Chief of Police of Malibu

in order to keep their jobs.  This, apparently, is what the current Republican administration feels is such a high crime-fighting priority that if US Attorneys waste their time pursuing violent criminals, embezzlers, or (Republican) elected officials accused of corruption, they will be driven off in favor of some Karl Rove buddy or other flunky who now, thanks to the Patriot Act, will not be subject to Senate confirmation.

This is by far the most appalling story I’ve seen about Republican priorities in years.  Veiling their hatred for and desire to oppress poor people and those with other skin colors is often hard for their party leaders, but this beats all.  Sending a Wisconsin woman who had done her time back to jail because nobody told her when she registered to vote that it was banned (which in itself is a dubious law, since she was not even on parole anymore), not to mention a poor black woman who was not part of any organized scheme, whose single vote could have had but infinitesimal influence on an electoral outcome is bad enough.  Deporting a law-abiding legal immigrant from Florida back to Pakistan (also of a darker skin color than most Republicans), not even because he voted but merely because he followed the directions of a DMV worker while he was in line to renew his license and filled out a registration form is bad enough.  Wasting enormous government resources (a favorite activity of this administration) on a campaign against a phantom menace which amounts to no more than a few dozen isolated incidents which have harmed no one is bad enough.

But at its heart, the evil of this administration that this activity embodies is based around undermining the most basic of democratic rights: the right to vote.  By making a federal trial out of even the slightest hints that anyone whose skin is not white might have voted when ineligible (or even made the preliminary step of registering), trials which apparently ended most of the time in acquittal because of the flimsiness of charges and lack of evidence, the US Department of Justice has put out notice that voting is a risky affair if you’re not white.  The notice says "Be warned that unless you can be a thousand percent sure of your eligibility, you might go to jail if you are of color and try to vote–we don’t want your kind voting, and we’ll prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law for trying, even if our case is without merit and you are within your rights".  It’s a naked effort to scare non-white people away from voting.  In a country where voter turnout rates are already low and declining, especially among the poor and minorities, the ultimate effect of such a concerted effort to unearth or invent "voter fraud" by people of color is the most blatant act of anti-democratic racism (among a host of others) that I’ve seen in a while from this administration. 

The lack of merit in so many of these cases, the fact that so many are directed against minorities, the fact that none of these are part of conspiracies to influence electoral outcome (or could possibly have affected the outcome), and the fact that so many of them were connected not even to voting, but merely to the precursor to voting (registration), make crystal clear that such a campaign is designed to strike a fear of political participation into the hearts of those who are not white.  The desire is plain on its face: the resurrection (and spread) of a society organized like the Jim Crow-era South, an apartheid society where only whites exercised political rights and people of color existed merely as a laboring class, disenfranchised en masse of their political rights.  It is activities such as these that unmask the evil of this Republican administration, which in its two terms has consistently chosen to devote itself to racist, exclusionary, and self-enriching attempts at increasing its power instead of the welfare of this country.  Any support for such campaigns is unconscionable and traitorous to the freedom and democracy for which America stands.