Obama Campaign Accuses Clinton of Disenfranchising Nevada Voters

Posted by Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet at 3:02 PM on January 23, 2008.

Barrack Obama's campaign has called on the Nevada Democratic Party to investigate electioneering tactics by the Hillary Clinton's campaign that it says willfully disenfranchised voters in Saturday's Nevada Caucus. The campaign is not seeking to challenge the results, where the Clinton campaign won the popular vote count among caucus attendees but Obama won one more delegate.

The Obama campaign said the Clinton campaign gave its precinct captains guidebooks that told them to close the doors to caucuses a half hour early. It also said Clinton campaign workers blocked Obama voters from signing in at the caucus, and that ballot cards given to attendees were pre-marked for Clinton.

"It is not illegal unless they [the temporary precinct chair] tell you so," said one Clinton campaign document cited in the letter by Obama campaign attorney, Bob Bauer, one of the country's top election lawyers.

On Sunday, the Obama campaign's Nevada State Director David Cohen and Bauer announced they had 300 complaints, or election incident reports, concerning the caucus. By Wednesday, that number had grown to more than 1,000 complaints, his letter to Nevada State Democratic Chair Jill Derby said.

Bauer said Clinton campaign officials following the campaign's manual successfully convinced party officials to close the caucus doors at numerous locations across the state, but neither he nor Cohen could estimate the number of impacted voters.

Earlier Sunday, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe sent this statement to volunteers:

“We currently have reports of over 200 separate incidents of trouble at caucus sites, including doors being closed up to thirty minutes early, registration forms running out so people were turned away, and ID being requested and checked in a non-uniform fashion. This is in addition to the Clinton campaign’s efforts to confuse voters and call into question the at-large caucus sites which clearly had an affect on turnout at these locations. These kinds of Clinton campaign tactics were part of an entire week’s worth of false, divisive, attacks designed to mislead caucus-goers and discredit the caucus itself.

On Wednesday, Bauer said all these tactics showed a "willful intention to distort the process in favor of ... Senator Clinton."

There is no doubt the Nevada campaign was hard-fought and the Caucus was confusing for the tens of thousands of people who attended for the first time. On Friday, the day before the Caucus, there were reports from Obama and Edwards volunteers that voters were receiving telephone calls with misleading information. One Edwards precinct captain said she had spoken to a woman who was told that if she did not caucus on Saturday that she could not vote in the fall election.

At the Luxor hotel Caucus on the Las Vegas strip, party officials and others running the caucus at first were turning away delegates. Tova Wang, a fellow at The Century Foundation whose expertise is voting rights, saw several of the first dozen people to arrive at 11 AM being told they could not caucus, because the site was only for workers who had shifts that day and were to be on-duty between 10.30 AM and 2:30 PM. The explanation given was this was according to rules created by the state party.

After protests by Wang and would-be attendees, Caucus Chairman Matt Paul, called party officials and then allowed everyone who showed up to go inside and participate if they signed an affidavit saying they could not reach their home precinct in time. Approximately 400 people showed up. One third of the attendees registered to vote before the caucus began. Once inside, there was tension between some Obama and Clinton delegates over what Clinton supporters said was pressure from their union to back Obama.

Tagged as: clinton, obama, voter suppression, nevada, caucus