Update: I added the photographs I took.
"Men With Guns Harass Latino Voters" blared the headline on Daily Kos. I clicked and read a quote from a TPM Muckraker post:
I just spoke with a Latino election monitor in Arizona who said that a trio of men, one with a handgun visible, is harrassing Latino voters as they go to the polls in Tucson, Ariz.
Tucson? That's where I live. I read more and found that this incident took place "at a polling place in Tucson's Iglesia Bautista precinct." Which is less than 2 minutes from my home. I jumped in the car and grabbed my camera. I'm a photographer and a student of photojournalism at Pima Community College.
What I found is after the jump.
In summary, I discovered the following to be true:
In the morning on voting day, two men -- anti-immigrant crusader Russ Dove and his cameraman -- showed up at precinct 49 in Tucson, at the Iglesia Bautista church, 4502 S. 12th St. Their plan: To harass and intimidate Spanish-speaking voters by using an "English-only" petition to screen for "illegal immigrants" trying to vote, videotape them, and post their likenesses on the Internet. Roy Warden also came, armed with a gun -- as he usually does -- and the trio started approaching a small number of people. MALDEF monitors were there, to observe the effect of Arizona's new requirement for ID to vote, and observed the attempted intimidation tactics.
The trio left around noon to head to other polling places, then gave up after talking to only a few people. MALDEF reported this to the authorities, who are investigating; MALDEF has photographs of the men from when they were there.
My Investigations
I drove to Iglesia Bautista at 2:00 p.m., but neither the anti-immigrant trio nor MALDEF were there. I returned home and did some research on the Web, posting some in the DKos comment thread. I headed around to a dozen precincts in the area, but saw no obvious sign of intimidation at any of those. (I'd find out later that they had given up hours before.)
Some Democratic campaigners outside the 75-foot campaigning limit had seen Dove -- I showed them a picture from the same stunt being pulled two years ago -- at a second polling place. Evidentally he'd come by precinct 160 at El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, after leaving Iglesias Bautista.
Eventually I returned to Iglesia Bautista and met Diego Bernal, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), and several others who were there to observe the effects of Proposition 200, which required that all voters show identification -- purportedly an attempt to cut down on "voting by illegals": a problem which has never really been proven to exist, but the cure for which is affecting legal citizens throughout the state.
Bernal was there when the three were at Iglesia Bautista, and he has photographic evidence including the gun carried. The men were identified as Russ Dove, Roy Warden, and an unnamed cameraman. The legal authorities had arrived to investigate as well, and didn't want me taking pictures -- alas, as I didn't get any good shots of MALDEF speaking to the cops.
Raul Grivalja, D-Arizona, at the polling place. Photograph by Kynn Bartlett.
I returned home and then went back to the polling place shortly before it closed; congressman Raul Grijalva, D-Arizona, was there speaking to the media, as the polling place in question was the very one he votes at. (Later, Dove told me this specific place was chosen because it's where Grijalva votes.) I shook Grijalva's hand and took some pictures as he was interviewed in Spanish and in English.
Raul Grivalja, D-Arizona, interviewed by Telemundo. Photograph by Kynn Bartlett.
A reporter wandered through -- for one of the print papers, although I didn't catch which -- and mentioned that Russ Dove had gone "to speak at City Hall." I jumped in my car and drove downtown, where I found Dove outside the city council meeting.
Who is Russ Dove?
Russ Dove is a convicted car thief, handyman, purported Web designer, and would-be "traditional Democrat" write-in candidate who runs what he calls Truth In Action -- a nativist hate site.
He is profiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the focus is on his 2004 election day stunt that was identical to this year's.
Blog for Arizona exposed Russ Dove as the backer of so-called "traditional Democrat" and nativist William "Bill" Johnson in July. Billionaires for Bush, an anti-Bush parody group, even created a Block The Vote trading card for Dove. David Neiwert wrote about Johnson and Dove, linking to some of the articles above.
Who is Roy Warden?
Roy Warden makes Russ Dove seem reasonable, at least in actions (although they share the same rhetoric and general world view). Warden is profiled on the SPLC site, in a story called Deadly Force:
Sunday services were under way inside St. Augustine's Cathedral. Outside, the summer air was still and quiet except for a few birds chirping in a courtyard near the entrance. But the serenity was doomed. A car pulled up, and a graying, bespectacled man carrying a handgun and a loudspeaker got out, two cameramen in tow.
Working fast, he positioned a collection of lawn chairs on the public sidewalk in front of the Catholic cathedral, then encircled the lawn chairs with what appeared to be a series of pink jump ropes and planted two American flags. With the bravado of a professional wrestler, he then stepped into the roped-off ring he'd constructed, threw down a Mexican flag, and ceremoniously stomped on it, grinding his heel for the cameras.
Then he turned on the loudspeaker and addressed the worshippers inside St. Augustine's.
"You people don't seem to understand forbidden territory, whether it's a child's anus or the American border! You just want to push on in, don't you?" he screamed, his face flushed with anger. "We are going to be driving you back to Mexico real goddamn soon!" Spit flew from his mouth. "Get used to it! My name is Roy Warden, and I burn Mexican flags!"
With a fanny pack loaded with water bottles strapped to his belly, a Glock 9mm on his hip, and a bullhorn to amplify his outrage, Roy Warden, 59, emerged this spring as one of the country's most controversial, volatile, and, many believe, dangerous characters of the anti-immigration movement. Along with occasional sidekicks Russ Dove, a former militia leader and convicted car thief, and Laine Lawless, the founder of the group Border Guardians who earlier this year urged neo-Nazis to terrorize Hispanics, Warden has burned and trampled Mexican flags in public, nearly started at least one riot, regularly wreaked havoc on Tucson City Council proceedings, and E-mailed a death threat to a prominent local public defender. Without regular followers or even a named group behind him, Warden is a one-man band of immigrant-bashing hate, a man so untamed that other anti-immigration activists shun him as an embarrassment.
This is the man who showed up at the polling place in a heavily Latino part of town, toting a gun.
What was the plan?
On his U.S. Constitution Enforcement 2006 web site, Russ Dove laid out his simple plan for voter intimidation, including the following:
We will be exercising our "First Amendment Right to Free Speech" at the preceint polling locations
protesting that "foreign nationals - legal & illegal" are being allowed to vote in our elections.
We will do this on the grounds of the English Language. No speak English - No Vote! ~ IT IS THE LAW!
We will have a Citizens initiated "English Only Petition" and we will lawfully ask each voter to sign the Petition.
Those who cannot speak English and are under 75 will be photographed and posted on the Internet as a suspected illegal voter.
As an aside, this blog post at Idle Words lays out a good response to the right-wing meme that you must speak English in order to vote. For example:
[...] entire classes of legal immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship are exempt [pdf] from the language requirement: If you are old enough, and have lived legally in the United States long enough, you do not have to know a word of English (the requirement is 15 years of residency for applicants over 55, 20 years for applicants over 50). You might call this the 'grandma clause' in naturalization law. Applicants who have a mental or physical handicap that prevents them from learning English are also exempt from the language requirement.
The requirement to speak English fluently says: "Applicants for naturalization must be able to read, write, speak, and understand words in ordinary usage in the English language." As Idle Words points out, the legal ballot language is NOT ordinary usage of English.
But back to Russ Dove's plan.
He asked for people who agree with him to fill out an online application form to watch the polling places:
1) FILL OUT THE FORM BELOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS
1-A) I WILL CONTACT YOU TO DISCUSS PRECINCT ASSIAGNMENT
2) PRINT OUT 2(TWO) COPIES OF YOUR PRECINCT ASSIAGNMENT
3) PRINT OUT A SET OF LAWS THAT ESTABLISH YOUR LAWFUL RIGHT TO BE AT THE PRECINCT
4) PRINT OUT 5 (FIVE) COPIES OF THE "AMERICAN CITIZEN ENGLISH ONLY PETITION"
5) BE AT YOUR PRECINCT WITH YOUR PETITION'S, COPY OF THE LAW, VIDEO CAMERA, CELL PHONE AND FSR RADIO'S
See, the petition is the key. His "English-only" petition -- apparently circulating in an attempt to get a bill on the books, even though there was an English-only proposition in Tuesday's election -- is really his modern-day version of a literacy test, a type of voter suppression historically aimed at African Americans and banned by the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
It works this way: He approaches Latino voters and tries to get them to sign. The petition is his pretext for initiating conversations with people approaching the polling location, and allows him to judge whether or not they are, in his opinion, "fluent" in English. Those who sign it are presumably fluent; those who refuse to sign are, no doubt, illegal immigrants attempting to vote.
Pictures of these supposed "illegal voters" are then placed on the Internet, as well as potentially being reported to police. Their only actual crime? Being judged by Russ Dove, an anti-immigrant nativist, to be insufficiently fluent in English to vote.
Which polling places would be targeted? Russ Dove published a USCE 2006 Precincts To Be Watched page on his Web site which listed over a dozen polling places in southern Tucscon. Anyone familiar with Tucson demographics can tell you that not only are these heavily Democratic areas, they're also very Latino, Spanish-speaking parts of town.
This corresponds to Sunnyside School District, named by Russ Dove in the 2004 article as a special focus of his attention:
Dove planned to visit all 15 precincts in the Sunnyside Unified School District. He chose the predominantly Hispanic area because he contends fraud there in 2002 helped elect Gov. Janet Napolitano and U.S. Rep. Ra√∫l Grijalva, both Democrats.
What else is distinctive about Sunnyside? Oh, yeah, 88% of the kids in the schools are Latino.
My Interview with Russ Dove
I caught up with Dove outside the city council meeting, as he was chatting with a police officer who was all too happy to ramble on about various corrupt cops he'd met. I interrupted the two as they were exchanging tales of government corruption, and introduced myself to Dove.
"Are you here because of the MALDEF press release?" he asked. I hadn't read it yet, and told him so, but I said that I had heard there were problems, and asked him to tell me his side.
Russ Dove outside Tucson city hall. Photograph by Kynn Bartlett.
He wasn't as angry and stupid as I'd expected; he was reasonably well-mannered and polite to me. Of course, I'm a blonde white American and that may have had something to do with it. I know from past experience that bigots treat me nicely until they find out I'm a "race traitor."
"MALDEF doesn't like me and they're lying!" he said, starting a prolonged rant that had me scribbling frantically. Alas that I don't handwrite as fast as I type or make pictures. "I didn't go out to intimidate anyone!" Dove said.
He explained there are two types of Americans: Birthright and Naturalized. Birthright citizens are born into English-speaking families and attend English-teaching K-to-12 schools. The laws say that naturalized citizens have to learn English, so nobody would ever need ballots printed in Spanish. I asked him to pause as I tried to catch up with writing down his spiel.
Russ Dove made sure the back of his shirt was photographed. Photograph by Kynn Bartlett.
Dove was wearing the same T-shirt he made and wore two years ago; in fact, it was starting to show signs of age. The front has a faux badge, while the back was labeled "U.S. CONSTITUTION ENFORCEMENT" in the way that you expect to see "DEA" or other government agencies. He was so proud of this, in fact, that he asked if I'd made a picture of his back, and turned around so I could take one.
From his belt were slung bottled water and fanny packs. His hair was worn up in a braided pony tail.
Various objects hang from Russ Dove's belt. Photograph by Kynn Bartlett.
Russ Dove told me his side of the story, which pretty much confirms all the other facts I'd learned, and adds a few moredata points.
He brought along the videographer, who he refused to name, as a "witness." If the scenario he'd planned for took place -- he discovered an "illegal" who wasn't fluent enough -- he'd have been able to photograph the incident and post the offender's picture on his web site.
Yes, Dove said, Roy Warden had brought a gun with him -- "because we're all under death threats!" he explained. Warden and Dove have been repeatedly threatened, Dove said, by open-borders advocates, the Mafia, Mexicans, and others. So they need to be armed.
I asked why he didn't bring a gun, then. "I chose not to, because I'd be at a school, a church, a park," he said, citing Arizona's laws against bringing guns there. He doesn't have a concealed-carry permit -- presumably because of his felony conviction in 1980 -- and so couldn't go there with his gun anyway.
The precinct 49 location was chosen because that's where Tucson attorney Isabelle Garcia (of the immigrant rights group Derechos Hermanos) and Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-AZ, vote.
Then Dove told me about how he spent election day.
So what happened?
Well... apparently not much, as it turns out. He spent most of his time at precinct 49 -- Iglesia Bautista church -- as confirmed by the MALDEF folks and Democratic workers. And then he went to five other precincts and spent a short time there.
Dove couldn't quite recall what time he did all this -- first he started at 8:00 a.m., then 9:00; he worked for four hours, and left at 2:00 p.m., but he got home at 1:00 p.m. He did remember that he voted Tuesday afternoon, about 4:30 p.m. Then he headed over to city hall, where he regularly speaks before the city council about the evils of illegal immigration.
How many people did he talk to?
"I asked four people to sign," he says. Two elderly "people of Mexican descent" who refused to sign, a man and a woman. A "young American man of Mexican descent" who did sign it. So he talked to three voters in precinct 49.
Dove then left Iglesia Bautista without finding a single Mexican lacking English fluency and headed to another precinct, where he found an older "American of European descent" who agreed to sign the petition. That's apparently when Russ Dove gave up and went home.
He wants to make this a national effort. Get other people signed up to challenge Latino voters across the country, videotape them, post them on the Web if they fail to speak English to someone else's satisfaction. And ultimately get them arrested.
But today, in Tucson, Russ Dove found no one to arrest despite his best efforts. He, his photographer, and Roy Warden wasted four hours of their lives in the hot Arizona sun, desperately seeking out this Mexican "illegal alien" voting threat that they were convinced must exist, and the net result was that they spoke to four legal voters and convinced two of them to sign a piece of paper.
Bravo.
Analysis
Any type of voter tampering is a serious issue, and needs to be addressed by the authorities. I have every confidence in the Arizona U.S. Attorney's office, the folks at MALDEF, and the FBI that they will deal with this problem appropriately.
Russ Dove and Roy Warden are simultaneously pathetic and dangerous. Similarly, the Minutemen don't really amount to much on their "patrols," sitting around on lawn chairs peering into the desert as they cradle shotguns while imagining they're fighitng off an invasion -- but the psychological impact and support they receive is very dangerous to our democracy and to people who are potential victims of extremists.
Raul Grijalva described the problem clearly as they feel empowered to step forward with their racist nativism in the current political climate. They have no compunctions about putting this forward, as the right wing has been pushing an increasingly racist and nativist agenda for years now.
Russ Dove explains his views to Michael Toney. Photograph by Kynn Bartlett.
Russ Dove seems like a friendly enough guy when you chat with him, but his words aren't anywhere near reasonable. After the city council meeting ended, Michael Toney came up and told Dove he'd been mistaken for Dove recently and gotten roughed up for it. Toney liked some of what Dove would say at council meetings, "but you gotta lay off the Latinos," he implored, apparently less racist than the self-style "Constitutional Enforcer."
"Latino is a contrived word to confuse Americans," Dove replied.
Additional Coverage:
Kynn Bartlett is a photojournalist, writer, and former Web developer who has lived in Tucson, Arizona for nearly two years now. He can be reached at NextOfKynn@gmail.com.
Update: Russ Dove says I "betrayed" him.