GOP’s maniacal new vote scheme: What wingnuts are hatching to keep the “riff-raff” away
Paranoia reaches a fever pitch in Arizona, where the right has violent nightmares -- and an absurd response in mind
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
It’s soothing to think that this “voter fraud” fraud is a temporary fad among right-wingers desperate to stop the encroaching tide of minority voters — especially when you see
silly provocateurs James O’Keefe and company running around the country making fools of themselves as they try to trap people into violating the voting laws. That’s so daft that it’s fair to assume this strategy may have run its course.
Unfortunately, that would probably be wrong. “Voter fraud” is just the latest iteration of a fundamental belief among conservatives that if you let the riff-raff vote they will vote to take everything you’ve got. It goes all the way back to the beginning, when the founders debated who would be allowed to vote, and John Jay is said to have quipped: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.”
They fought against suffrage for women all the way up until 1919 and there are still some conservatives agitating against women having the franchise. Just this week, a Fox News celebrity named Kimberly Guilfoyle announced that young women shouldn’t vote because
“they don’t get it.” That opinion obviously stems from the fact that young single women overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. (This would be in contrast to many of Fox’s conservative elderly audience who have been
found in academic studies to be the most uninformed people in the nation.)
And needless to say at this point, the ongoing saga of vote suppression of racial and ethnic minorities across the centuries is very well documented. One of the best-known voter intimidation and suppression projects was in Arizona in the mid-’60s. This one stands out mostly because one of its most famous operatives was a guy named Bill whose activities at the time were recounted in
this 2000 story about someone who had a long career in Arizona politics:
Lito Pena is sure of his memory. Thirty-six years ago he, then a Democratic Party poll watcher, got into a shoving match with a Republican who had spent the opening hours of the 1964 election doing his damnedest to keep people from voting in south Phoenix.
“He was holding up minority voters because he knew they were going to vote Democratic,” said Pena.
The guy called himself Bill. He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman. He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they’d lived there — every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people who spoke broken English were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.
By the time Pena arrived at Bethune, he said, the line to vote was four abreast and a block long. People were giving up and going home.
Pena told the guy to leave. They got into an argument. Shoving followed. Arizona politics can be raw.
Finally, Pena said, the guy raised a fist as if he was fixing to throw a punch.
“I said ‘If that’s what you want, I’ll get someone to take you out of here’ “
Party leaders told him not to get physical, but this was the second straight election in which Republicans had sent out people to intellectually rough up the voters. The project even had a name: Operation Eagle Eye.
Bill was Bill Rehnquist, the man who would become a Supreme Court Justice a mere eight years later.
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