Rove and GOP Voter Surpression Conviction
A GOP operative was convicted of trying to suppress Democratic get out the vote efforts:
The jury acquitted James Tobin of the most important of three charges — violating voters’ rights — and convicted him on two counts of telephone harassment.
Tobin, 45, of Bangor, Maine, was President Bush’s New England campaign chairman last year.
Tobin faces a maximum seven-year prison term and $500,000 in fines when he is sentenced in March.
Tobin’s lawyer had no comment after the verdict was delivered in U.S. District Court.
For nearly two hours on Election Day 2002, hundreds of hang-up calls overwhelmed Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks and a ride-to-the-polls line run by Manchester’s firefighters union.
The state GOP’s former executive director, Chuck McGee, who admitted hatching the plot, has completed a seven-month sentence for conspiracy.
Notice that this was thought up by the head of the state GOP. It was not a rogue operative: it was a strategy. The modern GOP, apparently, needs to depend on denying people the opportunity to vote if it is to have any chance of winning.
This kind of thing was made almost inevitable by Karl Rove’s base strategy. In a nation as closely divided as this, a party that depends upon driving out its base has little margin for error. One way to increase that margin is to prevent the other side’s proponents from reaching the polls. And thus we have pressure to jam phone banks, to pass out flyers in African American neighborhoods falsely claiming that voting with an unpaid ticket can land you in jail, sloppy listing of people as felons on the voter roles when they are not felons, and placing fewer machines in democratic strongholds than needed. Without the ability to appeal to a broad base of voters, these kinds of dirty tricks become especially valuable. The longer the GOP adheres to Rove’s theories, the more of this we are going to see.