Voters line-up to register and cast their early votes at the City-County Building Monday, Nov. 5, 2012, in Indianapolis. (photo: Darron Cummings/AP)
So Donald, tell us again who's trying to steal this election
oughly
45,000 newly registered voters in Indiana — almost all of whom are
black — may not be allowed to vote next month after state police
targeted the state’s largest voter registration drive, forcing it to
shut down its operation.
Police raided
the Indiana Voter Registration Project (IVRP) offices on October 4,
seizing documents and equipment and forcing the group to cease its
get-out-the-vote efforts one week before the end of the state’s
registration period. Bill Buck, a spokesperson for the liberal nonprofit
Patriot Majority USA which runs the IVRP, told ThinkProgress that IVRP
could have registered about 5,000 more voters in that additional week.
The IVRP is still unsure whether the 45,000 people it
registered will be permitted to vote this year, or how the state will
handle their applications while the police investigation is ongoing.
Bill Bursten, chief public information officer for the Indiana State
Police, told ThinkProgress that law enforcement is investigating whether
IVRP violating fraud and forgery laws.
“It will be up to each prosecutor to review the
completed investigation and take whatever action they, as the local
prosecuting authority, deem appropriate,” Bursten said. “Investigations
of this nature are complicated and can take an extended period of time
to complete.”
Secretary of State Connie Lawson (R)’s office declined
to comment, and Buck said IVRP is still unclear what law it violated or
why it’s being aggressively targeted by election officials and police.
The IVRP launched in April of this year to improve
voter participation in Indiana, particularly in African American
neighborhoods in Indianapolis and the Chicago suburbs. In 2014, Indiana
had the worst voter turnout rate in the country.
But Lawson, a Republican secretary of state, decided
not to address her state’s abysmal participation levels (as a
legislator, she cosponsored the state’s strict voter ID law). Instead, she went after voter registration groups. In September, she sent a letter to state elections officials warning them about groups like IVRP.
“Unfortunately, it has recently come to my attention
that nefarious actors are operating here in Indiana,” she wrote. “A
group by the name of the Indiana Voter Registration Project has forged
voter registrations… If you receive one of these applications, please
contact the Indiana State Police Special Investigations.”
Buck said that at the time, they had no evidence that
IVRP was intentionally submitting forged or fraudulent applications.
While Republicans claim otherwise, voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
Almost three weeks later, as IVRP was planning for one
final week of its registration efforts, police entered the group’s
offices with a search warrant and seized equipment and paperwork.
Patriot Majority alleges the investigation and raid were political moves, and that Lawson worked closely with Gov. Mike Pence (R), who has pushed the “voter fraud” conspiracy on the campaign trail alongside Donald Trump.
“We’ve seen nothing but partisan activity from the
secretary of state, and even from the police,” Buck said. “They saw that
there was a very successful voter registration drive happening, and
this was an attempt to shut it down.”
“It’s clear that the governor or the governor’s staff
are very aware and involved in what’s happening,” he continued. “It fits
into the Trump/Pence narrative that in certain neighborhoods, you have
to watch how many times people show up to vote and how things happen.”
Political police
State elections officials have also enlisted the
help of the Indiana State Police to push the “voter fraud” myth.
Superintendent Doug Carter, who was chosen for the position by Pence,
has been on television and was interviewed on right-wing radio Tuesday
morning about the ongoing investigation.
On conservative talk radio, Carter said that “the
notion that there is voter registration fraud is very real,” but denied
that the investigation is “driven by politics.”
He accused the IVRP of forging signatures and making
up people’s names. “To what purpose? We don’t know,” he told radio host
Tony Katz. “That’s the purpose of the investigation. Were these acts of
gross negligence? Were they acts of intent? That’s what we don’t know,
and we don’t want to speculate.”
He added that police are going through thousands of registrations to make sure that nothing nefarious occurred.
“While I’ve been blamed by some of intentionally disenfranchising voters, nothing could be further from the truth,” he said.
On TV, Carter also called it “unconscionable” that
anyone would imply that Pence ordered the raid, while also indicating
his close relationship with the governor.
“I wish people could know Mike Pence like I do,”
he said. “He has never ever tried to influence me with a decision that I
had to make within the state police as we protect the citizens of this
state.”
Buck called it “completely bizarre” that the police have become spokespeople for Indiana’s electoral system.
Aggressive tactics
Before raiding IVRP’s offices, police were already using aggressive tactics during their investigation of the group.
According to the New Republic,
“police detectives arrived unannounced at the homes of get-out-the-vote
activists to interrogate them about their voter registration work.”
Lydia Garrett, a 57-year-old voter registration
worker, told the New Republic that police came to her home and
repeatedly asked her if the group illegally sets quotas for canvassers.
“That’s what they kept on asking me: ‘How many did
they tell you to get? How many did they tell you to get?’” she told a
reporter. “And I said: ‘Sir, you can come back with two or three
[registrations] and you’re still paid. I don’t understand what you’re
saying.’”
Garrett claims that investigators kept questioning
her, trying to get her to “say something negative.” She said police even
asked her if she would be willing to submit to a polygraph test about
her registration work.
Neither the police nor the secretary of state’s office would not comment on their tactics.
Local news also reported
that police seized at least 250 voter registrations, but state
officials only informed IVRP of about ten problematic applications, none
of which show a fraudulent intent.
Under Indiana law, the project is required to submit
all voter registration forms, regardless of how they are filled out or
if there are imperfections, Buck said.
Voter registration drives across the country follow similar protocol, without being subject to investigations. A Huffington Post investigation
reported that “it seems the extraordinary investigation is likely to
find no more than potential technical violations of obscure regulations
for third-party voter registration groups.”
Two days after the police raid, the IVRP asked the
Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division
to initiate an investigation.
“We’ve never had the state police involved in any
voter registration project,” Buck said. “It’s pretty unprecedented for
this to happen.”
No comments:
Post a Comment