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Mississippi election row sees race roles reversed
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Amid fingerpointing, Justice Department and black Democratic chairman fail to come up with a remedy.
By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the August 17, 2007 edition Macon, Miss. - As Noxubee County voters last week took to firehouses and community halls from Prairie Point to Shuqualak, hints of old Mississippi hung over the polls. Federal election observers witnessed:
•Suspicious manipulation of minority voters' ballots.
•Hired hands at the polls working to "assist" voters in selecting certain candidates.
•A suspiciously large number of absentee ballots in a county where, inexplicably, 127 percent of the adult population is registered to vote.
But nothing is quite what it seems in Noxubee. The minority here is white. Local politics is dominated by blacks. In a further twist, blacks here charge that the US Justice Department investigation into political manipulation is in part an act of intimidation intended to give Republicans a foothold in staunchly Democratically controlled local governments.
"This story has all these odd sort of mirror-image resonances," says Steven Mulroy, a University of Memphis law professor and former Justice Department civil rights attorney. "It used to be local officials that intimidated black voters and federal people came in to stop it. Now you've got black voters saying it's federal observers doing the intimidating."
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Rest of story:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0817/p...sju.html?s=hns
-- So is this bad, or is it justice?
Whites in the South did this sort of thing to minority voters for many, many years. Some would argue that such oppression still occurs. Is this justified by history? Or does history merely explain it? Do black voters feel as if they must stuff the ballot boxes, or else, they'll get out-stuffed by the minority whites?
I really didn't think this stuff still really went on anymore.