Oh, the gall. The gall! This has me so outraged that I'm writing my first diary after four years lurking here.
Republicans create the biggest housing mess in decades, but of course manage to find a way to profit it from it electorally: Voter suppression! Recent news reports indicate that they plan on challenging the voting rights of foreclosure victims in at least Ohio and Michigan. There are a number of other high-foreclosure swing states where this ugly trick may pop up: Nevada, the nation's foreclosure capital, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Arizona are all in the top ten for foreclosure rates.
From Michigan:
"We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses," [Macomb GOP] party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week.
Obviously, this is an underhanded tactic to suppress the votes of struggling Americans who haven't benefited from the Bush economic agenda. And as noted in the Michigan Messenger article, there are many victims of foreclosure that still remain in their homes as eligible voters while they attempt to work out a modification or refinancing.
"You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so," said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public interest law firm. "I don’t think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance."
I'm glad to see ACORN, which is a national leader on both foreclosures and voting rights, tackling these GOP shenanigans head-on. Here's the statement from ACORN president Maude Hurd, which I'm going to quote in full since it's so good:
ACORN members are outraged that once again the Republican Party is planning to use dirty tricks, this time targeting foreclosure victims, to suppress votes. The GOP and the predatory lenders who created the foreclosure crisis have set up shop together to steal our homes and our votes.
The simple fact of the matter is that many homeowners who have experienced foreclosure are able to remain in their homes for some period of time up to a year in some states, and in many cases homeowners are still negotiating with their lenders to receive a modification or refinancing in order to save their homes. Mere foreclosure is a wholly inadequate basis on which to deny someone the right to vote.
It's painfully clear that some would like to return to the day when property ownership was a prerequisite to the franchise and turn the mortgage payment into a poll tax. They want to see us penniless and powerless.
And the punchline:
This helps explain why the GOP has been so uninterested in stopping the epidemic of foreclosures -- it turns out this is their strategy for winning the election!
So, so true. McCain is really running a subprime campaign.
And Michigan ACORN is going to be staging a protest tomorrow at the Macomb County GOP Headquarters denouncing these tactics and calling on the scurrilous chairman to step down. Michiganders, join them!
Who: Members of Michigan ACORN, victims of foreclosure, concerned citizens
What: Protest Against Macomb Republican Party Chairman James Carabelli
When: Thursday, September 11 at 12pm
Where: John McCain Macomb County Republican HQ/McCain office 48711 Van Dyke Avenue in Shelby Township, MI
I know it's easy to get rage fatigue from all the dirty tricks the Republicans employ, but this one is just particularly galling.
I certainly hope the Obama campaign steps up and denounces this and mobilizes to counter it. And hey, maybe that mavericky McCain will too! Although if he lost one of his seven houses, my guess is he would still be able to vote.