Poor people barred from registering to vote

If you want to talk about electoral corruption, it doesn't get much worse than this.

In Bristol, Virginia, housing officials illegally barred a voter registration drive in a public housing complex. The drive was led by the Obama campaign and was like registration drives affiliated with other candidates in other areas. The drive wasn't illegal; indeed it was protected by federal law.

The city's housing director came up with contradictory excuses for quashing the drive. First he charged that the campaign workers were breaking federal law. But there is no such law. Then he claimed that signs in the development forbid soliciting. That too is a falsehood. Besides that, soliciting regulations usually don't cover voter drives.

An editorial on the Bristol Herald Courier's website suggests the housing director's stance might be politically motivated: "One has to wonder if housing officials would have been quite so quick to eject volunteers working for Republican candidate John McCain ... Perhaps someone at the housing authority doesn't like Obama and doesn't relish the idea of a few more Obama voters taking part in the November election."

Surely that's true, but the fact is, there's a lot of people in high places who just don't like poor people voting. That's the reason Kentucky launched a selective crackdown on voter carpools.

After the electoral butchery in Kentucky paid generous dividends for the lunatic Right, why wouldn't the Nazis try suppressing turnout among the poor everywhere else too?

(Source: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/8/6/112151/9121/929/563500;
http://www.tricities.com/tri/news/opinion/editorials/article/political_speech_in_public_housing/12104)