Trans Universe

By Monica F. Helms

It seems that the Republican Georgia Secretary of State, Karen Handel, figured out a new way to suppressed Georgia voters. Last Wednesday, October 29, 2008 – just six days before the election – over 4500 Georgia voters received a letter questioning their citizenship. One of them is a lesbian friend of mine, who was born in Florida.

Here is the letter she received:

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Dear Voter Registration Applicant,

When you registered to vote, you filled out an application that gave your local county registrar information about who you are. Federal law requires that this information be compared with information on file with your driver’s license at the Department of Driver Services. When that happened, though, there was some information that did not match up. We are writing you to let you know that and to tell you what you can do to clear up any questions about you voter registration application that were raised by this process.

One of the pieces of information that did not match up for you was whether you are a United States citizen. When you registered to vote, you said that you were a citizen, but the Driver Services record does not match that information. Under state and federal law, you must be a citizen to register to vote, so this is a very important question to answer.

In order to clear up this question, you should contact your local county voter registrar immediately and provide the registrar with documents to show your citizenship. A list of the type of documents that you could show is included with this letter. You should do this before you vote, but not later than 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 6, 2008. If you do not, your local registrar will schedule a more formal hearing to look at this question. This hearing may be held in your county as early as Friday, November 7, 2008, and you will get a separate letter from the registrar explaining this. You will still be able to vote in the upcoming November 4, 2008 election even while you and the registrar are working on this question. However, your local election officials will ask you to vote on a paper ballot rather than on an electronic voting machine until this question is resolved. Once you have shown proof of your citizenship, your vote will be counted.

Sincerely,

Karen C. Handel
Secretary of State

The Atlanta Journal Constitution followed this story on different days. Voting rights groups, including the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, say the letters are a form of intimidation. Civil rights groups, representing a Kennesaw State University student, filed suit on Oct. 9 seeking a halt to the matching system that started this whole process in motion. The groups said it amounts to a systematic purging of voter rolls that needed to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act.

Also, Handel decided not to help Georgia voters this past week by not supporting the idea of weekend voting. She could have convinced the governor to sign an executive order extending early voting, but she had no plans on helping what could be more Democrat voters, in her opinion.

On a news interview, she told a reporter that “It’s the Georgia law.” The reporter asked if they could do in Florida, then why not here and her response was, “The laws are different in every state. True, but it doesn’t stop a governor from signing an executive order. She also told the reported her decision had no partisan politics involved with it, which I find very hard to believe, based on the history of this state.

Georgia will have a very close election this year and the Republican-controlled state law makers will do whatever they can to suppress and disenfranchise Democratic voters. My friend will be able to clear up this mess on her mix-up, but what about the other 4500 people? I have one more question for Karen Handel, “What percentage of those 4500 names happen to be Democrats?”