Mississippi election row sees race roles reversed

As Noxubee County voters last week took to firehouses and community halls from Prairie Point to Shuqualak, hints of old Mississippi hung over the polls. Federal election observers witnessed:

•Suspicious manipulation of minority voters' ballots.

•Hired hands at the polls working to "assist" voters in selecting certain candidates.

•A suspiciously large number of absentee ballots in a county where, inexplicably, 127 percent of the adult population is registered to vote.

But nothing is quite what it seems in Noxubee. The minority here is white. Local politics is dominated by blacks. In a further twist, blacks here charge that the US Justice Department investigation into political manipulation is in part an act of intimidation intended to give Republicans a foothold in staunchly Democratically controlled local governments.

"This story has all these odd sort of mirror-image resonances," says Steven Mulroy, a University of Memphis law professor and former Justice Department civil rights attorney. "It used to be local officials that intimidated black voters and federal people came in to stop it. Now you've got black voters saying it's federal observers doing the intimidating."

Led by a lanky, enigmatic chairman and self-proclaimed "yellow dog democrat" named Ike Brown, the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee (NDEC) has in the last decade gained a stranglehold on local government, the Justice Department charged in court earlier this year. The NDEC disqualified white votes and bolstered the black vote, sometimes by allowing nonresidents to cast absentee ballots in favor of black candidates. On June 29, US District Court Judge Tom Lee found Mr. Brown guilty of violating the Voting Rights Act, saying that the NDEC carried out a systematic campaign to "impair and impede participation of white voters and dilute their votes."

It marks the first time that the Voting Rights Act has been used to remedy discrimination against whites. The court mandated that the county correct the situation.

A scrap dealer who twice before has been convicted of tax and insurance fraud, Mr. Brown is known by sight or name by just about everybody in the county.

In his defense, Brown says he simply refuses to let Republicans, most of whom happen to be white, vote in the Democratic primary – the de facto general election in a county where 80 percent of voters are black, and most of them are Democrats. Those overwhelming odds against white candidates – only two hold elected office in Noxubee County – explain the predominantly Democratic election outcomes here, not any racial discrimination on his part, Brown says. "This is not about racism, it's about factionalism."

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