Activists say: ‘Stop racist voter suppression’

The International Action Center sent out the following petition to thousands of activists. Go to www.iacenter.org for more information. As of Nov. 3, tens of thousands of responses have been generated by those adding their names to the petition.

To President Bush, Senator John McCain, Governor Sarah Palin, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Governors of Key States, Congressional and Republican Party leaders and members of the media:

In the days leading up to a historic election, there has been a massive, illegal attempt to suppress votes, particularly among the poor, communities of color, and students. These tactics include:

▪ In Ohio, the Republicans attempted to illegally challenge the registrations of 200,000 new voters.

▪ Voters in West Virginia counties have reported that electronic voting machines visibly changed their vote to John McCain when they tried to cast their vote for Barack Obama.

▪ Students in Colorado, Virginia and South Carolina were told that they would lose their scholarships and that their parents could no longer claim them as dependents on their tax returns if the students voted in their college towns.

▪ In Georgia more than 50,000 voters were improperly purged from the voting rolls, a clear violation of federal laws that prohibit massive purging within 90 days of an election. Approximately 4,500 of them have been wrongly identified as “non-citizens.”

▪ In Indiana, Republican officials filed a lawsuit to close down voting sites early in three key Indiana cities—Hammond, Gary and East Chicago. Indiana’s population is only eight percent Black, but Black voters are heavily concentrated in the three cities targeted by the lawsuit.

▪ In Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin, right-wingers are using the Jim-Crow practice of “caging,” where they send out mass mailings to low-income neighborhoods. If the letters come back unopened, then those voters are challenged at the polling place.

These are just a few of the tactics that have come to light in the recent period which are part of an ongoing pattern of racist disenfranchisement—an illegal campaign to deliberately deprive people of the hard-won right to vote.

I demand:

• Stop police intimidation of voters.

• Keep polls open until everyone has the opportunity to vote.

• Full emergency staffing of polling places to meet the widely-expected massive turnout.

• STOP all voter suppression—count all ballots.