If you can't convince 'em, prevent 'em from going to the polls

Ex-GOP pleads guilty to phone jamming:

CONCORD, N.H. - The former head of a Republican consulting group has pleaded guilty to jamming Democratic telephone lines in several New Hampshire cities on Election Day two years ago.

The jamming involved more than 800 computer-generated calls and lasted for about 1 1/2 hours on Nov. 5, 2002, the day voters decided several races, including a close Senate contest between outgoing Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and GOP Rep. John E. Sununu, who won by fewer than 20,000 votes.

The lines that were jammed were set up so voters could call for rides to the polls. Democrats say the jamming was an organized, statewide effort that may have even affected the outcome of some local races.

The consultant, Allen Raymond, former president of the Virginia-based GOP Marketplace, also pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to conspiring to make harassing phone calls. Add phone jamming and harassment, then, to the increasing list of ways, including posting intimidating "poll watchers" at poll booths in minority neighborhoods, and using inaccurate felon lists to purge eligible voters from the rolls, as per today's Miami Herald:

More than 2,100 Florida voters -- many of them black Democrats -- could be wrongly barred from voting in November because Tallahassee elections officials included them on a list of felons potentially ineligible to vote, a Herald investigation has found.

A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.

But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names -- including 547 in South Florida -- shouldn't be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state's clemency process.

And there are yet more ways in which minority, largely Democratic voters are prevented from voting. Yesterday I went door-to-door to gather registrations in what passes for the minority neighborhood in Ithaca, and two persons separately told me that they had registered at the DMV or in the process of performing jury duty, yet were prevented from voting on grounds that they weren't registered. Evidently many of these registrations never get delivered to the local board of elections, either from incompetence or (I would not be surprised to learn---if not in Ithaca then elsewhere) instructed neglect.