It'll Come Down to the White Vote in Alabama: Black Vote is being Blocked [voter ID], Crosschecked, Caged & Spoiled [over-votes] by Racist GOP

Greg Palast explains, "So, how will they steal it?  Let me count the ways (nine of them).

“Caging.”  It’s a felony crime, but that didn’t stop Judge Moore’s campaign chief, Brett Doster, from committing this vote theft crime for the George W. Bush campaign in 2004.  I know, because I have Doster’s own confidential emails. 

(How I got them – well, that’s another story. You’ll just have to read the book.) Here’s a bit of one of the emails.  Bobby Kennedy Jr explains how this ‘caging’ trick steals votes (from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy): 

Crosscheck.  In 2015 I got a call from Hank Sanders of Selma, Alabama.  His name was missing from the voter rolls.  That’s Senator Hank Sanders.  Despite his post, he’d been removed mysteriously.  I flew down and solved the mystery.  The perp:  Donald Trump’s operative, Kris Kobach of Kansas. 

Kobach created a list of 239,801 Alabamians he tagged as “potential” duplicate voters.  I got my hands on about a third of that list – how? don’t ask – and it’s overwhelmingly names of Black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters.  Yet, Alabama has arrested not one double voter.  It’s Jim Crow all over again.

“Spoiling.”  The Alabama ballot has nothing on the ballot but the Senate race and, in some counties, a local referendum.  But it also has a box for “party-line” votes.  Vote for “Democratic Party” and also vote for the Democratic candidate, your vote can be tossed in the “spoilage” bin, not counted, because they can decide, arbitrarily, that you “over-voted” – voted twice.  It’s a technical gotcha that is used selectively…i.e. against Black voters.

I saw the “over-vote” spoilage trick eliminate 700 Al Gore votes in Gadsden County, Florida in 2000.  (That’s more than the 537 votes that supposedly elected George W. Bush.)

And I saw it again in November 2016 in Detroit, Michigan, where 70,355 ballots were not counted (in part, because of the same over-vote trick).  Throwing out those Detroit ballots gave Donald Trump a supposed 10,700 margin to win Michigan.

The ID con.  Within hours of the Supreme Court slicing up the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Alabama passed a law requiring all voters to have a photo ID from a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).  And the very next day, the state shut down almost every DMW in the ten Black-Belt counties.

I simply can’t describe every trick in this small space.  You’ll have to read the book or see the film.

From [NyTimes] The Senate election in Alabama on Tuesday is not just about the choice between Doug Jones and Roy Moore. It’s also about a voter suppression campaign that may well sway the result of a close race.

In 2011, Alabama lawmakers passed a photo ID law, ostensibly to combat voter fraud. But “voter impersonation” at polling places virtually never happens. The truth is that the lawmakers wanted to keep black and Latino voters from the ballot box. We know this because they’ve always been clear about their intentions.

A state senator who had tried for over a decade to get the bill into law, told The Huntsville Times that a photo ID law would undermine Alabama’s “black power structure.” In The Montgomery Advertiser, he said that the absence of an ID law “benefits black elected leaders.”

The bill’s sponsors were even caught on tape devising a plan to depress the turnout of black voters — whom they called “aborigines” and “illiterates” who would ride “H.U.D.-financed buses” to the polls — in the 2010 midterm election by keeping a gambling referendum off the ballot. Gambling is popular among black voters in Alabama, so they thought if it had remained on the ballot, black voters would show up to vote in droves.

Photo ID laws may seem innocuous. For many of us, it might be easy to take a few hours off from work, drive to the nearest department of motor vehicles office, wait in line, take some tests, hand over $40 and leave with a driver’s license that we can use to vote. But this requires resources that many rural, low-income people around the country simply do not have.

I work with poor, black Alabamians. Many of them don’t have cars or driver’s licenses and make under $10,000 a year. They cannot afford to pay someone to drive them to the motor vehicles or registrar’s office, which is often miles away.

Photo ID laws are written to make it difficult for people like them to vote. And that’s exactly what happens. A study by Zoltan Hajnal, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, comparing the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, found that the voter ID law kept black voters from the polls. After Alabama implemented its strict voter ID law, turnout in its most racially diverse counties declined by almost 5 percentage points, which is even more than the drop in diverse counties in other states.

The study controls for numerous factors that might otherwise affect an election: how much money was spent on the races; the state’s partisan makeup; changes in electoral laws like early voting and day-of registration; and shifts in incentives to vote, like which party controls the state legislature.

In Alabama, an estimated 118,000 registered voters do not have a photo ID they can use to vote. Black and Latino voters are nearly twice as likely as white voters to lack such documentation.

In other words, Alabama’s law is nothing but a naked attempt to suppress the voting rights of people of color. That’s why my organization, Greater Birmingham Ministries, with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, has sued the state to block the photo ID law. The case will go to trial in February.

When the law was passed in 2011, it so reeked of discrimination that state politicians didn’t bother to submit it to the federal government for approval, as Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required. For decades, Section 5 had acted as a crucial prophylactic, stopping discriminatory voting laws before any election. Instead the ID law remained dormant until June 2013, when the Supreme Court’s devastating ruling in Shelby County v. Holder suspended Section 5’s preclearance requirement.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a United States senator, applauded the ruling as “good news” for the South. For Mr. Sessions, who called the Voting Rights Act an “intrusive” piece of legislation, it was a victory. But for voters in Alabama and the rest of the South, it was terrible news.

It left states like Alabama, Texas and North Carolina free to test the limits of voter suppression. Indeed, after the decision, Alabama announced the photo ID law would go into effect without federal approval.

The photo ID law isn’t the only obstacle in front of Alabama voters. My organization is also challenging the state’s felon disfranchisement law, which affects an estimated 250,000 people here — 15 percent of Alabama’s black voting age population, but fewer than five percent of whites.

The law bars people with felonies of “moral turpitude” from voting. For decades such crimes were ill defined, but once included things like miscegenation. A new law narrowed the list of disfranchising crimes, but a federal judge ruled this summer that the state is not required to inform people with convictions who couldn’t vote under the old law that they may now register to vote.

Sadly, on Tuesday, many of the voters who would most benefit from picking lawmakers who will represent their interests in the Senate will be kept away from the polls. Those voters are disparaged for their purported disengagement with the election, while the state’s voter suppression campaign is largely ignored. [MORE]