Racial Preference on the Ballot

Wall Street Journal ^ | October 20, 2008

[reaganaut1]

While choosing between tickets featuring Barack Obama or Sarah Palin this November, voters in Colorado and Nebraska will also be able to bury the idea that blacks and women in America still need special help to get ahead.

In those states, the ballot will carry civil rights initiatives to end race and gender preferences in public hiring and education. Led by Ward Connerly's American Civil Rights Institute, the measures would take a chip out of racial preferences that have committed the same kinds of discrimination they were designed to prevent.

If passing laws to ban discrimination sounds like a triumph for civil rights, you wouldn't know it from the heckling of opponents, who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the measures off ballots around the country, using tactics from lawsuits to voter deception to defeat the plans. Efforts in Missouri and Arizona were blocked by challenges to signature gathering. In Missouri, a dispute with Secretary of State Robin Carnahan over the ballot language left the Missouri initiative with only 90 days to collect 200,000 signatures. In Arizona, signatures went uncounted or were declared invalid on questionable grounds. Offending signatories were nixed for offenses as grave as writing the wrong date, or signing "Jim" instead of "James."

In Nebraska, the measure made the ballot despite activist groups funded by four heavy hitters, including Warren Buffett, ad-exec Richard Holland, attorney Dianne Lozier and financier Wallace Weitz. The quartet provided a hefty portion of the bankroll for Nebraskans United, a group that ran ads trying to scare voters away from signing petitions by suggesting the signers might be subject to identity theft.

[reaganaut1]

At every rally, someone should ask Obama what he thinks of these initiatives. Freepers know, but many voters need to be reminded of what he stands for.

[Niuhuru]

It would be supremely ironic that if Obama gets elected, preferences for racial quotas might end up getting voted out.