Voting fraud in West Alabama?

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: July 10, 2008

I would write about this from the makeup file, since it happened while I was out of town, but I’ll give you this updated story from the New York Times (via the Tuscaloosa News) instead:

Federal and state authorities are looking into accusations of voting fraud in three largely black counties of Alabama, including Perry and Lowndes Counties, which played a historic role in the struggle for black voting rights in the 1960s.

In May, a local citizens group gathered affidavits detailing several cases in which at least one Democratic county official paid citizens for their votes, or encouraged them to vote multiple times. The affidavits were presented to state officials in Montgomery, the capital, and after the June 3 primary, the Alabama attorney general, Troy King, a Republican, seized voting records from the primary election in Bullock, Lowndes and Perry Counties.

The United States Department of Justice posted a team of observers to monitor the primary, and the Alabama secretary of state, Beth Chapman, a Republican, reported hearing from one of the federal observers that a candidate had “free rein” of a polling place, where campaigning is prohibited, passing out sample ballots and instructing voters how to vote.

This story is disquieting on many levels. Just as disturbing as the obvious concerns about voting fraud is the racial undertone permeating the story.

According to the Times:

Blacks hold a majority on the five-member Perry County Commission. And an influential political organization, the Perry County Civic League, founded during the civil rights movement by one of the movement’s leaders, Albert Turner Sr., plays a large role in filling other offices.

The “biracial citizens group” The Democracy Defense League is the organization that gathered the affidavits and drew attention to the irregularities after being “critical of voting abuses in the area for the last three years,“ the Timessaid.

Hence, the racial tension.

“The Republican Party has an unscripted mandate to target Democratic counties, and African-Americans particularly,” county commissioner Albert Turner Jr. told the Times.

But it sure seems more about numbers—particularly, the numbers of absentee ballots used in the election on June 3.

In that contest, 1,114 voters—fully 25 percent of the total electorate—cast absentee ballots. That’s a percentage that is six times the state average and a figure that Chapman called “astronomical.“ By way of comparison, only 365 absentee ballots were cast that day in Jefferson County, home to Birmingham and a population 60 times that of Perry County.

In addition, the DDL submitted affidavits alleging that some people voted six times in the same election, the Times said. One young man told DDL officials he had been paid by local officials to use an absentee ballot ever since he had been eligible to vote.

“The last time I voted, I was paid $30,” he said this week. “It’s pretty common. It ain’t nothing new.”

But not all Democrats in Perry County believe the investigation is racially or politically motivated. According to the Times:

The Perry County district attorney, Michael W. Jackson, a Democrat and the first black to be elected to the post, called early in June for a federal investigation into possible voting irregularities, particularly focusing on absentee ballots.

“Just the volume, the sheer number of it,” Mr. Jackson said in an interview. “For there to be that many, it’s suspicious. When you get the absentee ballots, it’s a lot easier to pull that off, forge their names, vote for them.”

He added, “It certainly needs to be looked at, because given the historic significance of Perry County, we want to make sure candidates and the public have a fair process.”

Read more first-person accounts of fraud in the rest of the Times story here.

And the most sinister aspect of these allegations is the despicable irony that all these things are alleged in an area there the modern civil rights movement was born. From the Times:

The incongruity is lost on no one here. It was here in downtown Marion on a night in 1965 that an Alabama trooper flung a young local activist against a cigarette machine and then shot him in the stomach. And that killing led directly to the Voting Rights Act enfranchising blacks throughout the South.

Just as Alabama is gearing up to prosecute the state trooper who acknowledges having fired on the activist, Jimmie Lee Jackson, 43 years ago, federal agents came to the state last month to observe whether voting is free of fraud.

What those who sell their votes fail—or simply refuse—to recognize is that by selling their votes, they are disenfranchising themselves all over again, the police dogs and sit-ins and Freedom Rides and marches and fire hoses notwithstanding.

Take some time to read the complete Times article. It’s an excellent overview of the situation, the investigation and the shockingly blasé attitudes about the integrity of the vote that prevail these areas, where the right to vote freely was once worth the precious human lives of many who died to secure it.