I believe voter suppression is more than a simple political crime. I believe it is a crime against humanity. I've fought voter suppression, theft and fraud all my life. Working as a reporter and then as a Democratic consultant, activist and writer based in Texas, I've seen it first hand. I've watched my screams fall on deaf ears. I've lived with a culture that believes that as long as "the right people" vote, every thing is in its little hierarchical place.
It happens everywhere, but it a particularly Southern tragedy, and I can fully understand and fully support the outrage among African-American voters when they believe their voting rights are being trampled once again.
There's a part of me that believes the outrage at suspected voter suppression in North Carolina is healthy. There's a bigger part of me that sees too much vigilantism in the reaction to WVWV.
The first chapter of my book, The Politics of Deceit, opens with a tragic story from Ocoee, Florida during the 1920 election. When a young African-American named July Perry cast his ballot that morning, white racism turned to rage. Perry was shot, hanged and burned. Five hundred people were driven from their homes, which were then burned to the ground. Children spent the night hiding in trees of an orange grove. One of them, Armstrong Perry, returned for the first time 81 years later. He was 93. He said he could still smell the fire.
You can read a PDF of the chapter on voter suppression, "The Threatened Habitats of Democracy," here.
I know many of the critics of WVWV take offense at being characterized as an unthinking mob. From their perspective, someone is trying to suppress the votes of African-Americans because those votes may help give the Democratic nomination to an African-American candidate. Whatever the facts of the matter, we will know them, sooner or later. It's the tone of the criticism that concerns me, the rush to condemn and convict. It smells like the Ocoee fire to me.
I don't know what the facts are. I am a committed supporter of Barack Obama's. I have long sense abandoned any idealism that every Democratic candidate is above immoral and unconscionable acts, so I imagine there are supporters of his opponent who would try to suppress his vote. WVWV made mistakes, mistakes that appear to have caused confusion and dread among the voters of North Carolina. The group also mishandled the press and the blogosphere in its reaction to the accusations.
But I still find it hard to believe that a group that has registered hundreds of thousands of voters and conducted similar campaigns in post-election settings that couldn't possibly suppress votes because the voting had already happened would engage in an overt voter suppression effort. If they have, it's the most sophisticated and intricate suppression plan I've ever heard of, complete with alibis and cover of an extraordinary kind.
Maybe it was simple ineptitude and incompetence. Maybe it was hijacked by a consultant who turned an otherwise beneficial program to bad purposes. I don't know.
Would I feel pulled toward such a patient withholding of judgment if this was a Republican group? Damn good question, and the honest answer is I suppose not. I simply know too much of the history of Republican efforts to suppress votes, right up through the U.S. Supreme Court's anti-democratic endorsement of Indiana's regressive voter i.d. law. There's nothing in the history of that party that deserves a benefit of the doubt on this issue.
But as long as facts are not ultimately suppressed, as long as we can get to the truth, I think we'd do the progressive movement a favor if we'd give at least some little room for one of our own to explain what happened, to correct any unfortunate mistakes, to admit wrongdoing if wrongdoing was done, to be punished or exonerated, whichever is called for.
I don't want brothers and sisters of our movement feeling like that need to hide through the night. It's the authoritarians and the bigots who do that sort of thing. We stand for something else altogether.
I have just finished a series at OpenLeft called "The Promise of Popular Democracy." It touches on many of these issues. It is about these issues, and I locate the ultimate human values and capacities that gave rise to democracy long, long ago. It will make clear where I stand on voter suppression. Each of the parts is lengthy, so don't expect a sound bite blog. But some of you might find the series worthwhile.
You can read the series here: Part I: Origins, Part II: Solidarity of the Shaken, Part III: The Promise.
I also recommend Mark Crispin Miller's new book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 200-2008.
For those who disagree with me now, I only hope you will carry your outrage about voter suppression on to our future battles. The rigging of elections, the shutting down of the civil justice system, the weakening of the legislative branch and the construction of an authoritarian executive branch, all still depend upon the Right Wing effort to limit the counted votes of Americans of all kind. Republicans are pulling up the ladder, but we have our hands on it, and it's our responsibility to pull it back down to the people.
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