Who’s Suppressing Whose Vote?

By Ian Jobling •  5/9/08

One of the most common claims of liberals who view America as a “racist” state is that whites intentionally suppress the votes of non-whites. As the NAACP and the People for the American Way put it: “In every national American election since Reconstruction, every election since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, voters—particularly African American voters and other minorities—have faced calculated and determined efforts at intimidation and suppression.” However, the facts say otherwise. According to my research, only two allegations of voter suppression have stood up in court over the past three years, and both of them involved blacks suppressing the white vote.

One of these cases involved voter suppression orchestrated by Ike Brown, a twice-convicted black felon who headed Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee in Mississippi. In June 2007, a federal court found Brown and his associates guilty of what the Justice Department called “the most extreme case of racial exclusion seen by the [department’s] Voting Section in decades.” Judge Tom Lee, who presided over the case, concluded that Mr. Brown believed that “blacks, being the majority race in Noxubee County, should hold all elected offices, to the exclusion of whites.”

An article by John Fund in the Wall Street Journal details the mind-boggling extent of vote fraud in Noxubee County. Brown blatantly discriminated against white voters:

Mr. Brown also went through the absentee ballots in other precincts the night before the Aug. 26, 2003, runoff and put Post-it notes on some ballots with instructions indicating they should be rejected. Judge Lee found that “witnesses who saw the yellow stickers maintained that every sticker seen was on the ballot of a white voter.”

Brown also had notaries fill out absentee ballots for voters, often without their knowledge or consent.

The other instance of vote suppression took place in Milwaukee during the 2004 elections. Four Democratic campaign workers, three of whom were black, slashed the tires of vans Republicans planned to use to transport voters to polls. The men convicted in 2006 were Sowande A. Omokunde (the black son of Gwen Moore, the congresswoman for Milwaukee), Michael Pratt (the black son of a former Milwaukee mayor), Lavelle Mohammad (black), and Lewis Caldwell (white). Although the question of racial bias did not enter the case, it would be surprising if it were not a factor, given that blacks typically view Republicans as a pro-white party. (There are pictures of the guilty parties here in the bottom half of the page.)

It is true that there was at least one case in recent years in which black voters were excluded from voting: the botched attempt to purge felons from Florida’s voting rolls in 2000 did result in some blacks being unfairly stricken from voter rolls. However, there has never been any reason to see this incident as anything other than a bureaucratic SNAFU, rather than a deliberate attempt to deprive blacks of the vote. Despite dozens of other allegations of minority vote suppression, none of them, to my knowledge, has stood up in court. By contrast, the intent to racially discriminate was proven in the Ike Brown case and likely in the Milwaukee case.

The common public perception that it is whites who are guilty of racially discriminatory vote suppression proves once again that we live in an inverted world.

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