In the hours before every Election Day comes a blitz of dirty tricks — confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night. The intent is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a Black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent.
Complaints have surfaced in predominantly Black neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions. Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats. In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens. In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Senator Barack Obama to the Holocaust. "Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4," said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake."
The Obama campaign has signed up millions of new voters for this presidential race. In Ohio alone, some 600,000 have submitted new voter registration cards. Across the country, many of these first-time voters are young and strong Obama supporters. Many are also Black and Brown. In Nevada, for example, Latino voters said they had received calls from people describing themselves as Obama volunteers, urging them to cast their ballot over the phone.
Other reports of intimidation efforts in the hotly contested state of Pennsylvania include leaflets taped to picnic benches at Drexel University, warning students that police would be at the polls on Tuesday to arrest would-be voters with prior criminal offenses. In a Jewish neighborhood fliers were recently left claiming Senator Obama was more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel, and showed a photograph of him speaking in Germany. It showed up between the screen door and the front door in the middle of the night.
Trying to mislead voters is nothing new. It all happens around this time when there's too much other stuff going on in the campaigns, and it doesn't get investigated. In 2004, automated phone calls in the final days leading to the federal election wrongly warned voters they would not be allowed to vote without a photo ID. In Colorado and Virginia, people reported receiving calls that told them their registrations had expired and they would be arrested if they showed up to vote. In Milwaukee, fliers went up advising people "if you've already voted in any election this year, you can't vote in the presidential election." In Pennsylvania, a letter bearing what appeared to be the McCandless Township seal falsely proclaimed that in order to cut long voting lines, Republicans would cast ballots on Nov. 2 and Democrats would vote on Nov. 3.
The ACLU's Voting Rights Project said they have never seen "an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities." Activist groups say it is this fresh crop of voters that makes some Republicans very nervous. And they say they expect the dirty tricks to get dirtier in final hours before Tuesday.
Such tactics are common, and are often impossible to trace. Robo-calls, in which automated, bogus phone messages are sent over and over, are very hard to trace to their source. E-mails fall into the same category. The calls were reported to Election Protection, a nonprofit advocacy group that runs a hot line for election troubles. The organization does not know who orchestrated them. "The Voting Rights Act makes it a crime to misled and intimidate voters. "If you can find out who's doing it, those people should be prosecuted. But sometimes it's just difficult to know who's doing what”, they say.
That is the kind of people that we have running the country. They stole the presidential election in 2000 and 2004 by dirty tricks. And it is not going to be easy to unseat people who will do anything to win. We know that we need a change -- tomorrow night we will know if the people have risen up enough to overthrow the undercover “oppressors”.
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