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| Ike Brown was convicted of keeping whites from voting. Patrik Jonsson |
Mississippi election row sees race roles reversed
Amid fingerpointing, Justice Department and black Democratic chairman fail to come up with a remedy.
from the August 17, 2007 edition
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But the Justice Department says the county's voter suppression and voter fraud findings are serious enough to warrant specific remedies.
Twenty-three federal voting rights observers who observed last week's primary say they witnessed a number of irregularities similar to earlier complaints. Larry Tate, a black county supervisor, charged that the numerous and aggressive observers intimidated voters, especially older ones, by peering over their shoulders as they cast votes last Tuesday. For their part, the observers said their efforts to observe interactions between voters and those assisting them were rebuffed by poll workers.
Brown, who had promised to stay away from the election, took part in a Thursday absentee vote counting session determining the legitimacy of ballots.
"He's still in charge," says Mr. Tate.
Negotiations between Brown and the department over a solution broke down. So in a court hearing Monday, the department offered its own fix: Depose Brown and virtually every other election worker in the county, and replace them with an impartial "referee-administrator" to manage the next election. Judge Lee is expected to rule soon on that request.
"This case is about racial discrimination, pure and simple ... and it shows that discrimination can arise any time, any place, by any group," writes a Justice Department spokeswoman in an e-mail.
The Democrats oversee a financially struggling county. The library is housed in a former jail. Thirty percent of the residents are poor. Only 55 percent can read and write.
Although the Jim Crow era, where white Noxubee County harassed blacks at the polls, is long gone, race still permeates elections here, says John Bruce, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. "Republicans are white, Democrats are overwhelmingly black."
Brown's campaign is "payback, pure and simple," says Scott Boyd, editor of the Macon Beacon newspaper.
At the same time, critics say, the Noxubee voting rights lawsuit is part of a major turning point or the Justice Department's civil rights division.
Former Justice Department lawyers have complained loudly in recent years that the Bush administration has politicized the department. Some of the debate around the recent firings of eight US attorneys revolves around their unwillingness to aggressively go after voter fraud.
Traditionally, "our primary enforcement would be on groups that had historically suffered from a legacy of discrimination," says Professor Mulroy, the former Justice Department lawyer. "As far as enforcement, you might not put whites in the South at the top of that list."
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