Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Republican Supression of the African American Vote


A sad news report from Virginia today. Jeffrey Frederick, a state Delegate and Republican Party leader has been telling African-Americans not to register to vote because of "the risk of identity theft." Local election officials as well as the police were surprised by the Republican's comments as they have found no evidence of fraud or even attempts to steal personal information by persons or organizations doing voter registration drives.

Almost 150,000 new voters have registered in Virginia since the first of the year. Many have been registered by the Obama campaign and many more are young people and minorities registered by community organizations. The Obama campaign has seen a huge number of Virginians volunteer to help on voter registration without any problem incidents. One community group, the Community Voters Project, which registers voters in low income African American neighborhoods, reported that three of their paid workers submitted forms with false names so the workers could inflate the number of registrations. The group checks all of the voter registration forms submitted by workers. They turned the false forms over to the police rather than the elections board.

Virginia has a long history of obstructing the right of African Americans from voting.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

typical.

Anonymous said...

stopping blacks from voting. for conservatives, its in their blood.

Anonymous said...

Unbelievable!! And how do you react when generalizations are made about liberals?? I am sure conservatives make a practice of stopping blacks from voting. Where is the proof?? How silly! Do you ever think before you respond????

Anonymous said...

do you know anything about Virginia history? Ever heard of "massive resistance"? Does Prince Edward County schools mean anything to you? The poll tax?

Anonymous said...

Hey Anon,

Grow a pair.

Steve

Anonymous said...

Charming, Steve. Katherine, I thought you filtered these before they were put on here.

I am talking about generalizations. Who was it exactly that stopped blacks from voting? Conservative Republicans or Dixiecrats??

Katherine said...

Anon,

Just to be clear, have we now resolved that it is true that conservatives tried to stop Blacks from voting and now you want to discuss which subset of conservatives were most involved?

Kate

Anonymous said...

Come on, Kate, don't be coy. The title of the article is "Republican Supression." Comments from posters indicated the conservative label. Obviously they were talking about conservative Republicans. Now that I brought up the Dixiecrats do YOU want to drop the "Republican Supression" from the article and talk about ALL conservatives? NOT Republicans??

Anonymous said...

Just one day into it, the Republican National Committee was forced to strip the comment wall and discussion board from its new website because so many of the comments were racist attacks on Obama.

Katherine said...

There has been a history in Virginia of conservatives suppressing the Black vote. The current incident is by a conservative Republican official. Previously the worst offender was the Byrd Machine.

Anonymous said...

Anyone on welfare shouldn't be allowed to vote.

shiloh said...

Yes, standard operating procedure for the party of Lincoln ~ The republican party has no shame, very sad!

take care