What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?

icon_eric_holder.jpgThe U.S. Justice Department told Georgia election officials this week that their program for verifying the citizenship of voters has been rejected because it violates the Voting Rights Act. You would think that our state’s officials would have gotten the message by now — this is at least the third time in nine months that the DOJ has turned down this plan because it discriminates against non-white voters.


For good measure, the Justice Department also said that a new state law requiring persons to show proof of citizenship before they can register to vote is “unenforceable” because Georgia has not obtained federal clearance for that particular change in its election laws.

This issue goes back a couple of years and involves efforts by Republican officials to make it more difficult for blacks, Latinos and other non-caucasian voters to cast ballots. When Karen Handel was secretary of state, she devised a program of cross-matching data from the voter registration rolls with the Department of Driver Services database. This program supposedly would flag non-citizens who should not be voting.

Voter rights groups went to court and protested this attempt at voter suppression. A panel of federal judges ruled in October 2008, as early voting was proceeding in the presidential election, that the state would have to allow all of these voters Handel’s office had been flagging to cast “challenged ballots.”

After Barack Obama took office, the Justice Department rejected Handel’s voter-flagging program and charged that it had prevented numerous African American, Latino and Asian persons from voting who should have been allowed to cast ballots.

“Our analysis shows that the state’s process does not produce accurate and reliable information and that thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote under Georgia law have been flagged,” said Loretta King, assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, in a May 29, 2009 letter to state Attorney General Thurbert Baker.

Handel has a history of being stubborn when judges and lawyers try to tell her she’s done something illegal, so she ordered the state law department to appeal that denial of the verification program. Her appeal was turned down by the Justice Department in October. An assistant attorney general in the state law department asked the Justice Department in December to reconsider that decision once more.

The Justice Department sent a letter to the law department this week informing them that the state’s voter flagging program has again been rejected — making it the third time that federal officials have tried to convey this message to Georgia.

“I remain unable to conclude that the State of Georgia has carried its burden of showing that the original voter registration verification program has neither a discriminatory purpose nor a discriminatory effect,” Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said in the letter to the law department.

Perez said that SB 86, the law passed by Republican legislators last year that requires proof of citizenship for people registering to vote, has not been submitted to the federal court in the District of Columbia or to the Justice Department for administrative review as required by the Voting Rights Act.

“Changes that affect voting are legally unenforceable unless and until the appropriate Section 5 [Voting Rights Act] determination has been obtained,” Perez reminded the law department.

Handel is long gone as secretary of state, but her successor appears to be determined to keep fighting this battle. Brian Kemp said he will ask Attorney General Baker to file a petition for a declaratory judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in an attempt to salvage the citizenship requirement.

“The State of Georgia will no longer watch the Obama Justice Department play politics with our election processes and protections,” Kemp said in a statement released by his office. “The Justice Department is denying Georgia’s legal requirement to verify the information provided by new voter registration applicants.”

What we have here is really a very simple situation. You can get away with programs that deny some citizens the right to vote when a guy like George W. Bush is president. When you have a president like Barack Obama, however, the Justice Department is going to take a dim view of attempts to keep non-caucasian citizens from casting their ballots.

Attorney General Eric Holder needs to have a conference call with Kemp and Handel and ask them this: “What part of ‘no’ do you have trouble understanding?”


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4 responses to “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”

  1. J.M. Prince Avatar
    J.M. Prince

    Wow, somehow that’s not taking at all. We wonder why, right? Pretty screwy. Let’s try that again:

    “Again, we’ve had literally Many 1000’s of these ‘mismatches’ in my small county (100K). If former SoS Miss Handle had her way? They’d be more likely to be prevented from voting. Even if they’ve been voting all their lives in essentially the same place. Which to my mind is the very definition of discriminatory. And for no good cause other than than trying to ‘gum up’ the system which had been working reasonably well, without any examples for decades of the ‘widespread’ type of fraud this action was supposed to prevent. But then again I repeat myself, and some will whine about the length here. But thanks for the reporting here Tom”. JMP

  2. J.M. Prince Avatar
    J.M. Prince

    [Sorry for the break there, this is the rest of the comment above, continuing on for another paragraph]:

    Again, we’ve had literally Many 1000’s of these ‘mismatches’ in my small county (

  3. J.M. Prince Avatar
    J.M. Prince

    “I remain unable to conclude that the State of Georgia has carried its burden of showing that the original voter registration verification program has neither a discriminatory purpose nor a discriminatory effect,” DoJ, 2010 version

    Me? I can easily provide documentary evidence of how this action has already had a ‘discriminatory’ effect in my small county. Many older Democratic voters have been contacted (some right before the Prez. election), to inform them that their ‘voter file’ was ‘incomplete’ (or just not ‘matching) and that they’d need to come in to either sign another form or do another application.

    After working with the county registrar I got him to then issue a letter informing those folks that they a.) still could vote & b.) the ‘status’ of the ‘completeness’ of their voter file would not prevent them from voting. Many of these folks were just Older voters who they had never had a ‘proper’ signature on their Original ‘voter card’, which may have been either decades old, or subsequently ‘lost’ or unable to be located. Despite that ‘incongruity’ they’d often been actively voting, again for decades.

    So to my mind, certainly a ‘discriminatory effect’ and probably from the GOP’s hell bent insistence on implementing this crass stupidity, a ‘discriminatory intent’. Which, BTW is the usual and typical course for that party, country wide too. My registrar eventually came to understand this ‘dynamic’, and worked diligently to try & personally resolve all the erstwhile 1000’s of ‘discrepancies’ that were flagged by the SoS ‘matching’ program. Anyone who knows anything about matching names in databases can tell you that they’re plenty of errors everywhere in them. Mostly? People still need to be allowed to vote despite how some data entry clerk may have mangled their name, or how Mrs. Winston ‘fudged’ on her actual birthdate in 1956, and then did not manage to match this with her drivers license.

    Again, we’ve had literally Many 1000’s of these ‘mismatches’ in my small county (

  4. Jules Avatar
    Jules

    I would have mad love for Baker if he said “hell to the no” to Kemp.

    I can’t tell you how many of our Dem Reps told the committee and house this was a bad idea, but they were so tone deaf that they actually tried to bring forward legislation that would make it illegal for anyone but a GA resident to even register voters. Mercifully this was contained in committee on cross over day.

    Hello it’s 1964 calling, someone wants their Jim Crow laws back. Next they’ll be saying we need literacy tests again too, oh oops they tried that at the Swiftboatbirthbagger thing last month.

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