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OHIO - JoAnn Wypijewski, The Nation:

She played one of those messages for me. It came from a woman working at the Fairfax Nursing Home, saying people from the Board of Elections were taking absentee ballots from the residents that day and creating a ball of confusion, asking people their party affiliation and telling self-described Democrats that Bush was the Democratic candidate.

I called over there to speak with Ann Niles-Crumb, an LPN named in the message, to check it out. "This little shrimp of a bald-headed man named Lacey Brooks Jr. walked around here saying 'Vote for Bush! Vote for Bush! He's still going to give you your forty acres and a mule!'" she told me. "So I get infuriated. You don't talk to these patients this way. We were so angry, if we weren't at work we would've whupped this little man."

The Board of Elections confirmed that Lacey Brooks Jr. is a Republican nursing home inspector for absentee ballots, but no one returned calls for comment.

FLORIDA - Suzanne Charlé, The Nation:

Challenges have a long, dark history. In Florida poll watchers were first given the right to challenge voters in 1868, just a year after blacks were granted the right to vote. (At the time, one white delegate to the Florida Constitutional Convention declared that the legislature had successfully prevented Florida government from becoming "Niggerized.") After Reconstruction, the challenge/poll watcher law was re-enacted, but it hasn't been used for decades.

On Tuesday poll watchers will be able to challenge an individual's qualifications to vote by filing a sworn affidavit. In Duval the challenge is to be resolved on the spot by three election workers, or by having the voter cast a provisional ballot. Usually challenges are rare: Ion Sanchez, a Democrat, said no challenge had ever been used in sixteen years that he has been supervisor of Leon County. But in a marvelous bit of doublespeak, the Republicans' Fletcher says that challenges could be "the best way to make sure legal votes aren't disenfranchised by illegal votes."

[...]

The Rev. Willie Bolden, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Truth and Justice campaign, has been flying down every week from Atlanta to work with the coalition. A veteran of the civil rights fights of the 1960s, Bolden was chosen by Martin Luther King Jr. to work with the SCLC. "In all those years," he says, "even in the bad days of the 1950s and '60s, there were never voting challenges like the ones going on now. They would physically intimidate you, maybe burn a cross in your yard-but they never challenged your right to vote by saying you were a felon."

He summed up his feelings about challenges at last Friday's meeting with the supervisor, when Republicans-represented by Mike Hightower, head of the Duval County Republicans, and four lawyers flown in from Texas with lapel pins identifying themselves as the "Texas Task Force"-refused to say that they would work to limit voter challenges. Bolden challenged them: "This is simply suppression of people's right to vote," he said. "You're not doing it in the white community. It's just another form of the KKK-only you don't have hoods and sheets, instead, you're wearing Brooks Brothers and Armani." - Blocking-and Rocking-the Black Vote

More Ground War blogs...Ground War 2004

Back to OHIO:
Rick Perlstein, Village Voice - blogging from Cleveland.

One more political reflection, then I hit the road.

It seems a basic point. But it's worth making. Why do Republicans suppress African American turnout? Because if blacks voted in anything like the numbers whites did, the Republicans would lose several points in every election.

In fact, if people who don't vote generally--the poor, minorities, youth--voted more often, the Republicans would do even worse. [ more... Cleland and Cleveland ]

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