US groups warn of moves to deny Obama victory

Civil rights and trade union leaders in the United States are warning of last-minute efforts to deny victory to Democratic candidate Barack Obama by preventing thousands of likely pro-Obama voters from casting ballots on November 4.

Known as “vote suppression,” the tactic involves challenges to eligibility on a variety of grounds, including improper voter registration and insufficient proof of US citizenship or place of residence.

“This year has brought heightened efforts to disenfranchise and intimidate voters,” Wade Henderson, director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, declared recently. “These are targeted and insidious attempts to suppress the vote, particularly in communities of colour.”

John Sweeney, the head of the largest US trade union confederation, charges that groups favouring John McCain are responsible for vote-suppression campaigns in some key states.

Mr Sweeney said the labour movement “strongly condemns the coordinated national effort by the Republican Party and allied political operatives to suppress voter turnout and deny ballots to newly registered voters, particularly young people, the poor and people of colour.”

Tens of thousands of individuals in six swing states have been purged from voter rolls or have been prevented from registering to vote, The New York Times reported earlier this month. Many of these moves by state election officials appear to be in violation of federal law, the Times added.
The newspaper also said, however, that the purges and denials of eligibility do not seem to be coordinated by any political party.

CBS News reported this week that there is so far no indication of widespread voter suppression in states where balloting is permitted to take place weeks in advance of Election Day. Based on surveys it conducted in 17 of those states, the US television network found that charges of vote fraud or vote suppression “are far more rhetoric than reality.”

Some voting-rights activists have also warned that the machines used to count ballots at thousands of polling places are vulnerable to “hacking.” Computer experts could rig these machines to record inaccurate vote totals, these monitors say.

Even if broadly conducted and highly effectively, vote suppression and hacking of voting machines would probably not alter the outcome of this year's presidential election. Nearly all reputable polls show Senator Obama with a substantial lead that may be impossible to erase through such tactics.

Still, the Obama campaign plans to deploy armies of attorneys at polling places around the country on November 4 to monitor voting procedures and to initiate urgent legal action in response to complaints of vote suppression. The McCain camp is preparing a similar, though smaller, effort.

Millions of names are removed from voter rolls every year in the United States in response to deaths or changes in residency. But other factors may also be involved in some states. And that leads Wendy Weiser, an elections expert at New York University, to describe the culling process as “secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation.”

“Lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the voter rolls without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity to correct if before Election Day.”

Conversely, Senator McCain's campaign has voiced fears about efforts to inflate voter rolls by adding invalid registrations in neighbourhoods likely to support Senator Obama by wide margins. Senator McCain has pointed in particular to a group that organises in low-income urban communities. It was recently revealed that 30 percent of 1.3 million voter registrations submitted by the group were faulty.