Connerly's Phantom Voters Out to Destroy Affirmative Action

Today on our DailyKos diary, Nicole Kief, state strategist for the Racial Justice Program, and Selene Kaye, advocacy coordinator for the Women’s Rights Project, write about millionaire lobbyist Ward Connerly’s attempts to abolish affirmative action by deceiving voters and faking petition signatures. They write:

In addition to deliberately misleading voters about the intentions of his anti-equal opportunity initiatives, Connerly pays professional petition circulators who engage in a variety of fraudulent practices to collect enough signatures toplace these initiatives on the ballot. As if it weren’t undemocratic enough to mislead voters, Connerly’s folks appear to be blatantly fabricating voters. The signatures collected to support the Oklahoma version of the initiative, for instance, were found by the Oklahoma Secretary of State to have serious irregularities, including circulators signing their own petitions multiple times and numerous duplicate names and addresses.

Whatever his methods, Connerly sure is tenacious: he’s been working to destroy affirmative action programs since he was a University of California regent in the 90’s. He’s also a hypocrite: in 1995, the San Francisco Chronicle exposed Connerly for taking advantage of equal opportunity programs-the same ones he’s now trying to abolish-to win no-bid contracts for his company, Connerly & Associates.

So check out Nicole and Selene’s blog on DailyKos, and don’t believe Connerly and his “American Civil Rights Institute” hype.