K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
Texas Prosecutes Little Old Ladies for Voter Fraud
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on March 31, 2008, Printed on April 1, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80589/
Willie Ray was a 69-year-old African-American City Council member from
Texarkana who wanted her granddaughter, Jamillah Johnson, to learn
about civil rights and voting during the 2004 presidential election.
The pair helped homebound seniors citizens get absentee ballots, and
once they were filled out, put them in the mail.
Fort Worth's Gloria Meeks, 69, was a church-going, community activist
who proudly ran a phone bank and helped homebound elderly people like
Parthenia McDonald, 79, to vote by mail. McDonald, whose mailbox was
two blocks away from her home (she recently died), called Meeks "an
angel" for helping her, a friend of both women said.
And until he recently moved out of state, Walter Hinojosa, a retired
school teacher and labor organizer from Austin, was another Democratic
Party volunteer who helped elderly and disabled people vote by getting
them absentee ballots and mailing them.
Today, Ray and Johnson have criminal records for breaking Texas
election law and faced travel restrictions during a six-month
probation. Gloria Meeks is in a nursing home after having a stroke,
prompted in part, her friends say, by state police who investigated
her -- including spying on Meeks while she bathed -- and then
questioned her about helping McDonald and others to vote. Hinojosa,
meanwhile, has left Texas.
Their crime: not signing their name, address and signature on the back
of the ballots they mailed for their senior neighbors, and carrying
envelopes containing those ballots to the mailbox. Since 2005, Texas
Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican, has been prosecuting
Democratic Party activists, almost all African-Americans and Latinos,
as part of an effort to eradicate what he said was an "epidemic" of
voter fraud in Texas.
"These guilty pleas demonstrate precisely why it is so important to
uphold the integrity of our election process in the state," Abbott
said, speaking of Ray and Johnson's conviction in a press release. "We
will visit justice upon any who ignore the fact that we have election
laws in Texas and they apply to everyone."
But Texas Democrats, such as Lisa Turner of the Lone Star Project,
onestarproject.net a political action committee that first exposed
Abbott's prosecutions, issued reports on it and maintains a staff to
fight voter suppression in the state, said Abbott's goal is not merely
to prosecute little old ladies. Rather, Turner said it was to send a
message to Texas' minority communities, which lean Democratic, by
sowing fears among the elderly about voting by mail.
"It's the equivalent if when a gang moves into a neighborhood and
spray paints their graffiti or their marker; it's not to deface one
building. It is to send a message," Turner said. "You have agents of
the attorney general, walking through a neighborhood, walking past
three crack houses, to go talk to a voter. Think about that. What does
that say their priorities are? It's about holding onto the levers of
power."
Attorney General Abbott and the election laws that he has used to
bring the prosecutions have been challenged in federal court under a
suit that is slated to go to trial this spring. In September 2006,
Gerry Hebert, a former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's
Voting Section -- which oversees the nation's voting rights laws --
and now executive director of the Washington-based Campaign Legal
Center, filed a suit challenging the Texas attorney general, secretary
of state and a 2003 Texas law that criminalized practices often used
to help the elderly to vote by mail.
Abbott's office would not comment on the suit, but Texas Solicitor
General Ted Cruz, who works for Abbott, issued a statement in
September 2006 saying it "has no basis in law" and "the plaintiffs are
combination of political operatives and individual criminals who have
already pleaded guilty to voter fraud."
Meanwhile, Texas' attorney general has continued to prosecute middle-
aged and elderly political volunteers under a law his office says
stops people from impersonating voters and taking advantage of seniors
by falsifying ballots. The accused are almost all African-American and
Latino and likely Democrats.
In February 2008, Abbott indicted four Duval County residents, Lydia
Molina, 70, Maria Soriano, 71, Elva Lazo, 62, Maria Trigo, 55, for
allegedly delivering "mail-in ballot applications to numerous
residents in Duval County, many of whom were ineligible to vote by
mail," his press release said. Under Texas law, only the disabled,
people 65 or older, or people expecting to be out of state on Election
Day can vote absentee. The accused checked a box saying voters were
disabled "when they were not," he said, referring to their actions in
the 2006 election.
"The voter registrar's office then mailed the actual ballots to the
residents," Abbott's release said. "Once the ballots were completed by
the residents, the defendants allegedly retrieved these and mailed
them to the registrar to be counted without identifying themselves on
the carrier envelope." They face six months and a $2,000 fine.
Only likely Democrats prosecuted
Despite Abbott's repeated declarations nobody is above Texas law, he
has prosecuted no Republicans.
"What is especially troubling is that while Greg Abbott's office has
prosecuted minority seniors for simply mailing ballots, he has not
prosecuted anyone on the other side of the aisle for what appear to be
open and shut cases of real voter fraud," Hebert told Texas House
Elections Committee, on January 25, 2008, as the panel held a hearing
on a bill making the state's voter I.D. laws tougher.
Hebert cited a 2005 election in Highland Park, one of the wealthiest
neighborhoods in the country with hundreds of million-dollar homes and
where both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lived before the 2000
election. In 2005, two election judges, both Republicans, and a 10-
year-old boy handed out over 100 ballots, Hebert testified, without
checking any voter registration cards or IDs. The ballots were filled
out and turned in, he said, quoting from several Dallas District
Attorney memos that suggested there was a strong basis for prosecuting
the judges for not following procedures and counting "over 100 more
ballots" that there were "signatures on the roster."
In other words, here was a serious case of apparent ballot box
stuffing -- voter fraud -- by Republicans, albeit in a state where the
GOP holds all the constitutional offices, most judgeships and controls
most county election boards.
"Here we are nearly three years later and Attorney General Abbott's
office has done virtually nothing," Hebert told Texas legislators.
"Rather than exercise his discretion to act directly on the [district
attorney's] request and immediately investigate the voting
irregularities and potential voter fraud in Highland Park, Mr.
Abbott's office has instead used his office's resources to prosecute
elderly political activists whose only 'crime' was assisting elderly
and disabled voters cast a vote by mail."
The bigger picture, said the Lone Star Project's Turner, was the Texas
Republican Party, assisted by the state's Republican attorney general,
was using the power of the state and public funds to create a climate
for partisan gain.
"I don't believe that the Attorney General or the Governor or the
Republicans are really interested in putting old women in jail," she
said. "They see what we all see and what everybody has written about,
which is Texas is trending majority minority [where the majority of
voters is no longer white]. And the Republicans haven't figured out
how to talk to minorities. So, instead of figuring out how to talk to
them on an issue basis, they have embarked on a plan to shave two or
three percentage points off the electorate and that's how they stay in
power."
The Climate of fear
On the outskirts of Ft. Worth, the Democratic Party has a campaign
office for its various local and statewide campaigns. In early March,
Jane Hamilton, a young woman who has been working on campaigns in the
Dallas-Ft. Worth area since 2000, and Dorothy Dean, 74, who has worked
on campaigns for four decades, described the real-life impact of
Abbott's efforts to prosecute people for helping the elderly and
disabled to vote.
Hamilton described how the 2003 law passed by the Texas Legislature
changed the way the Democrats interacted with older people who wanted
help with their absentee ballots.
"We would get phone calls from older ladies who wanted to vote,"
Hamilton said. "And they would ask, a lot of times, for people that
they trusted, their neighbors, to come over to help. I would then say,
'Well, I don't know her, but how about us helping you over the phone?'
And they would say, 'Well, I can't see. And I can't hear good. I need
somebody to come over here and help me.'"
Before the attorney general's prosecutions, Hamilton said she would
find well-known people in the caller's community to visit the elderly
person's home to help them with voting -- volunteers like Ray, Meeks
or Hinojosa. But after Abbott started prosecuting Democratic
volunteers for assisting the seniors, Hamilton said she could only
help elderly voters over the phone, which many callers did not
understand.
"It was very difficult for me," Hamilton said. "It was very hard to
explain why a Mrs. Johnson couldn't help a Mrs. Brown, or if she did,
then she couldn't help a Mrs. Sue... I think that really started as
fear. They (the callers) were afraid, because they also started
hearing about the attorney general's office prosecuting. You had all
of these things going on, however no one really understood why. The
AG's office never did a good job on the community level saying what
this means, what this means for you."
Abbott may not have been telling the public what was required under
the 2003 law, but he did tell the police. In early 2006, he announced
"a statewide initiative to work with local law enforcement and
prosecutors to combat and prevent the persistent problem of voter
fraud," his January 25, 2006 news release said. The project's initial
phase would target "44 key counties that either have a history of
voter fraud or the population of which exceeds 100,000," the attorney
general's release said.
"Voter fraud has been epidemic in Texas for years, but it hasn't been
treated like one. It's time for that to change," Abbott said.
Continuing, he announced the formation of a new "Special
Investigations Unit [that] will help police departments, sheriff's
offices, and district and county attorneys successfully identify,
investigate and prosecute various types of voter fraud offenses." The
release said the Texas governor's office, held by another Republican,
was supporting the effort with a $1.5 million grant.
According to the Center's lawsuit, where Ray, Johnson, Meeks,
McDonald, Hinojosa and the Texas Democratic Party are plaintiffs, the
PowerPoint presentation used by Abbott's office to train Texas
officials was rife with racial stereotypes associating voter fraud
with people of color -- communities in Texas that in recent history
have supported Democrats.
"As an introduction to a section of the PowerPoint involving 'Poll
Place Violations," a slide depicts a photograph of African-American
voters apparently standing in line to vote," the lawsuit's complaint
said. "Notably, the 71-slide presentation contains no similar
photographs of white or Anglo voters casting ballots."
"Another slide in the same PowerPoint presentation, in a section
involving tactics for investigating purported voter fraud, is entitled
'Examine Documents for Fraud.' That slide states that investigators
should look for 'Unique Stamps' and shows a prominent picture of a
postage stamp known as the 'sickle cell stamp,' which depicts an
African-American woman and infant," the complaint said. "The
PowerPoint presentation thus communicates the message that minority
voters should be the focus of election fraud investigations and
prosecutions, particularly under the new 2003 criminal prohibitions."
The lawsuit continues and describes various investigating tactics used
by Abbott's special investigations unit, including the incident where
two state police officers were seen by Meeks "peeping at her through
her bathroom window" while she was taking a bath on August 10, 2006.
"She later learned that these two persons were investigators with the
office of the defendant Attorney General Abbott," the suit said.
Meanwhile, the state office overseeing voting in Texas, the Secretary
of State, "fails to make clear that those who assist voters may be
subject to criminal prosecution," the complaint said, underscoring the
point that Abbott and Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams, also a
Republican, were "engaging in a deliberate campaign to suppress the
minority vote and discriminate against minority voters."
"That is the whole scheme of the plan," said Dorothy Dean, who has
worked on campaigns in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area for four decades.
"Get it so complicated that the Democrats will stay at home, so they
will be confused... A lot of these older people will be like, 'Oh, I
guess I can't vote this year because I don't have my neighbor that can
help me. She hasn't been here for two years.' That is really what is
happening."
Dean said she has not been investigated by Abbott, but knows of others
who have.
"There is one lady who used to be a precinct chair," she said. "I
refuse to give her name because she almost had a nervous breakdown.
She couldn't believe that all of her hard work as a precinct chair,
and devoted to the party, that something like this would happen to
her. She still to this day cannot get over it. She wants to be her
precinct chair again. But because of the law, she can't get it back."
The fallout for 2008
Dorothy Dean said the impact of the attorney general's campaign is
much larger than the dozen people charged with voter fraud and the
dozens more that have been investigated.
"You have to understand that this would be 20 to 30 percent of the
voting ballots from the Democratic Party because senior citizens
cherish the right to vote," she said. "They remember the poll tax,
having to pay it. And they want to vote."
Hamilton said the 2003 law and Abbott's prosecutions have prompted the
Democratic Party in Dallas County to suspend its field program for
absentee ballots, where it once sent volunteers to voter's homes to
help them fill out ballot applications so they could vote by mail.
"It is absolutely fair to say there is no field program for mail
ballots," she said. "What happens now is everything is by phone. They
call up and request one. And then you call them back and say, 'Did you
get it?' And they say, 'Well, I know I got something, but I wasn't
sure what it was, so I threw it in the trash. Can you send me another
one?' And then you send them another one, and then you call them back,
and they say, 'Well, I got that one but I can't see it. What is the
line I sign on?'
"So, do you see what I am saying? You are on the phone with a process
with no field component to it. Not anymore."
While the Center's lawsuit against attorney general goes to court
later this spring, some of Abbott's recent prosecutions have been
thrown out in court. In early March, criminal charges against two
politiqueras accused of unlawfully assisting elderly voters were
dismissed by Hidalgo County Court-at-law Judge Jaime Palacios,
according to the Rio Grande Valley website, TheMonitor.com.
"In 2006, Attorney General Greg Abbott held up the Hidalgo County
voter fraud case as an example of a successful voter fraud
investigation that produced results," the website reported on March
11. "His office did not return calls for comment."
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of
"What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the
2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press,
2006).
This article and future coverage of election challenges to our
democracy on AlterNet are in part are supported by Credo Mobile
Action. Credo Action offers tools for working for change and a unique
mobile phone service where you don't have to worry about your phone
being tapped. You also get competitive rates, nationwide all-digital
coverage, courteous customer service, cutting-edge phones and a
variety of plans from which to chose.
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on March 31, 2008, Printed on April 1, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80589/
Willie Ray was a 69-year-old African-American City Council member from
Texarkana who wanted her granddaughter, Jamillah Johnson, to learn
about civil rights and voting during the 2004 presidential election.
The pair helped homebound seniors citizens get absentee ballots, and
once they were filled out, put them in the mail.
Fort Worth's Gloria Meeks, 69, was a church-going, community activist
who proudly ran a phone bank and helped homebound elderly people like
Parthenia McDonald, 79, to vote by mail. McDonald, whose mailbox was
two blocks away from her home (she recently died), called Meeks "an
angel" for helping her, a friend of both women said.
And until he recently moved out of state, Walter Hinojosa, a retired
school teacher and labor organizer from Austin, was another Democratic
Party volunteer who helped elderly and disabled people vote by getting
them absentee ballots and mailing them.
Today, Ray and Johnson have criminal records for breaking Texas
election law and faced travel restrictions during a six-month
probation. Gloria Meeks is in a nursing home after having a stroke,
prompted in part, her friends say, by state police who investigated
her -- including spying on Meeks while she bathed -- and then
questioned her about helping McDonald and others to vote. Hinojosa,
meanwhile, has left Texas.
Their crime: not signing their name, address and signature on the back
of the ballots they mailed for their senior neighbors, and carrying
envelopes containing those ballots to the mailbox. Since 2005, Texas
Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican, has been prosecuting
Democratic Party activists, almost all African-Americans and Latinos,
as part of an effort to eradicate what he said was an "epidemic" of
voter fraud in Texas.
"These guilty pleas demonstrate precisely why it is so important to
uphold the integrity of our election process in the state," Abbott
said, speaking of Ray and Johnson's conviction in a press release. "We
will visit justice upon any who ignore the fact that we have election
laws in Texas and they apply to everyone."
But Texas Democrats, such as Lisa Turner of the Lone Star Project,
onestarproject.net a political action committee that first exposed
Abbott's prosecutions, issued reports on it and maintains a staff to
fight voter suppression in the state, said Abbott's goal is not merely
to prosecute little old ladies. Rather, Turner said it was to send a
message to Texas' minority communities, which lean Democratic, by
sowing fears among the elderly about voting by mail.
"It's the equivalent if when a gang moves into a neighborhood and
spray paints their graffiti or their marker; it's not to deface one
building. It is to send a message," Turner said. "You have agents of
the attorney general, walking through a neighborhood, walking past
three crack houses, to go talk to a voter. Think about that. What does
that say their priorities are? It's about holding onto the levers of
power."
Attorney General Abbott and the election laws that he has used to
bring the prosecutions have been challenged in federal court under a
suit that is slated to go to trial this spring. In September 2006,
Gerry Hebert, a former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's
Voting Section -- which oversees the nation's voting rights laws --
and now executive director of the Washington-based Campaign Legal
Center, filed a suit challenging the Texas attorney general, secretary
of state and a 2003 Texas law that criminalized practices often used
to help the elderly to vote by mail.
Abbott's office would not comment on the suit, but Texas Solicitor
General Ted Cruz, who works for Abbott, issued a statement in
September 2006 saying it "has no basis in law" and "the plaintiffs are
combination of political operatives and individual criminals who have
already pleaded guilty to voter fraud."
Meanwhile, Texas' attorney general has continued to prosecute middle-
aged and elderly political volunteers under a law his office says
stops people from impersonating voters and taking advantage of seniors
by falsifying ballots. The accused are almost all African-American and
Latino and likely Democrats.
In February 2008, Abbott indicted four Duval County residents, Lydia
Molina, 70, Maria Soriano, 71, Elva Lazo, 62, Maria Trigo, 55, for
allegedly delivering "mail-in ballot applications to numerous
residents in Duval County, many of whom were ineligible to vote by
mail," his press release said. Under Texas law, only the disabled,
people 65 or older, or people expecting to be out of state on Election
Day can vote absentee. The accused checked a box saying voters were
disabled "when they were not," he said, referring to their actions in
the 2006 election.
"The voter registrar's office then mailed the actual ballots to the
residents," Abbott's release said. "Once the ballots were completed by
the residents, the defendants allegedly retrieved these and mailed
them to the registrar to be counted without identifying themselves on
the carrier envelope." They face six months and a $2,000 fine.
Only likely Democrats prosecuted
Despite Abbott's repeated declarations nobody is above Texas law, he
has prosecuted no Republicans.
"What is especially troubling is that while Greg Abbott's office has
prosecuted minority seniors for simply mailing ballots, he has not
prosecuted anyone on the other side of the aisle for what appear to be
open and shut cases of real voter fraud," Hebert told Texas House
Elections Committee, on January 25, 2008, as the panel held a hearing
on a bill making the state's voter I.D. laws tougher.
Hebert cited a 2005 election in Highland Park, one of the wealthiest
neighborhoods in the country with hundreds of million-dollar homes and
where both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lived before the 2000
election. In 2005, two election judges, both Republicans, and a 10-
year-old boy handed out over 100 ballots, Hebert testified, without
checking any voter registration cards or IDs. The ballots were filled
out and turned in, he said, quoting from several Dallas District
Attorney memos that suggested there was a strong basis for prosecuting
the judges for not following procedures and counting "over 100 more
ballots" that there were "signatures on the roster."
In other words, here was a serious case of apparent ballot box
stuffing -- voter fraud -- by Republicans, albeit in a state where the
GOP holds all the constitutional offices, most judgeships and controls
most county election boards.
"Here we are nearly three years later and Attorney General Abbott's
office has done virtually nothing," Hebert told Texas legislators.
"Rather than exercise his discretion to act directly on the [district
attorney's] request and immediately investigate the voting
irregularities and potential voter fraud in Highland Park, Mr.
Abbott's office has instead used his office's resources to prosecute
elderly political activists whose only 'crime' was assisting elderly
and disabled voters cast a vote by mail."
The bigger picture, said the Lone Star Project's Turner, was the Texas
Republican Party, assisted by the state's Republican attorney general,
was using the power of the state and public funds to create a climate
for partisan gain.
"I don't believe that the Attorney General or the Governor or the
Republicans are really interested in putting old women in jail," she
said. "They see what we all see and what everybody has written about,
which is Texas is trending majority minority [where the majority of
voters is no longer white]. And the Republicans haven't figured out
how to talk to minorities. So, instead of figuring out how to talk to
them on an issue basis, they have embarked on a plan to shave two or
three percentage points off the electorate and that's how they stay in
power."
The Climate of fear
On the outskirts of Ft. Worth, the Democratic Party has a campaign
office for its various local and statewide campaigns. In early March,
Jane Hamilton, a young woman who has been working on campaigns in the
Dallas-Ft. Worth area since 2000, and Dorothy Dean, 74, who has worked
on campaigns for four decades, described the real-life impact of
Abbott's efforts to prosecute people for helping the elderly and
disabled to vote.
Hamilton described how the 2003 law passed by the Texas Legislature
changed the way the Democrats interacted with older people who wanted
help with their absentee ballots.
"We would get phone calls from older ladies who wanted to vote,"
Hamilton said. "And they would ask, a lot of times, for people that
they trusted, their neighbors, to come over to help. I would then say,
'Well, I don't know her, but how about us helping you over the phone?'
And they would say, 'Well, I can't see. And I can't hear good. I need
somebody to come over here and help me.'"
Before the attorney general's prosecutions, Hamilton said she would
find well-known people in the caller's community to visit the elderly
person's home to help them with voting -- volunteers like Ray, Meeks
or Hinojosa. But after Abbott started prosecuting Democratic
volunteers for assisting the seniors, Hamilton said she could only
help elderly voters over the phone, which many callers did not
understand.
"It was very difficult for me," Hamilton said. "It was very hard to
explain why a Mrs. Johnson couldn't help a Mrs. Brown, or if she did,
then she couldn't help a Mrs. Sue... I think that really started as
fear. They (the callers) were afraid, because they also started
hearing about the attorney general's office prosecuting. You had all
of these things going on, however no one really understood why. The
AG's office never did a good job on the community level saying what
this means, what this means for you."
Abbott may not have been telling the public what was required under
the 2003 law, but he did tell the police. In early 2006, he announced
"a statewide initiative to work with local law enforcement and
prosecutors to combat and prevent the persistent problem of voter
fraud," his January 25, 2006 news release said. The project's initial
phase would target "44 key counties that either have a history of
voter fraud or the population of which exceeds 100,000," the attorney
general's release said.
"Voter fraud has been epidemic in Texas for years, but it hasn't been
treated like one. It's time for that to change," Abbott said.
Continuing, he announced the formation of a new "Special
Investigations Unit [that] will help police departments, sheriff's
offices, and district and county attorneys successfully identify,
investigate and prosecute various types of voter fraud offenses." The
release said the Texas governor's office, held by another Republican,
was supporting the effort with a $1.5 million grant.
According to the Center's lawsuit, where Ray, Johnson, Meeks,
McDonald, Hinojosa and the Texas Democratic Party are plaintiffs, the
PowerPoint presentation used by Abbott's office to train Texas
officials was rife with racial stereotypes associating voter fraud
with people of color -- communities in Texas that in recent history
have supported Democrats.
"As an introduction to a section of the PowerPoint involving 'Poll
Place Violations," a slide depicts a photograph of African-American
voters apparently standing in line to vote," the lawsuit's complaint
said. "Notably, the 71-slide presentation contains no similar
photographs of white or Anglo voters casting ballots."
"Another slide in the same PowerPoint presentation, in a section
involving tactics for investigating purported voter fraud, is entitled
'Examine Documents for Fraud.' That slide states that investigators
should look for 'Unique Stamps' and shows a prominent picture of a
postage stamp known as the 'sickle cell stamp,' which depicts an
African-American woman and infant," the complaint said. "The
PowerPoint presentation thus communicates the message that minority
voters should be the focus of election fraud investigations and
prosecutions, particularly under the new 2003 criminal prohibitions."
The lawsuit continues and describes various investigating tactics used
by Abbott's special investigations unit, including the incident where
two state police officers were seen by Meeks "peeping at her through
her bathroom window" while she was taking a bath on August 10, 2006.
"She later learned that these two persons were investigators with the
office of the defendant Attorney General Abbott," the suit said.
Meanwhile, the state office overseeing voting in Texas, the Secretary
of State, "fails to make clear that those who assist voters may be
subject to criminal prosecution," the complaint said, underscoring the
point that Abbott and Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams, also a
Republican, were "engaging in a deliberate campaign to suppress the
minority vote and discriminate against minority voters."
"That is the whole scheme of the plan," said Dorothy Dean, who has
worked on campaigns in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area for four decades.
"Get it so complicated that the Democrats will stay at home, so they
will be confused... A lot of these older people will be like, 'Oh, I
guess I can't vote this year because I don't have my neighbor that can
help me. She hasn't been here for two years.' That is really what is
happening."
Dean said she has not been investigated by Abbott, but knows of others
who have.
"There is one lady who used to be a precinct chair," she said. "I
refuse to give her name because she almost had a nervous breakdown.
She couldn't believe that all of her hard work as a precinct chair,
and devoted to the party, that something like this would happen to
her. She still to this day cannot get over it. She wants to be her
precinct chair again. But because of the law, she can't get it back."
The fallout for 2008
Dorothy Dean said the impact of the attorney general's campaign is
much larger than the dozen people charged with voter fraud and the
dozens more that have been investigated.
"You have to understand that this would be 20 to 30 percent of the
voting ballots from the Democratic Party because senior citizens
cherish the right to vote," she said. "They remember the poll tax,
having to pay it. And they want to vote."
Hamilton said the 2003 law and Abbott's prosecutions have prompted the
Democratic Party in Dallas County to suspend its field program for
absentee ballots, where it once sent volunteers to voter's homes to
help them fill out ballot applications so they could vote by mail.
"It is absolutely fair to say there is no field program for mail
ballots," she said. "What happens now is everything is by phone. They
call up and request one. And then you call them back and say, 'Did you
get it?' And they say, 'Well, I know I got something, but I wasn't
sure what it was, so I threw it in the trash. Can you send me another
one?' And then you send them another one, and then you call them back,
and they say, 'Well, I got that one but I can't see it. What is the
line I sign on?'
"So, do you see what I am saying? You are on the phone with a process
with no field component to it. Not anymore."
While the Center's lawsuit against attorney general goes to court
later this spring, some of Abbott's recent prosecutions have been
thrown out in court. In early March, criminal charges against two
politiqueras accused of unlawfully assisting elderly voters were
dismissed by Hidalgo County Court-at-law Judge Jaime Palacios,
according to the Rio Grande Valley website, TheMonitor.com.
"In 2006, Attorney General Greg Abbott held up the Hidalgo County
voter fraud case as an example of a successful voter fraud
investigation that produced results," the website reported on March
11. "His office did not return calls for comment."
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of
"What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the
2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press,
2006).
This article and future coverage of election challenges to our
democracy on AlterNet are in part are supported by Credo Mobile
Action. Credo Action offers tools for working for change and a unique
mobile phone service where you don't have to worry about your phone
being tapped. You also get competitive rates, nationwide all-digital
coverage, courteous customer service, cutting-edge phones and a
variety of plans from which to chose.
