May 28, 2008
2 Voter Rights Cases, One Gripping a College Town, Stir Texas
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
PRAIRIE VIEW, Tex. =97 =93Vote or Die,=94 exhorts the faded slogan on a
roadway at Prairie View A&M University, where black students once
marched for the right to vote here in the town where they attend
school, on a former cotton plantation about 50 miles northwest of
Houston.
The students won that battle in 2004, long after the United States
Supreme Court supposedly decided the issue in 1979. But disputes over
minority voting rights =97 along with accusations of election fraud =97
continue to rouse Prairie View, home to one of the nation=92s leading
historically black colleges, and other Texas locales.
=93The cold war=92s not over =97 they just moved the fence from Berlin to
the Texas border,=94 said DeWayne Charleston, Waller County justice of
the peace, who maintains that local officials failed to record
hundreds of students whom he registered to vote in 2006. The federal
Department of Justice and the Texas attorney general=92s office say
investigations are under way here, but will not give details.
Meanwhile, the attorney general, Greg Abbott, is a defendant in a
separate voting rights case that goes to federal trial on Wednesday in
the East Texas city of Marshall, in the wake of the Supreme Court=92s
decision last month upholding Indiana=92s tough voter identification
law.
Arguing that antifraud provisions enacted in 2003 were being
selectively enforced to intimidate minority voters who are largely
Democrats, the Texas Democratic Party filed suit against Mr. Abbott
and Phil Wilson, the secretary of state, both Republicans.
The suit, initially filed in 2006, contends that get-out-the-vote
activists who help voters with mail ballots have been =93interrogated,
harassed and intimidated=94 by state investigators.
J. Gerald Hebert, the lawyer for the Democrats, said his first
witnesses would be several elderly black women prosecuted on fraud
charges for what Mr. Hebert described as help given other elderly
voters in the mailing of early ballots in Texarkana, Fort Worth and
Dallas.
Mr. Abbott and Mr. Wilson say they have a duty to prevent voter fraud.
To complaints that any infractions at issue have been insignificant,
they say that in pursuit of that duty, they must pursue violations of
provisions like one that requires anyone mailing in a ballot to sign
the envelope.
They say that =93there is no evidence of any voters who have been unable
to vote due to enactment or enforcement=94 of the provisions, which,
they also note, were sponsored in the Texas House by a Democrat.
Further, they say, there is no evidence that enforcement has
intimidated anyone into stopping voter assistance efforts.
The Dallas Morning News re****ted on May 18 that all 26 cases of voter
fraud prosecuted by Mr. Abbott had been brought against Democrats,
almost all of them black or Hispanic.
But in their legal brief, Mr. Abbott and Mr. Wilson said that the
state had brought voter fraud cases against Republicans as well and
that =93mere questioning=94 of people about activities that might have
broken the law did not deprive them of a constitutional right.
The brief said the two officials=92 position was strengthened by the
Supreme Court=92s Indiana ruling, on April 28, which allowed states, as
a way of preventing fraud, to require voters to show photo
identification.
The suit against Mr. Abbott and Mr. Wilson involves enforcement of
provisions that make it a crime in certain cases to carry someone
else=92s filled-in early-voting ballot to the mailbox, to possess
another person=92s blank ballot or to provide early-voting ballot
assistance to anyone who has not asked for it.
The case, to be tried without a jury before Judge T. John Ward, has
put Mr. Abbott at odds with Judge Charleston and some campus activists
at Prairie View, who say they once looked to the attorney general as a
champion of their voting rights.
In 2004, Oliver Kitzman, then the Waller County district attorney,
challenged the students=92 right to cast ballots here rather than in
their home communities, although the Supreme Court had long ago
decided they could. Students, claiming that the county=92s white
residents feared the voting power of the predominantly black 9,000-
member student body, marched in protest, and Mr. Abbott wrote an
opinion sup****ting them. Mr. Kitzman soon retired, and students
continued to cast ballots here.
But other voting rights disputes have since erupted. Before the 2006
election, Judge Charleston said in an interview, he personally
registered about 1,000 students. But on Election Day, he said,
hundreds of them were turned away as not registered to vote. The
registration cards were later found in county offices, he said.
Ellen C. Shelburne, the county tax *****sor and registrar, who took
office in January 2007, said she had recently been questioned by
investigators from Mr. Abbott=92s office and had told them that she knew
nothing about the matter. Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for Mr.
Abbott, said, =93We cannot comment on ongoing investigations.=94
Jamie Hais, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said, =93We do
have an ongoing investigation into the matter,=94 but declined to
comment further.
Judge Charleston said he had also complained to federal and state
officials that Waller County had denied Prairie View students
convenient polling locations. Further, he told them that for the May
10 school board election, not only did district trustees use public
money to issue a voter guide, the guide also gave short ****ft to two
black candidates, Jemiah Richards and Charli Cooksey, both Prairie
View students, who subsequently lost to in***bents.
Patrick W. Mizell, a lawyer for the firm of Vinson & Elkins, which was
hired to represent the school board, said that this was the first time
the trustees had put out a guide but that he saw nothing wrong with
it.
Anyway, Mr. Mizell said, =93I don=92t think a large number of Prairie View
students have kids in the local school district.=94
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/us/28texas.html?_r=3D1&oref=3Dslogin
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