To my mind there are a few forms of vote tampering.
There are your heavy handed tactics. These tactics in the modern era happen infrequently, largely because of the Voting Rights Act. But I'd suspect that when they are used, they are used against relatively powerless populations--populations without the education, or the money, to understand and use their rights. I imagine that when my colleague talks about people needing to learn how to cast ballots he is assuming that the majority of people hit by vote tampering fit within this category. "Police" going through poor neighborhoods warning citizens that they will be arrested if they cast a vote and they are found to have warrants, fliers telling folks they can vote on Saturday if they are unable to vote today, police barriers, etc. are all examples of heavy handed tactics.
But there are a variety of methods that can either stop people from even casting a ballot in the first place...or that will neuter the value of that vote.
The Florida felon case is the best example. And it would've been worse if not for the Sunshine provisions that make the machinations of Florida politics visible for all to see (provided they ask). When the newspapers used these provisions to get a sense of who was removed from the rolls this year, they found 22,000 African Americans...and only 61 Latinos.
As far as I know (and of course I could be wrong) the African American felony rate isn't anywhere close to 4000 times higher than the Latino rate. Note here that being smart enough to cast a ballot doesn't matter. If your name is on that roll there is nothing you can do about it.
Another mode of vote tampering is tampering with the funds that are used to purchase voting machines. You'd think that states would allocate funds based on population size, or in some other way that could even things out.
They do in some cases, but they don't have to. Imagine a scenario in which the city of Saint Louis with more than 300,000 people was given the same amount of money as a city of only 10,000.
Then we can talk about the vote machines themselves. Are they butterfly? Are they hand operated?
Now I'm pretty sure there are articles written about this within the academic journals, but until 2000, we largely assumed that elections worked as advertised within the US. I'm willing to bet that munipalities that are poorer and blacker have poor voting systems--which have the effect of taking the votes away from a number of folks smart enough to cast ballots.
(Jimmy Carter has recently stated that the political conditions in Florida do not fit the conditions required internationally for a legitimate process. What are we to make of this? <----facetious question)
Final point in pt. 3.
Posted by at September 29, 2004 08:27 AM | TrackBack