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Gregory T. Moore

Gregory T. Moore is the executive director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, a nonpartisan organization that works to increase African-American voter turnout. Previously, he was the deputy political director of the Democratic National Committee and chief of staff to Representative John Conyers of Michigan.

Josh Israel interviewed Moore on June 26, 2007, and July 10, 2007.

Start by just talking a little bit about your background. You have worked with the Democratic National Committee before?

Well, I am the current executive director of the NAACP National Voter Fund. I first became the director in September 2001. Actually, I started on September 12, believe it or not. It was the day after the September 11 [terrorist attacks]. But that was my first day there. And I had been in the position through the 2002 and 2004 [elections]. And in 2006, I took a leave of absence, because we went through some reorganization. There was some downsizing going on. But I sort of decided that it was probably best to use this time when we were in an off-year, nonpresidential, to try to help out with some more of the election-protection problems that we feared would come about again in the ’06 cycle.

So I decided to help out with the Democratic National Committee as a consultant on the efforts, first of all, to re-enfranchise the voters who had been victims of Hurricane Katrina. And that was the original project I started on with the DNC. And we put together an election-protection plan for all of the displaced residents who were all over the United States. And from there, I decided I’d stick around a little longer, at the DNC’s request, to help them put together their comprehensive plan for 2006.

Governor [Howard] Dean wanted a 50-state operation for election protection. So I agreed to stay around and help put that plan together and implement it, where we had, for the first time ever in the history of the party, a 50-state election-protection program for every state. And every state party was required to do a certain number of things. We actually had staff in about 18 states and were able to put together some manuals and some guidebooks and some how-to pieces and some monitoring systems.

Probably the best thing we did was put together an 800 number that was able to be used to help people identify their poll locations and call in for problems they encountered on Election Day and leading up to Election Day, and provide information about some of the issues related to voting, whether it was early vote or other voting procedures. We logged about 30,000 calls, with about 25,000 of those calls on Election Day. There was the largest hotline number for all of the groups, so this [was] the partisan side. And I know the other groups, on the nonpartisan side, were working as well.

But after the 2006 election, I decided to come back to the Voter Fund, since it looked like the cycle was starting earlier than we all thought. And I felt there was a big hole over here on the NAACP (c)(4) side. So I thought I’d come back. I came back in February 2007.

And the National Voter Fund is not a partisan organization, right?

Absolutely not. No. It is the 501(c)(4) arm of the NAACP, which is a 501(c)(3). And we were founded in the year 2000, to be focused directly on voter-engagement work: voter rights, voter registration, GOTV [get out the vote] programs.

So you moved from the nonpartisan to the partisan world and then back to the nonpartisan world. So you have really seen the entire . . .

Well, yeah. I had been involved the years before. In the DNC, I worked with President [Bill] Clinton at the DNC during his reelection. And actually, prior to that, I was the chief of staff of Congressman John Conyers in [1993]. When the president was elected, I decided to come and work on Capitol Hill for the first time. So I became John Conyers’s top aide. And in 1994, when the Democrats were wiped out of Congress leadership, I was called in to the DNC to help. And we put a program in place that would help put things back on track for 1996.

With the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and obviously, with the Constitution, the right to vote preceded that — but this was the first time that Congress really tried to give some teeth to that. Now here we stand more than 40 years later. How would you assess the right to vote in this country as it stands now?

I think that the rights of voters continue to be hampered by different procedures: with their administrative procedures, intentional voter intimidation, efforts on the parts of election officials to make the registration process more difficult, or the verification process of registrations more difficult, or the way many of our election officials eagerly go after voter purges and implement voter purges more aggressively than they do efforts to register voters. I think we are in a situation where I don’t feel as good about the right to vote, as you would hope, 42 years after the Voting Rights Act.

I understand that a fair amount of the disenfranchisement of voters has to do with just the people in public office carrying out their job as stewards of the election process. Can you talk a little bit about the ways that people outside of government — various different entities, be it opposing campaigns or independent groups — use their efforts to disenfranchise people’s voting rights?

Well, if you saw the Republican Party itself, they have a long history of voter intimidation. We don’t have to go back much further than the 2004 election, when the Republican Party challenged 35,000 voters in Ohio and brought people to the polls in great numbers to challenge voters if they came up in African-American communities.

Their reasons for challenging the voters varied. But for the most part, they did not support much of the historic voter registration that was going on around the state. And they tried to target those organizations and those individuals who had newly registered, saying they weren’t officially registered voters.

A lot of what happens is that the Republican Party and Republican operatives and campaign operatives put people on staff or contract with some folks who go out and make the targeted communities’ lives miserable in terms of challenging their right to vote. They may go to an election board and try to get the election board to throw out a certain number of voters. They might go to court to seek injunctions to prevent the extension of voting hours, where we might file a claim to extend the voting hours, because the machines are broken. They may file a counterclaim saying it’s not fair to let the polls stay open any longer.

There are groups that go out and put flyers out that say “Election Day is Wednesday”; that say that if you owe any parking tickets, you have to pay those before you vote; that say there are poll taxes still; that say if you have ever been arrested for anything, you can’t vote, when, in fact, only convicted felons who have not served their time, in most places, are the ones who are actually denied the right to vote.

There is all kind of evidence of their being involved in schemes regarding phone banking, jamming of the telephones. In New Hampshire that has been documented, proven, and settled out of court, or in court, maybe, that said: “Yes, we did this jamming. And yes, we were instructed by the White House.” Yes, we have evidence to prove that the calls came from there. I mean some of these guys, there were hundreds of calls between the White House and some of these operations convicted of doing this.

So we know that it comes from the very top in terms of the operatives who would try to do what they can to deny people the right to vote. Back in 2000, organizations were actively involved in trying to stop vote canvasses from happening post-Election Day. [There were] legal maneuvers to stop the votes from being counted in 2000 in counties where people were turned away. So all of those things have contributed to the type of election results we were getting prior to 2006.

I just think that the election-protection program that we put forth in 2006 in all 50 states helped scare away many of those operatives who would have normally felt the need to go out and do those types of things. Again, they heard that the party and the nonprofit groups were launching a master voter-protection effort. I think that did reduce some of the problems, and it was also able to lift some of the structural and institutional mechanical problems that were there always but were never reported on. So yeah, there is a big history of that. And we have been fighting this for years now. We are going to continue to fight it. Because we know that it goes on. And we know that it can be stopped.

Is there a history of this, also, in campaigns that are not necessarily Republican? I know the Democratic Party has not always been a bastion of perfection on civil rights. Have there been equal-opportunity offenses?

I don’t think it’s equal opportunity. No. I don’t think Democratic Party operatives can go out and try to block people from voting. I think, if anything, they are defending the rights of people to vote. But there have been times in the past of our country’s history that the Democratic Party was the leading cause of votes being challenged, whether that was in Southern states in the 1960s or ’50s, or whether they were people challenging more modern-day efforts like the [Jesse] Jackson campaign in 1984 in places like New York and Chicago, where there was evidence of challenges to new voters that Jackson had registered.

So yeah, there have been efforts in ’88 and ’84 and years when the African-American vote was being exercised. We had problems in Chicago when Harold Washington won and in Philadelphia when Wilson Goode was running in Democratic primaries. So we know that it goes on primaries, from time to time. And we have done what we can to make sure that every Democrat knows that our voting rights are sacred, and that we expect them to protect their right to vote in primaries and in general elections.

Was there some sort of a consent decree — I think that was the term I heard — where the Republican Party agreed to stop using voter suppression tactics at some point in years past?

Yes. There was a consent decree with the Democratic National Committee. And again, that’s a document I’d be glad to share it with you. But there was a consent decree to stop some of this voter intimidation that they were found guilty of.

When was that?

I can’t remember the year. It was recent. I think it was in the late [1980s]. But I have to get that paper, because we do have it.

And would you say that’s been followed?

Oh, no. I think they have violated that several times over.

You mentioned the 2000 election, which I think along with 2004 is the freshest image in people’s minds of where the battlegrounds sort of lie on voter inclusion. Subsequent to that, we had, in 2002, the Help America Vote Act. Can you talk a little bit about what this did? And how it’s changed things, if at all, as far as the issues you are talking about?

I think the Help America Vote Act was a well-intended piece of legislation that was designed to address many of the problems that took place in November 2000. It set up an Election Assistance Commission. It set up new guidelines for everything from voting machines to procedures around voter registration and list management, et cetera, that were able to be used by election officials and provide us some oversight to some federal funds that were being drawn down by states in purchasing voting machines and standardizing and upgrading their standards for voter registration, their databases. So those kind of dollars have been used effectively, I think, to help.

But many times, the dollars have been too scarce. The Help America Vote Act was funded with $3.2 million, or maybe with $3.8 million, of which less than $3 million was actually received. So the program started off underfunded. It still is underfunded. And so the problems we have with training, machine maintenance, understaffing, and long lines, are the direct result of the programs not being fully funded by Congress. So that was the first problem.

The second problem is that it created new problems for jurisdiction issues where boards of elections would now have federal guidelines. They have to comply with state guidelines. There was not unanimity among election officials about HAVA and how it worked. So there wasn’t a lot of communication. But people were moving fast in the cycle. So they had to move and sort of keep it. Machine certification issues were a problem. And it didn’t seem as if the EAC had teeth to do what it needed to do. Although they had the responsibility, they didn’t have the teeth to manage these problems as they came.

Are there organizations, consultants, staffers at the Republican National Committee or elsewhere who are sort of specifically details to voter suppression? Do you have sort of a sense of how it works?

I don’t have a sense of how it works. I am sure many people don’t who are not involved in that. What I do know is that there is an example in 2000. The Republican Party and the [Ohio] secretary of state’s office, Ken Blackwell’s office, were engaged in coordination of legal challenges to a certain number of voters. Republican operatives sent people in Michigan and Ohio, now that I think about it, into precincts where there were voters, and challenged them based on the voter rolls that were coming out and based on the high number of new registrants that there were.

I don’t know who these operatives were. I do know that they were brought in. We didn’t know who they were. They weren’t from our communities. They were often asked to be there, stand there, even to intimidate or to take their list out and to start identifying ones they want to question. They tend to be tied to the Republican Party. They tend to be either lawyers or people who were involved in political activity. And I am assuming that they weren’t doing it for free.

Many on the Republican side of the aisle, when they talk about this issue, they say the biggest issue here is one of voter fraud. And they will, in many cases, cite example of dead people voting, ineligible people voting illegally, people voting twice. Is this a legitimate concern? And how pervasive is that?

I think there is very little evidence of voter fraud on the part of individual voters who are trying to vote twice or trying to vote without being in the proper precincts. Most of these are accidental occurrences of voters who don’t understand the myriad issues that have to come with the voting process. What precinct you are in changes every 10 years. Voting locations can change every two years. What ballot questions you are voting and what candidates are up changes every cycle.

There are a number of organizations that put out information that can be confusing sometimes about voting: what you are voting on, what you should vote, whether you vote in the primary or general, whether you can vote a straight ticket or not. These are never easy issues. And so the fraud that they talk about is, I think, sometimes imaginary.

Because there are a lot of very low income and African-American and Latino people who want nothing more than to participate in the political process, and who are very aware of the struggles we have had over the years. The last thing they are trying to do is to cheat the political process. And many times, what happens is they are victimized by a system that makes it very difficult to understand how voting procedures go, often.

So I don’t put a lot of credence on these charges of voter fraud. There is very, very little evidence of it. When people are accused of it, it’s because they have been involved in organized voter drives or strong efforts to reform laws. And I think it’s an opportunity for many of the people who don’t like the fact that large numbers of African-Americans or progressive voters are registering. It’s an opportunity for them to challenge some of that. So I think that’s part of our problem. And I think it’s part of what gets perceived, often, as voter fraud.

The fraud that does happen is when people try and challenge the rights of people who do know their rights to vote. I think it happens when there are a number of people who are put on a voter list and someone basically goes out of their way to challenge that list. I mean, that, to me, creates fraudulent results. If 5,000 people are turned away from a polling place in one precinct or one county, and are 89 percent or 90 percent African-American, why isn’t that fraud?

The people who are responsible for challenging those voters, when these people obviously have done nothing more than register to vote, but for some reason the database wasn’t correct, their name wasn’t entered properly, the vote book didn’t have the information properly listed — there are a lot of reasons why people’s names may not be on the list. But these things can all be taken into consideration when you look at the issue of where fraud does or does not come from.

In 2006, Congress renewed the Voting Rights Act for another 25 years. Did the renewed voting-rights language change anything? Or was it basically just reauthorizing the existing rules?

It changed a few things administratively. But it was basically the existing laws. They didn’t get strengthened. It was basically maintaining the existing laws. It was extended for another 25 years. I think that a lot of people, like myself, who privately would have wanted a stronger bill, would have wanted some protection for people who have been disenfranchised; would have wanted protections for provisional ballots; would have wanted same-day registration or same-day address updates or things that would have made the voting process easier.

But in the spirit of bipartisanship, many of us sort of stood back and went for what we thought could be passed without a lot of pushback from the Republican side. So we got the bill renewed. And we are very happy about it. But there are some issues about whether or not we could have a stronger series of bills that would have maybe been a good collection of things to pass while we were in the middle of a Voting Rights Act renewal process.

But I am very happy with what came out. I think the civil-rights community can be very proud of the work that was done around it. And I think that there is still work to be done to make sure it’s enforced and to make sure that there is a number of provisions to continue to be fought at the state and local level.

You had mentioned dirty tricks. And you gave the example of the signs being posted in predominantly Democratic areas urging people to vote on Wednesday when the election is on Tuesday. How pervasive are these kind of tricks? And do you have any sense of who does these?

I don’t know who does it. I think there are groups of individuals who are trying to distort the political process. They are trying to make it harder for people to vote. They are trying to effect a certain political outcome. I think those are the kind of people who we have doing those things. But I don’t know why they would do them or what they would expect to get out of it. I just know that it’s done. We have evidence of it. It seems to be against heavily African-American precincts, heavily Democratic-leaning precincts. And you don’t see them in more white, affluent communities. You don’t see those kinds of things going on there. So I think it’s a concern.

Last year in Virginia, the State Board of Elections referred to the FBI allegations that people were receiving calls from someone claiming to be with the state elections commission and telling them they would be charged criminally if they voted and things like that. Did anything come of this FBI investigation? Was there one? 

I think something did come of it. I don’t know what the outcome was. But something did come up. Yes.

And you talked about the problems in 2000 and 2004 in Florida and Ohio and said that with 2006, the voter-protection efforts at the DNC really made a difference. I guess sort of my macro question for you is, do you think things will get better in 2008? And then after that, what can really be done to solve the problem nationwide?

I think we need to have a stronger system of voter administration in this country. I think that the nation invests too little dollars in the development of qualified people to work in these polling precincts. We don’t have enough trained people. We don’t have enough people who can figure out problems of voting machines. We don’t have enough voting locations. We don’t have enough ballots in many places. We don’t have enough accountability when it comes to verifying voting procedures, like optical-scan machines. Too many machines don’t have paper records or paper trails of votes.

We don’t have enough open-mindedness on the part of election officials to have the communities provide more of a role to assist the elections. Many of these guys want to run these elections the same way they ran them in 1979, 1980. And the world has changed since then. And the number of people eligible has changed. There are more African-Americans, urban, low-income, young people who want to participate, but who do not because the problems of voting have become so complicated. There is no easy process.

So we need to make the voting procedures more user-friendly for voters. You should not have to stand in line for two hours to vote any more than you shouldn’t stand in line for two hours to bank. If you can imagine the same number of people standing in line to go to a bank as they are to go vote, it would be a national crisis on Wall Street that the people have to stand in line two hours to get their money out of a bank or put their money in. The fact that our democracy is practiced on one day a year, or one or two days a year, really, we only have one day to see this picture and frame it.

So my feeling is that we need to invest more dollars into making sure that voting machines, if you are going to keep them, have the information that’s needed to make sure that the votes are properly counted and accounted for. I wouldn’t want to see anybody lose their right to vote who showed up on Election Day because they were involved in some type of overall effort that would undermine their rights, because somebody else wanted to question their right to vote. I don’t think that’s right or proper.

I think we need to find ways to make sure that people’s rights are protected. But the hodgepodge of laws that we have at the county level, at the state level, at the national level, make it difficult for many people to do that. So, yeah, we have a lot more work to do. There is a lot more that we can do.

I think that passing federal legislation to secure the ballots in a way that allow people to have their votes counted properly, so that you can use paper if machines break down, that provisional ballots are counted and then qualify. All of that is very important to this process. And I would hate to see anything happen that would move us away from that direction.

What do you think is going to happen in 2008 as far as will it be better than the past two presidential elections?

I think there is a lot more awareness about the problems that we do have. I think there is more work that needs to be done. But there are a lot more people who believe that the elections can be stolen if these kinds of protections aren’t there. And so I think there will be less voter fraud. I think there is going to be a deceptive-practices bill passed in 2007 that might cut down on a lot of this.

I just know that we are going to be out there on the part of the NAACP and the NAACP Voter Fund to make sure we have a protected system by use of 800 numbers, by use of election monitors, by more training, more monitoring of the voter registration process. And I think we are going to have more people adhering to the issue as we develop our strategies more deeply into 2008.