Year after year, race after race, Republicans have launched efforts to deter minorities from the polls. Yet they have suffered few legal or political costs stemming from the shameful practices. Why? Part of the reason, voting-rights activists say, is it's very difficult to prove the connections between specific vote-suppression tactics and the candidates who've apparently launched them. The candidates and campaigns who plan these efforts often hire third-party consultants to take care of the dirty work, so plausible deniability can always be maintained. Moreover, when Republicans are caught trying to suppress the vote, they often offer a reasonable-sounding explanation. It's all about "voting integrity," they say, an attempt to safeguard the polling place from fraud.

Just listen to Vito Canuso, a Philadelphia lawyer who is the chairman for the Republican City Committee. Told about Democrats' allegations that black voters in the 2003 mayoral race were questioned by men dressed as law-enforcement officials, Canuso categorically denies that any such effort had been pursued. "That's untrue," he says. So how might he explain why so many people had seen such men that day? "Did we have more people in the street than we've ever had before? Yes," he says. "Did we have more people backing us up than we had before? Yes. We did have a group of lawyers in the streets and I'm sure they were dressed like lawyers, and in some neighborhoods you don't see people dressed like lawyers. But we weren't going to put them in jeans and a sweatshirt. A lot of people were accusing them of being federal agents but they were lawyers."

Canuso says Republicans brought out so many lawyers because the party suspected that voters were cheating. "The number of people registered to vote almost exceeds the number of people who live in the city," he says. "We have every reason to believe that there are people with double and triple registrations on the rolls." Therefore, he says, challenging voters was necessary, and lawyers had a legal right to question anyone who appeared to be out of place at a particular precinct.

How would the lawyers make such a determination in deciding whether to challenge a voter's right to vote? Swirsky says the lawyers concentrated on minorities, with a special emphasis on people who seemed economically less well-off or appeared to be homeless. Canuso responds that the lawyers were instructed to challenge "people who seem to be out of place, who walk like they don't know where they are. This is supposed to be their neighborhood, so they should look like they know what they're doing."

Some conservative scholars have singled Philadelphia out as one of the cities with a curiously large number of registered voters, approaching or exceeding the number of eligible voters in the state. But this is a problem in many parts of the country, even in places where there are few minority voters. Some entire states -- Montana and Alaska, for instance, states not known for large African-American populations -- have more registered voters on their rolls than voting-age residents who live in the state. The phenomenon is most likely due to poor registration maintenance procedures, not active fraud on the part of voters, experts say. Moreover, if fraud existed in Philadelphia, there is no evidence to indicate that black voters should have been the ones most often challenged.

The idea that minorities at polling places should be scrutinized for vote fraud is "based on at least one racist assumption, and that is that black people cheat," says Bond of the NAACP. "I have never seen these tactics applied to whites. I've never seen them used in a partisan way by white Republicans against white Democrats. They are applied only against racial minorities. And although they may not be illegal, they are disgraceful. They are calculated to frighten and intimidate -- and for them to argue that this is simply hard-knuckled partisan politics is disingenuous in the extreme."

The Republican Party's Canuso maintains that he can't see why anyone would be intimidated by such tactics at polling places. "I only vote once, and if somebody wanted to challenge my vote, I'm willing to defend my right to vote," he says. "Why does someone else get intimidated? When I go to vote, I make sure I am properly prepared for anybody that will question my right to vote. It shouldn't intimidate them if they know they have every right to vote."

That's not the same thing, Swirsky says. Canuso is a lawyer and a man of not a small measure of clout in his city; of course he wouldn't be intimidated if someone came up to him and challenged his right to vote. But that doesn't stand up "when you're dealing with a culture that has a long history of disenfranchisement," she says.

For many blacks in America, voting is still a tenuous, fragile right, one exercised with as much fear as pride. "People often ask me, Why don't the Democrats retaliate in the suburbs?" Swirsky says. "The answer is obvious -- it's a bit difficult to intimidate a white middle-class or affluent population in the same way you can intimidate a minority population. In these areas, there is a fear of authority figures, there is a fear of any official communication." These fears are not irrational. And they are easily exploited.

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