Ex-chair of GOP admitted to voter suppression of blacks

You don't have to take my word for it that the GOP, election after election, tries to suppress black voter turnout.  Take it from the GOP itself....

Former FL GOP Chair Testifies That Party Discussed How to 'Keep Blacks From Voting' in 2009

Deposition recalls FL Republican whistleblower Clint Curtis' 2004 affidavit on 'reducing black vote' before 2000 election...

By Brad Friedman

July 27, 2012 | Brad Blog

Well, this sounds familiar, and for good reason...

In a 630-page deposition, released to the press yesterday, former Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer described a systemic effort by Republicans to suppress the black vote. Referring to a 2009 meeting with party officials, Greer said "I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting." He also said party officials discussed how "minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party." Florida is currently embroiled in a controversy surrounding Gov. Rick Scott's (R) voter purge program, which disproportionately affects voters of color. Fifty-eight percent of Scott's original list of voters who were supposedly ineligible to voter were Hispanic while Hispanics make up only 13 percent of Florida's eligible voters. Greer and the GOP cut ties in 2010, and he is currently facing felony corruption charges.

The summary above comes from ThinkProgress' Alex Brown who offer a hat-tip to Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald who opens his report this way:

In the debate over new laws meant to curb voter fraud in places like Florida, Democrats always charge that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote of liberal voting blocs like blacks and young people, while Republicans just laugh at such ludicrous and offensive accusations.

The entire matter echoes back to our initial 2004 exclusive on then Republican software programmer turned whistleblower Clint Curtis who had filed a sworn affidavit charging Florida Republican Tom Feeney had asked his company, Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), to create a vote-rigging software prototype in 2000.

At the time of his alleged meetings with Feeney, Curtis says the Congressman --- who had been Jeb Bush's Lt. Governor running mate in 1998 before becoming Speaker of the FL House and one of the most powerful elected officials in the state by 2000 --- discussed methods that he said the Republican Party had in place to "reduce the black vote" in the 2000 Presidential election.

According to the December 6, 2004 affidavit [PDF] filed by Curtis, just days before he would testify to a U.S. House Judiciary Committee panel...

10. In my role as a technology advisor at YEI, I was present at subsequent meetings between Mr. Feeney and Mrs. Yang [the company's owner]. In several of those meetings, prior to the 2000 election, it became clear to me that Mr. Feeney was well aware that by artificially reducing the margin of victory of the opposition party in areas where they were the strongest, the overall outcome would then favor his candidate. As well, he bragged that he had already implemented "exclusion lists" to reduce the "black vote". He further mentioned that the "proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25%." I didn't know at the time, if Mr. Feeney had meant that as a racial joke or actually part of the plan.

In 2001, The Orlando Sentinel described Feeney as "one of Florida's most powerful elected officials." In 2000, Time Magazine called him "the only man more influential in Florida than football king Bobby Bowden."

Curtis' claims under penalty of perjury in his 2004 affidavit, about Feeney's statements on minority voter suppression in the Sunshine State before the 2000 race, sound as if they are right in line with former FL GOP Chair Greer's remarks made in his own sworn deposition about his time with the party in 2009.

The BRAD BLOG has also been covering FL Gov. Rick Scott's recently failed attempt at purging some 182,000 registered voters he had identified as "potential non-citizens" in advance of the 2012 election. Earlier this week, we filed a special investigative report detailing how, of the thousands of registered voters Scott and his hand-picked Sec. of State Ken Detzner believed to be "non-citizens", just 9 of them --- out of 11.2 million registered voters in FL --- have so far been confirmed as "non-citizens". Of those 9, none appear to have cast a vote in any election.

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• Our index page listing of the most notable stories in our many years of coverage of the Clint Curtis/Tom Feeney vote-rigging scandal is right here.

• Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story, the award-winning documentary film on the Curtis/Feeney story and our coverage of it, isright here.

• Video and transcript of of Curtis' sworn 12/6/2004 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative Judiciary Committee Democrats' hearing is right here.