Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 13, 1993 TAG: 9311130119
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RONALD BROWNSTEIN LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
From Democrats' use of "street money" to get out the vote in minority communities to the Republican practice of posting security guards in heavily black and Latino districts to warn against voter fraud, both parties have engaged in Election Day activities that fall into ethical gray areas.
"It's a seamier side of politics," says Democratic consultant Tad Devine, the field director for Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential campaign.
The Justice Department entered the New Jersey dispute Friday, announcing that it would investigate whether the campaign of Republican Gov.-elect Christine Todd Whitman violated any laws.
Also on Friday, the state and national Democratic Party filed a civil lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn the New Jersey election. The suit, which is scheduled to be heard Monday morning, charges that the alleged GOP efforts to depress minority turnout violated the Voting Rights Act, other civil rights law and the constitution.
The entire arena of encouraging - and discouraging - votes is shrouded with legal ambiguity, election lawyers say. Though it is illegal to pay people directly to vote or to stay away from the polls, the law doesn't clearly proscribe other questionable practices commonly used by the parties. "You can't pay people to vote," says E. Mark Braden, the former general counsel of the Republican National Committee, "but you can encourage people and give them transportation money and doughnut money."
In addition to the New Jersey imbroglio, the Justice Department is investigating allegations from outgoing New York Mayor David Dinkins that Republicans tried to intimidate voters in minority communities during last week's mayoral election in New York City, said Carl Stern, the department's spokesman. Richard Breyers, communications director for New York Mayor-elect Rudolph Giuliani, said the campaign has not been contacted by the department.
The New Jersey dispute was triggered Tuesday when Whitman's campaign manager, Edward Rollins, told reporters in Washington that the campaign had spent as much as $500,000 to discourage black ministers and Democratic precinct workers from exhorting blacks to vote in last week's election. Whitman, who narrowly defeated Democratic incumbent Gov. James Florio, angrily declared Wednesday that "it did not happen" and released a letter from Rollins, in which he renounced his remarks.
But on Thursday, the controversy gained new momentum when the Rev. Keith Owens of a Baptist church in Camden, N.J., alleged that Republicans had made such offers to several members of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey.
What's unusual about the New Jersey dispute is not the means allegedly employed by the Whitman campaign, but the end - reducing rather than increasing minority turnout. "What frustrates me is Republicans are trying to draw a moral equivalency between Democratic efforts to get people out to vote and Republican efforts to suppress voting," complained Paul Begala, a Florio consultant.
But the distribution of money in the black community that Rollins described would be familiar to any big-city Democratic politician. Democratic operatives acknowledge that ethical questions also can be raised about the party's common practice of distributing substantial sums of "walking-around money" to local power brokers to encourage them to boost minority turnout.
"It's done all the time," said one Democratic activist who has run statewide campaigns in California. "Democrats have to be very careful about what they say - because we are the ones that throw around walking-around money all the time."
The sums Democrats put on the street in minority communities around elections can be substantial. "In a presidential campaign, how much would Election Day cost in a big city? You're talking $50,000 to $100,000, in some cases more," Devine said.
The manner in which this money is spent and distributed varies from region to region, and it can be difficult to draw a line between common and unacceptable get-out-the-vote activities. During the mayoral race in Los Angeles this summer, for instance, the state Democratic Party raised eyebrows when it spent $100,000 buying doughnuts for voters who turned out in Democratic precincts.
The most common technique is to hire substantial numbers of Election Day workers in minority communities - and occasionally in rural Southern areas that reliably vote Democratic - to "flush out" voters. "What is done is a campaign would pay for Election Day workers, would pay for the cost of transportation and would pay for that with checks that are duly recorded," says Democratic consultant Bill Carrick. "There is nothing wrong with that."
The flip side of Democratic efforts to spur minority turnout have been GOP efforts to suppress it. In the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race - an election Florio narrowly lost - the Republican National Committee sent poll watchers, including off-duty police officers, to hang posters in heavily black precincts warning about the penalties for voter fraud. Democrats charged that the guards and posters were meant to intimidate blacks from voting.
In a subsequent consent decree, the Republicans agreed not to replicate those tactics.
In addition to the civil suit filed Friday, Democrats also are asking the federal court on Monday to compel depositions from Rollins and other Whitman officials to determine whether the campaign's Election Day activities violated that decree. Sources said the Democrats filed the civil suit in part to maintain a legal option if the court decides the GOP Election Day program did not violate the consent decree.
In 1986, a controversy erupted over a Republican National Committee program to purge dead or ineligible people from voter rolls in Louisiana and other states. In an internal memo released during a court case, one committee operative described the Louisiana project as a means that "could keep the black vote down considerably." The firestorm that followed helped defeat the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate that year.
More recently, officials of North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms' 1990 campaign signed a consent decree with the Justice Department to settle charges that the campaign had sent postcards to 125,000 residents - many of them black - stating erroneously that they were not eligible to vote.
Against this backdrop, the paradox of Rollins' remarks stands out more clearly: If the campaign did what he originally asserted, it amounts to using Democratic means (the distribution of "street money") to achieve a frequent Republican end - the depression of minority turnout.
by CNB