Michigan Voters being challenged by GOP

[NorthCarolina]

Project Vote Denounces GOP Plans to Foreclose on the Voting Rights of Low-Income Michigan Residents

September 11, 2008
CONTACT: Eleiza Braun 415-420-4059

The Michigan GOP has announced plans to use a list of housing foreclosures as the basis for a broad voter-caging operation, as reported yesterday by Eartha Jane Melzer in The Michigan Messenger. James Carabelli, chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, has announced plans to assign “election challengers” to polling places to question the eligibility of home foreclosure victims based on residency. “We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” Carabelli told the Messenger.

Today Teresa James, attorney for the voting rights organization Project Vote, and author of the 2007 report Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters, issued the following statement in response:

The Macomb County GOP’s plan is a cynical partisan attempt to suppress the vote of thousands of low-income and African-American voters, a replay of the 2004 threats of mass challenges. Just because you’re behind on your mortgage doesn’t mean you lose the right to vote. All a foreclosure filing tells anyone is that the owners are behind on their mortgage; it does not mean a voter has necessarily moved. Foreclosures take time. And even if the plan is to only challenge voters whose homes have actually been sold at auction, the challengers will still achieve nothing but to slow-down voting and create an intimidating atmosphere at strategically chosen polls.

Michigan law says that challenges may be made at the polls if the challenger “knows or has good reason to suspect” a voter is ineligible. The Michigan Secretary of State has clarified this to require that challenges should be based on “reliable sources or means.” Republican challengers with only a list of foreclosure notices will have NO evidence or reliable source to suggest that eligible voters have moved and are no longer eligible to vote.

This is just the latest—and most transparent—in a long history of racially and politically motivated GOP attacks against Michigan voters, designed to suppress votes by disenfranchising individual voters and creating confusion and delays at the polls. In 1999, right-wing volunteers in Hamtramck, Michigan systematically challenged the citizenship of voters with dark skin and Arabic-sounding names. In 2004 and 2006, Republicans reportedly recruited thousands of paid challengers to disrupt predominantly African-American precincts. “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote,” a GOP state representative was quoted as saying in 2004,”we’re going to have tough time in this election cycle.”

As the Messenger reports, Macomb County is in the top three-percent of counties in the U.S. hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis—and African-Americans, as the primary victims of sub-prime lending practices, make up the majority of these cases.

Read more here: http://projectvote.org/index.php?id=80&tx_ttnews=2530&tx_ttnews=75&cHash=d8312209c7

[Jack Rabbit]

1. Make sure you are resistered to vote

Even if you think you are.

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Dupe

!!

[bluestateguy]

3. We need watchers to watch the challengers

Preferably big union guys who weigh at least 300 pounds and can kick some ass if need be.

[Bennyboy]

4. The link is bunk......

It takes me nowhere.

[NorthCarolina]

6. For some reason the link was truncated when it was posted

apparently the full link was too many characters so you would need to manually copy the entire line and paste it into your browser (check for and eliminate blank spaces). Sorry but it was beyond my control.

[norepubsin08]

5. NATIONAL CHECK IF I CAN VOTE

This is one of the reasons that I am proposing that we (all liberal blogs/web sites and organizations) declare October 1, 2008 as NATIONAL CHECK IF I CAN VOTE DAY. If we have massive cooperation on this, it will be one more fire wall in combating the tactics that have lost progressives the votes that were so rightly theirs.

[Sam Ervin jret]

7. The party of Lincoln has "changed" alright. Into the party that systematically and perpetually

tries to deny the citizens that Lincoln himself lost his life fighting to emancipate from exercising the most basic and important right of any and every citizen.

The right to vote.

That's the kind of change the GOP offers to America.

The GOP promises to try to change things back to make them the McSame as they were in the Dark Ages.

McCain is to change as Fox is to educational programming.