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March 14, 2005

Provisional Voting and the GOP's misunderstanding of black politics

My data on provisional voting is spotty from the last election. Many counties didn't report any provisional votes, which leads me to believe they may have just grouped them in with their absentee ballots in general -- or they may have actually not had any provisional voting.

I do know, however, that Republicans in the legislature are trying to crack down on voting, including provisional voting. What are they so scared of? Well, Kerry got 54.51% of the provisional vote in Georgia, with Bush getting 44.79%. This is about 12 points better than Kerry's overall total. But, we're only talking about a total of 4,432 votes. That amounts to about .13%, or about 1 out of every 744 votes cast.

Now that might not be that much, unless you are that 1. According to the voter file, my youngest brother registered to vote on September 13th, 2004. That is well before the deadline of October 1st. When he showed up to vote on November 2nd, he was told he wasn't on the rolls but was given a provisional ballot to vote on. Now, for some reason his paperwork wasn't processed by the secretary of state or DeKalb County and entered electronically, even though his registration date (he later showed up on the voter rolls) was well before the deadline.

Republicans like Jim Wooten look at provisional voting results and conclude that these Democratic voters must be stopped. Wooten even goes so far as to compare my legitimately registered brother to a "graveyard voter undermining the credibility of elections."

Republicans see huge margins in African American neighborhoods, with Democrats winning more than 90% of the vote, and conclude that fraud must be at hand. At the root of that voting, however, is African Americans looking at Republican efforts to disenfranchise them, and near unanimous Democratic opposition to those "reforms" and deciding for another generation to stick with the Democratic Party. It's happened before and it's happening again now. What Republicans don't seem to understand is that they can't pass a law to prevent huge African American turnout for Democrats, because there is nothing fraudulent about those election results.

Posted by Chris at March 14, 2005 10:50 PM

Comments

Have to agree completely here. The GOP Senators on Family Day looked like freaks on floor claiming there was "rampant" voter fraud, but offering no evidence, only that b/c Kerry gets a larger portion of provisional votes than Bush, there has to be fraud. Ridiculous.
Not to mention the fact that the provisional & absentee numbers are NOT included in the DEkalb County voting statistics, for some districts in planning campaigns this will be a nightmare.

Posted by: Tim [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 16, 2005 10:11 PM

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