins in two presidential defeats, and bitter ballot fights in Florida and Ohio.
In Georgia, conspiracy theorists even raised the possibility that hidden computer codes in newly issued voting machines had thrown the 2002 election to Sonny Perdue, the state’s first Republican governor in 130 years.
Liberals, African-Americans and young people were among those most likely to believe that their votes hadn’t been accurately counted. “The skepticism was on the Democratic side back then,” said pollster John Zogby. “They were obsessed.”
Paranoia has now shifted to the other foot.
That elections are being stolen right and left has become an article of faith among Republicans.
Attacks on liberal voter-registration groups like ACORN didn’t jump up from nowhere. The importance of countering voter fraud is a plank in nearly every state GOP platform, and the national one as well. Why?
”That’s easy. Our voters don’t cheat,” said Eric Johnson of Savannah, the ranking Republican in the state Senate and a prime supporter of Georgia’s 2005 voter ID law.
“We wouldn’t know how to cheat. [Democrats] seem to be creative. I mean they’re out there registering prisoners now. Openly and actively,” Johnson said.
The Senate president pro tem says he’s got no evidence that Democrats are subverting the November vote in Georgia — except for that lawsuit filed last week against Secretary of State Karen Handel.
Handel has encouraged local election offices to question the eligibility of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new Georgia voters flagged by a computer verification program.
Those singled out must prove themselves — which voting rights groups say amounts to intimidation.
“What’s their motive for that [lawsuit], other than to get people who aren’t legal, registered?” Johnson asked.
If ballot integrity is one GOP incentive, changing demographics could be another. Given their party’s limited appeal among minorities, Republicans have long viewed with trepidation the proportional shrinking of the nation’s white population.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s voter registration operation carries the potential of speeding that process in Georgia, which has among the lowest voter participation rates in the country.
Only half of those eligible to vote in Georgia actually cast a ballot in the 2004 presidential election, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And that was a high-water mark in the state’s voting history.
Minorities make up a disproportionate number of the state’s non-voters, according to Doug Bachtel, the University of Georgia statistician and sociologist. The South’s legacy of black disenfranchisement is partly to blame, he said.
But Georgia’s white population also tends to be older, wealthier and better educated — all factors that coincide with higher rates of voter participation, he said.
Figures from the office of Secretary of State Karen Handel have made clear that the prospect of the first African-American president produced a surge of black voter registration that ended last week.
But it’s not just Obama’s success in bringing new voters into the game that has Georgia Republicans worried — for registration is only half the battle. Traditionally, where Democrats have fallen short is in the delivery of these new voters to the polls on Election Day.
Early voting may have changed that. So far, close to 40 percent of all early votes in Georgia have been cast by African-Americans, who usually make up 25 percent of the voting universe in statewide contests.
When they talk of voter fraud, many Republicans point to “motor voter” laws pushed during the Democratic era of Bill Clinton. The measures expanded voter registration sites to include driver license stations and even public libraries.
Early voting in Georgia was a Republican device, intended to make it easier for the party’s harried, suburban supporters to cast their ballots. Even so, it’s about to become part of the Republican debate over election theft.
Johnson called the practice “a mistake.”
“Even if it was well-intentioned, we may find that we’ve opened up more opportunities for those people who are looking for ways to cheat,” said the Senate leader, who’s likely to run for lieutenant governor in 2010.
Tighter controls on voter registration, and continued use of photographic identification may be enough, he said — but if not, the elimination or curtailment of early voting should be considered.
“I think what we’re seeing now is the ability to have time to go out there and pick up homeless people, and carry them to the polls, and register cats,” Johnson said. “It just opens up a 30-day period of time when, if your goal is to undermine democracy, you’ve got 30 days to do it instead of one.”
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