CONTACT: Eleiza Braun 415-420-4059
The Michigan GOP has announced plans to use a list of housing foreclosures as the basis for a broad voter-caging operation, as reported yesterday by Eartha Jane Melzer in The Michigan Messenger. James Carabelli, chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, has announced plans to assign “election challengers” to polling places to question the eligibility of home foreclosure victims based on residency. “We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” Carabelli told the Messenger.
Today Teresa James, attorney for the voting rights organization Project Vote, and author of the 2007 report Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters, issued the following statement in response:
The Macomb County GOP’s plan is a cynical partisan attempt to suppress the vote of thousands of low-income and African-American voters, a replay of the 2004 threats of mass challenges. Just because you’re behind on your mortgage doesn’t mean you lose the right to vote. All a foreclosure filing tells anyone is that the owners are behind on their mortgage; it does not mean a voter has necessarily moved. Foreclosures take time. And even if the plan is to only challenge voters whose homes have actually been sold at auction, the challengers will still achieve nothing but to slow-down voting and create an intimidating atmosphere at strategically chosen polls.
Michigan law says that challenges may be made at the polls if the challenger “knows or has good reason to suspect” a voter is ineligible. The Michigan Secretary of State has clarified this to require that challenges should be based on “reliable sources or means.” Republican challengers with only a list of foreclosure notices will have NO evidence or reliable source to suggest that eligible voters have moved and are no longer eligible to vote.
This is just the latest—and most transparent—in a long history of racially and politically motivated GOP attacks against Michigan voters, designed to suppress votes by disenfranchising individual voters and creating confusion and delays at the polls. In 1999, right-wing volunteers in Hamtramck, Michigan systematically challenged the citizenship of voters with dark skin and Arabic-sounding names. In 2004 and 2006, Republicans reportedly recruited thousands of paid challengers to disrupt predominantly African-American precincts. “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote,” a GOP state representative was quoted as saying in 2004,”we’re going to have tough time in this election cycle.”
As the Messenger reports, Macomb County is in the top three-percent of counties in the U.S. hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis—and African-Americans, as the primary victims of sub-prime lending practices, make up the majority of these cases. African-Americans also tend to vote democratic, which is why it’s not surprising that the GOP would target these voters for suppression.
Regardless of politics, no one faced with the possibility of losing their home should also have to lose their vote. Project Vote is writing to ask Michigan Secretary of State, Republican Terri Lynn Land, to instruct election officials that someone’s presence on a list of foreclosure notices is not a legitimate basis for challenging that individual’s right to vote. Project Vote will also send letters to both major parties, reviewing the acceptable criteria for voter challenges under Michigan law, and if necessary will file lawsuits on behalf of disenfranchised voters.
In America you get to vote even if you’re behind on your bills. All Americans—particularly those members of the community hit hardest by the economic crisis—deserve a voice and a vote on Election Day.”