Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Behind Immigrant-Bashing in Arizona: Good Old Fashioned Voter Intimidation?

Click here for a scary, credible, article raising the possibility immigration concerns could serve as a pretext to intimidate and suppress Hispanic voters in Arizona. Under SB 1070 the law asking local police to force persons with "reasonable suspicion" to produce immigrant documentation, could certainly have been used in thousands of precincts to suppress the Hispanic vote, legally. The recent legal clarification makes it less likely. The article is quite specific about repeated voter suppression efforts in Arizona, beginning with a Republican operative by the name of Rehnquist (a tall man) who was always accused of shoving black and Hispanic voters out of line as a young Republican youth in the 1960s; he always denied it, but the accusation stuck. He later became a highly conservative member of the U.S. Supreme court. I would think ALL Hispanics might want to vote next November in Arizona: Maldef, anyone?

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