Von Spakovsky, fresh from serving as a Bush volunteer during the Florida recount battle, became the administration's point man on voting. A veteran of efforts to keep down the Black vote in the run-up to 2000, von Spakovsky tenaciously advocated felony disenfranchisement through the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. He also served on the advisory board of the now-defunct Voting Integrity Project (VIP), which was involved in the massive purge of voters in Florida before the 2000 election.

Frank Strickland, the Bush-appointed chair of the Legal Services Corporation, heads the Atlanta chapter of the Federalist Society, and also sits on the Society's electoral process subcommittee as well as the board of the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA). If a rerun of the Florida voter suppression disaster happens, the RNLA will be in the thick of the fight.

Legal Challenges

The Bush campaign has lawyers in every state, covering 30,000 precincts. This summer, to ensure that the Republicans could deal with any eventuality, the RNLA held a "National Election Law Seminar and School." Among its sponsors was Charles Bell, who coordinated litigation on the 2003 recall. Bell serves as the RNLA's V.P. for election education, co-chair of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney and the Federalist Society's election law subcommittee, and general counsel for the California GOP. He also recently represented Riverside County in an important case involving electronic voting, in which the county successfully fought candidate Linda Soubirous' demand for backup data relevant to a touch screen voting machine recount.

Attack Ads

Enormous sums, $7 million by one estimate, have also been spent since the 2000 election to depress minority voter turnout by running negative ads against the Democrats. Since the great majority of minority voters cast their ballots for Democrats, and would not consider voting for the GOP, many political analysts assert that the goal of these ads is to sow doubt and cynicism about the wisdom of voting at all, particularly among younger voters. "The whole idea is to alienate Blacks from their Democratic base so that they don't turn out and vote," argues St. Louis University political scientist Ken Warren. Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) said that these types of ads are "a deliberate, systematic effort to try to discourage African American voters from turning out," since "these people know that the African-American vote is not going to the Republicans. The whole idea is to confuse people and raise doubts in their minds."

Although conservatives have developed a habit of denouncing soft money 527 organizations, the Federalist Society's James Bopp was among the first to push their use. 527s have provided a legal umbrella not only for attack ads on John Kerry's Vietnam War record, but also to flood Black media markets with ads. Under-funded campaigns by competing voices have little chance of matching such efforts.

Richard Nadler, president of a 527 organization called Americas PAC, claims to have placed more than 11,000 pro-Republican issue ads on Black radio and BET TV in Missouri, Colorado, Minnesota, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Arkansas. Nadler produced an infamous ad in which an actress says of her decision to put her child in a private school, "We didn't want him where drugs and violence were fashionable. That was a bit more diversity than he could handle."

Nadler also formed Access Communications, which was selected by GOPAC (the organization formerly run by Newt Gingrich) to target African American audiences. Now headed by J.C. Watts, the former Republican congressman and board member of the right wing Clear Channel Communications, GOPAC bills itself as "the premier training organization for Republican candidates across America," and is now focusing on grooming minority candidates for state and local races.

The chair of the board of Watts' private consulting company, Randy Evans, is general counsel of the Georgia Republican Party and head of the legal team for the Bush-Cheney campaign in Georgia. He once served as legal counsel to Newt Gingrich.

The impact of the legal right wing's efforts to legally circumscribe citizen participation through voting, running for office, and communicating issues effectively will stretch well beyond this election cycle. If voter turnout stays stuck below 40%, democracy in America is in trouble. How well the voting system fares in coming days, months and years will be a good bellwether.

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing movements and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.