Digby's Hullabaloo

Depressing

by digby

The presidential campaign, in the almost all-white counties of southwestern Virginia, has produced an outcome that few people expected: a frank discussion of race. Voters sometimes sound as if they are reasoning with themselves and working through their own complex views as they talk through the choice they face this November.

“I’ve never been prejudiced in my life,” said Sharon Fleming, 69, the wife of a retired coal miner, who spends hours at the union hall calling voters on behalf of Obama. “My niece married a black, and I don’t have a problem with it. Now, I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama.”

Obama beat Hillary Rodham Clinton convincingly in the Virginia Democratic primary, but his supporters have known they face a challenge in this part of the state, just as Obama has faced challenges elsewhere among white voters from rural and working-class households.

He took 64% of the primary vote statewide but just 9% here in coal-rich Buchanan County, for instance, and 12% in neighboring Dickenson County. Though he is now the Democratic nominee, many voters are cool to him — even some of the party’s own leaders and precinct captains.

“I haven’t found in my precinct one out of five that will vote for Obama,” said Tommy Street, the party’s vice chairman in Buchanan (pronounced buck-AN-in) County.

Street, 78, counts himself among the doubters, citing Obama’s alliance with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). He has always voted Democratic, he said, but this year plans to leave the presidential ballot blank.

Some here blame Obama’s troubles on his mixed-race background (his mother was a white Kansan, his father a black Kenyan). Others say his journey from Hawaii and Indonesia to Harvard and big-city Chicago politics makes him an oddity.

[…]

Ben and Beth Bailey sat in the back and clapped politely, but they remained unpersuaded. They said they were likely to break from their tradition of voting Democratic and might well not vote at all.

Obama “just doesn’t seem like he’s from America,” said Beth Bailey, 25. Ben Bailey, 32, noted that Obama’s middle name is Hussein, “and we know what that means.”

Beth’s father, Josh Viers, is the party’s Whitewood precinct chairman, responsible for working the polls and urging Democrats to vote the party line. He came around to backing Obama only recently, and reluctantly.

“Am I racial? Am I prejudiced? No, I’m not,” said Viers. Still, he is frustrated that his job is to persuade other Democrats to back a black man.

“Somebody in Buchanan County or in the United States can look at him and say, ‘He’s not my color,’ ” said Viers. “Why put yourself in that position? We had a shot four years ago, and the people listened to lies, rumors, negative ads and got us beat. Bush got him a second term, and look what it got us.”

Viers said he will do his best to help Obama on election day. But local Democratic leaders said they could not rely on all of their precinct chairs to follow suit.

These attitudes are dying out, but they obviously aren’t gone yet. I heard an NPR report from rural Pennsylvania he other day in which the people interviewed sounded very much like this, so it isn’t just the south. But we knew that.

Probably of more importance is the fact that Virginia, like virtually all the swing states is very likely to be the scene of some shenanigans with the electoral system itself:

On July 31, 2008 Montgomery County held 47,604 voters. On October 1, the number increased to 51,796 voters. While the number may not seem like a titanic increase, Wertz said that, on average, voter rolls stay roughly consistent from year to year, especially in more transient communities such as those that house large universities. This influx of voter registration forms filled up by students is causing hassle in the Montgomery County Government Center. At one point, Wertz had received 3,000 in one week’s time. Registrars from other districts and volunteers have been staffing the registrar’s office nearly around the clock, often working through the weekends and until 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. to process all of the new registrations. Wertz said he “can’t even fathom the number” of eventual registrations.In the 2004 election, 45,079 citizens were registered to vote in Montgomery County, up from 41,063 in 2000. In Blacksburg alone the tally was 14,779 on July 1, 2008. The number rose to 14,821 on Aug. 1, 2008 and 15,401 on Sept. 1, 2008. The total number of registered voters in Blacksburg in the 2004 election, as of Sept. 1, 2004, was14,166.These numbers may have been exacerbated by a surfeit of misinformation from voter registration drives concerning absentee balloting. Wertz expressed concern over reports reaching him from students and parents about misinformation coming from campaigners. Campaigners are reported to have been “telling people that they should not vote absentee. That by voting absentee their votes would not be counted. ‘The only time that absentee ballots are counted is when it’s a tight race,’ (campaigners) were telling people,” Wertz said.[…]
Republican Del. Dave Nutter said that he had seen polling data suggesting that 80 percent of Virginians may turn out to vote on Election Day. The high voter registrations in the several different districts is sure to cause long lines on Election Day, Wertz said. Further, a spike in registrations from the E-1 district, encompassing the majority of student residence halls on the south side of campus, from 3,526 registered voters on June 3 to 4,829 on Oct. 1, makes E-1 the largest voting precinct in Montgomery County.Elected officials, political parties and poll workers alike foresee a crowded Nov. 4. …To quicken the pace at the polls, students should attempt to bring their voter registration card, mailed to the address at which they registered, with them to the polling site. Failing this, any first-time voter will have to produce a form of government-issued identification — a driver’s license or a Hokie Passport — or proof of their local residence, such as a utility bill or car registration …
First-time voters, however, without some form of identification will be asked to fill out the identity statement. Then, these voters will cast a provisional ballot, a paper ballot that will be counted along with absentee ballots at the close of polls if no irregularities arise.[…]
An issue that could thwart these preventive measures is a practice known as voter caging. The procedure for challenging a voter’s registration in Virginia is as follows: Virginia Code 24.2-651 states that “any qualified voter may, and the officers of election shall, challenge the vote of any person who is listed on the poll book but is known or suspected not to be a qualified voter.” Officers of elections can, however, remove anyone from a polling place for being unduly disruptive of the voting process, Wertz said.A political tactic with a history of challenging minority voters, the practice involves the challenging of voter rolls of a given locale in the hopes of disenfranchising legitimate voters. While not necessarily illegal, challenging can pose significant problems in terms of discounting those without documentation and may cause general frustration, leading to longer lines. In Ohio in 2004, 35,000 people were challenged while going to the polls. While representatives of both Republican and Democratic parties have said that neither side has plans to challenge voters, the flood of student voters and students’ typical leftward leanings may leave the question of voter caging heavy on the minds of some.”If Virginia proves to be, as many speculate, a battleground state, the stakes are higher. The games are dirtier. If we see come Election Day, Virginia could come in play; unfortunately we will probably see some attempts to prevent people from voting,” Willis said.

John Fund, who wrote a book recently about the (bogus) right wing issue of voter fraud, is talking constantly about how the Democrats are going to try to get election officials to count the votes of people who are unregistered via the provisional ballots.One of the reasons why they would want to do this, aside from making the lines so long that people will not be able to devote the time, is to throw the election into doubt and have the courts intervene, (which we know they are willing to do.) I suspect that it isn’t going to be close enough at this point to work, but if it is, the fact that Obama will be winning with a lot of new younger voters and minorities is likely to create the myth that he is an illegitimate president.

The Right loves nothing more than to take a liberal complaint and project it back into our faces like a laser beam. If the jokers over at the Corner can shriek about sexism against Palin, as if they all wear funny hats every day in solidarity with Bella Abzug, then they can surely claim that the Democrats stole the election. You know they’re going to if they can.

Here is a web site with state by state election laws. If you aren’t registered, you need to do it quickly and you need to read carefully about what the state law requires at the polling place. You may have to bring a DNA sample and the family Bible in some states these days, since the Supreme Court decided that even though there are no known cases of systematic voter fraud, the Republicans should still be able to suppress the vote by making it a royal pain in the ass.