Block the Vote

Josh Marshall reports on the latest example of GOP voter-suppression efforts, this time in Kentucky:

As recent press reports have noted, state Republicans plan to flood predominantly African-American precincts in western and central Louisville with poll watchers to challenge the eligibility of voters.

On Thursday, Jefferson County GOP Chairman Jack Richardson IV told the Louisville Courier-Journal that the precincts in question weren’t chosen on the basis of racial make-up or voting patterns. But a flyer sent out in July advertising a meeting to recruit poll watchers tells a different story.

Josh has a .pdf of the flyer in his documents collection. It bemoans the influence of black voters in recent Kentucky elections, the outcomes of which it says were:

… adversely impacted by the presence and influence of the Democratic National Committee, the A. Phillip [sic] Randolph Institute (the black militant division of the AFL-CIO and funded in part by the DNC) and the NAACP and their efforts to marshal the Get Out To [sic] Vote efforts targeted toward the black, poor voters in selected communities and selected targeted races of national impact.

The flyer is titled a "Call to Arms," and it seeks to create a gauntlet of procedural hurdles for any black or poor voter showing up to cast their ballot in the state of Kentucky. And yes, this has the full support of the Republican Party.

This kind of blatantly racist voter-suppression tactic makes me all the more determined to help recruit and register voters for the next election. So I click over to the Federal Election Commission's Web site to download more copies of the National Mail Voter Registration Form and I get the following message:

The FEC is updating the National Mail Voter Registration Form to reflect recent changes in Federal law. The new form will be available shortly.

I first noticed this earlier this month, and the form is still unavailable.

Given that voter-suppression is now an openly embraced strategy by the Republican Party, I find it troubling that public access to voter registration forms and information has been unavailable for several weeks during election season. The reference to "recent changes in Federal law" is also worrisome.

To learn more about the Get Out The Vote efforts of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, see here.