|
|
The
Front By Jeremy
Derfner Posted Tuesday, April 4, 2000, at 12:30 p.m.
PT
Before the Arizona Democratic Party held the
first
ever binding online election in March, a Virginia-based nonprofit
called the Voting Integrity Project tried unsuccessfully to get an
injunction to stop it. VIP argued that because more whites than minorities
have access to the Internet, the election was in violation of the Voting
Rights Act. VIP will go to court again later this year to try to set aside
the results on the same argument.
On this basis, you might assume that VIP is a liberal group. The
organization encourages that impression. Its first annual conference
opened last Friday in Washington with a press briefing about the
voting-rights problems with online elections. VIP attorney Miller Baker
explained to the few assembled journalists why Internet voting is the iron
fist of white supremacy.
Perhaps so, but Baker isn't the guy you expect to be making the
case. He clerked for two very conservative federal judges, worked in the
civil rights division of the Reagan Justice Department, and served as
counsel to Orrin Hatch on the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Hatch led the
Republican effort to weaken the Voting Rights Act when it was renewed in
1982.) A conservative résumé doesn't mean Baker can't support an activist
interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, but it kind of makes you
wonder.
In fact, almost
everything about the Voting Integrity Project makes you wonder. Though
VIP's members assert that they are both independent and nonpartisan, the
organization is essentially a conservative front. Five of seven on the
governing board are Republicans. The lone Democrat is a college student
who designed the VIP Web site. The president is a conservative activist.
The chairman of the board is Helen Blackwell, who also serves as the
Virginia chairman of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and is the wife of
conservative activist Morton Blackwell. James Meredith, the
civil-rights-pioneer-turned-Jesse-Helms-crony, sits on the national
advisory board. VIP has worked on special projects with the far-right
Frontiers of Freedom Institute (Malcolm Wallop) and Americans for Tax
Reform (Grover Norquist).
But the problem isn't who they are, it's what they do. VIP started
up in 1996 by answering the call from election losers who accused their
opponents of fraud. Its first high-profile moment was the investigation in
Louisiana into Democrat Mary Landrieu's Senate victory. VIP hired a
private investigator to look for evidence of vote stealing and filed a
report with the Senate Rules & Administration Committee, whose own
investigation dragged on for almost a year. Democrats insisted it was a
partisan witch hunt, and in the end the rules committee voted unanimously
to drop it.
Since then, VIP
has changed its focus from particular (possibly) tainted elections to
election policy in general. VIP is critical of Motor Voter. It wants to
abolish write-in registration and tighten the rules for absentee voting.
Last year VIP sued Texas to prevent early voting and Oregon to prevent
mail-in voting. The argument against these progressive voting reforms goes
like this: They have opened and will open the electoral process to
cheaters, cheaters will discourage honest voters from believing in the
system, honest voters will stop turning out, and democracy will
collapse.
VIP objects to
Internet voting on pretty much the same grounds. Before the organization
zeroed in on the voting-rights claim, it was on the warpath against online
elections because they could be ripe for fraud. Last August VIP President
Deborah Phillips published a paper called "Are We Ready for Internet
Voting?" that dedicated only one page to minority voting rights. At the
conference there was earnest discussion about every conceivable problem
with e-voting—from hackers representing nefarious foreign powers and
domestic pranksters to bribed equipment vendors and bullying neighbors and
spouses. But there was very little talk of minority voting rights after
the initial press briefing.
Another facet of VIP's anti-fraud mania is its citizen
poll-watching program. VIP's poll watchers stand over the poll worker's
shoulder and check every voter against master registration lists, ready to
offer challenges. Phillips says that "when [illegitimate voters] see VIP
poll watchers in there checking lists, it has a chilling effect." Of
course, it has a chilling effect on legitimate voters as well—a chill that
is felt in heavily minority neighborhoods, where VIP often targets its
poll-watching efforts on the theory that they generate suspiciously
"lopsided" results. But the thread running through various VIP activities
is less an effort to deter minority voters in particular than it is to
make voting more difficult in general. VIP wants looser rules about
challenging voters and purging rolls as well as tighter rules about
nontraditional ways of casting ballots. Chairman Helen Blackwell told me
that VIP prefers one-day voting in person at the polls because "if
something doesn't cost you a little bit, you don't value it very much."
To be sure, some members of
VIP may be interested primarily in ferreting out corruption. But on the
whole, the organization uses a clean government cloak to advance an
ideological agenda. When you ask VIP members if the organization is
conservative or Republican, they get very upset and point out that VIP has
worked on behalf of the Democratic governor of Guam and that former
Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder (a black Democrat) was the keynote speaker at
the conference. Wilder, however, is not a supporter of VIP's work. "I
never knew much about that group," he said with some surprise, when I told
him about the organization.
Join
The Fray What did you think of this article?
|
Reader Response from The
Fray:
Jeremy Derfner clearly came to our conference
with an ax to grind, demonstrating his obvious underlying political
agenda. In citing projects where VIP has worked with conservative
groups, he ignored other groups working on the same projects such as
Common Cause and the ACLU. In citing conservatives on the
board, he ignored the liberals on our board, including a union
election expert, a gay rights organizer, a third party
activist.
The panels at the conference (just check them out
at www.voting-integrity.org) were balanced to the
extreme, including such "conservatives" as Jenny Gainesborough of
The Sentencing Project, who advocated restoration of voting rights
for prisoners (a position that over two-thirds of VIP supporters
also support).
Slate has gone too
far and shown its willingness to sacrifice election integrity on the
alter of e-commerce. In Slate's
attempt to bolster the weakening position of Election.com it has
demonstrated that it will use any means possible to marginalize the
legitimate voting rights positions of VIP against the illegimate use
of on-line elections as in Arizona.
Have you no shame
Jeremy?
--Deborah
Phillips, VIP
(To reply, click
here.)
(4/5)
Jeremy
Derfner's article, "The Front," is an affront to logic and the
truth. He has concocted a theory and then twisted the truth to
almost farcical proportions to try and prove it, but still
fails.
In his desperate attempt to turn the Voting
Integrity Project's fight against election fraud and for ballot
integrity into some undefined ideological agenda, Derfner uses the
following logic:
--Michael Kinsley at one
time was editor of the New
Republic; --The New Republic then
and now is owned by a personal friend and supporter of Al
Gore; --Michael Kinsley is now editor of
Slate; --Slate
is a "front" for Al Gore.
Yes, absurd's the
word.
In fact, the Voting Integrity Project is what it says
it is, a non-partisan, non-profit citizen activist organization that
is a "pain in the patoot" for any individuals, be they Republican,
Democrat, conservative or liberal, who attempt to manipulate
America's elections to their benefit.
That's why VIP sided
with the D.C. voters whose votes were not counted in the medical
marijuana initiative. That's why VIP fought ballot count
manipulation in Guam, resulting in the election of a liberal
Democrat as governor.
The ideology at issue here is
not conservative or liberal, it's the ideology of greed. Quick
money to be made by election.com and other Internet companies who
want us to rush headlong into Internet voting before we solve the
issues of the digital divide and ballot security. They are running
scared after a blue-ribbon commission in California that set out to
join the Internet voting bandwagon recommended a cautious approach,
as did VIP in its 1999 study that so offended Mr.
Derfner.
VIP cannot be intimidated from its goals by such
ad hominem attacks. We will continue to encourage an
engaged and active citizenry to fight for voting rights and election
integrity. Since all of our rights and freedoms derive from the
right to vote, Americans must make sure their vote is
counted.
--Deborah M. Phillips
(To
reply, click here.)
(4/10)
I
wonder if Jeremy Derfner ever even thought about offering support
for his opinion that VIP officials checking voter registration lists
"has a chilling effect on legitimate voters as well--a chill that is
felt in heavily minority neighborhoods." Why would this bother
legitimate voters and why would it bother minorities more than
whites?
--Sam
(To reply, click here.)
(4/6)
|
Jeremy Derfner is a Slate editorial
assistant.
|