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From Ascribe Newsfeed:
In communities across the country, voters could be subject to intimidation and a variety of suppressive tactics meant to keep them from casting a ballot.
Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy center, published the details of these potential challenges to voting rights in a new briefing paper this week.
The Voter Intimidation and Vote Suppression briefing paper, part of Demos' Challenges to Fair Elections series highlighting trouble spots and voting rights problems in the '06 election, shows how campaigns to suppress voter turnout take a variety of forms, are often mounted in communities of color, and that many go unnoticed or unchallenged until after it is too late.
- 14,000 Latino residents in Orange County, California, received a letter in October 2006 warning that it was a crime for immigrants to vote and cautioning that they could be jailed or deported if they went to the polls in November.
These are naturalized citizens eligible to vote, as guaranteed by law.
- A fictitious "Milwaukee Black Voters League" distributed fliers intended to suppress black voters in largely African-American neighborhoods in 2004.
- A memo on bogus letterhead of the Lake County, Ohio, Board of Elections was sent to local residents in 2004, stating that registrations submitted through the Democratic Party and the NAACP were invalid.
The targeted area, Columbus' near east side, is predominantly African American.
They variously prohibit attempts to intimidate voters, the spreading of false information about elections, and efforts to deceive people about the time, place, or manner of elections or voter qualifications.
Minnesota and Washington also regulate challenges to peoples' voter eligibility.
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Posted on November 5, 2006 04:49 PM
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