By Smita Ghosh

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) was honored recently for its 2008 battle against deceptive anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives in five states.

The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC) honored LDF with the National Integrity Award for “upholding a fair and democratic initiative process through successful cases exposing the fraudulent signature gathering efforts of anti-equality crusader Ward Connerly.”

Anurima Bhargava, head of LDF’s Education Practice, right, accepts the National Integrity Award from Kristina Wilfore, Executive Director of The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center for “upholding a fair and democratic initiative process through successful cases exposing the fraudulent signature gathering efforts of anti-equality crusader Ward Connerly,” at a June 25 ceremony in Washington, DC.

BISC, based in Washington, D.C., works with activists to support progressive ballot initiatives and to challenge unfair practices in initiatives around the country.

“This year we are proud to recognize the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in particular for its 2008 efforts to combat the deception of Ward Connerly’s initiatives to outlaw equal opportunity programs,” said Kristina Wilfore, Executive Director, BISC. “The Legal

Defense Fund’s work to expose the deceit underpinning Ward Connerly’s signature drives specifically is worthy of recognition in and of itself.

“That LDF was able to deftly work with both state and national partners to accomplish these goals while building a more just initiative system squarely places the Legal Defense Fund in the realm of ballot measure excellence. We are happy to have an additional partner in this fight,” Wilfore added. “This is about the integrity of the process and more often than not it doesn’t receive the attention it deserves…so we are proud to sing the

praises of these unsung heroes for their legal minds and stellar work.”

Anurima Bhargava, head of LDF’s Education Practice, said at the June 25 ceremony in Washington, D.C., that LDF “got involved in this process because what we care about is protecting democracy and protecting the ability of people in all of the states to participate in our democracy.”

LDF and five other politicians, campaign organizers and national funders received awards from BISC.  LDF joined Booth Gardener, Our Oregon, the American Wind Energy Association, the Fulfilling the Dream Fund and two South Dakotan abortion activists to accept “Ballie awards” for their work on issues ranging from euthanasia to clean energy.  The ceremony was held at the Washington Court Hotel.

LDF played a key role in challenging ballot measures in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Oklahoma last year that would have hamstrung government programs in those states to advance equality of opportunity. The initiatives were supported by Ward Connerly, the longtime anti-affirmative action activist. Connerly called the campaign his “Super Tuesday for Civil Rights.”

In each state, Connerly and his allies took on the massive—and expensive—task of collecting a set of required signatures from state residents who supported anti-affirmative action amendments to state law.  This process was funded by Connerly’s deceptively-named American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI), which itself received money (PDF) from such large-scale donors as Rupert Murdoch and Joseph Coors.

Connerly’s previous campaigns against affirmative action in California, Michigan and Washington State had marked him as a supposedly formidable force.  But Bhargava said that LDF attorneys, working with coalitions that “rehydrated the grassroots,” last year mounted an intensive campaign that halted Connerly’s efforts in four of the five states.

That intensive work exposed a number of errant practices in Connerly’s efforts.

In Arizona, for example, LDF worked with an organization called Protect Arizona’s Freedom to challenge as fraudulent more than 100,000 signatures on petitions that Connerly workers had gathered calling for an initiative to ban affirmative action.  Some of the petitions contained suspicious “signatures” like those purporting to be from former Presidents Ford and Carter.

LDF’s work in Oklahoma, too, exposed extensive errors in Connerly’s state campaign.  In January 2008, Secretary of State Susan Savage noted (PDF) that the list of Oklahomans supporting Connerly’s petition was “replete with large numbers of duplicate signatures and addresses.”  The state official called the scope of the petition’s problems an “unprecedented situation.”

In Oklahoma and Arizona, LDF worked with local affiliates to challenge the errant signatures.  And in both states, the threat from progressive challengers appears to have pushed Connerly to concede.  The Oklahoma anti-affirmative campaign withdrew their initiative on April 4 and the Arizona campaign on August 29.

By November 2008, only two of Connerly’s Super Tuesday initiatives—in Nebraska and Colorado—remained on the ballot.  Oklahoma’s and Arizona’s had been withdrawn, and the Missouri campaign never submitted signatures for approval.

In Colorado, the initiative lost at the ballot box, meaning that Connerly’s campaign to end affirmative action in five states only succeeded to end it in one—Nebraska.  Onlookers dismissed his campaign as a failure or, at the least, a mixed bag.

Connerly’s campaign underscores a larger point about language in the affirmative action movement.  In addition to identifying forged and duplicated signatures, LDF found that the Connerly initiatives were often deceptively presented to the public during signature gathering.  In Arizona, a circulator convinced a voter to sign the petition by asking if she was interested in voting for Barack Obama.  In Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska and Missouri, voters said that petition circulators told them to sign if they wanted to “end discrimination.”

These aren’t the first such allegations for anti-affirmative action initiatives.  In June 2006 the Michigan Department of Civil Rights found that the Michigan anti-affirmative action initiative “a highly coordinated, systematic strategy” that involved “acts of misrepresentation across the state.”

And some people say that this misrepresentation is a symptom of a bigger problem: that the wording of each initiative can obscure the voter’s sense of the issue at hand.

Many Connerly opponents say that using the terms “discrimination” and “preference” rather than “affirmative action” misleads voters, who tend to support affirmative action programs but instinctively oppose the word “discrimination.”  In recent polls, American voters were likely to support equal opportunity programs when they were billed as “affirmative action,” though support differed depending on the phrasing of the question.

The fight against deceptive ballot initiatives is not over: Connerly’s ACRI has troublingly announced its intent to gather signatures for a 2010 initiative in Missouri, and the Arizona legislature recently approved an anti-affirmative action measure for the 2010 ballot.

But LDF’s award makes a needed link between the ballot initiatives that threaten to derail affirmative action programs and those that hamper the work of other progressives.  At the June ceremony, BISC’s Kristina Wilfore described the Connerly initiatives as part of a cohesive ballot-based movement against progressive ideals: “Ward Connerly and the likes of him,” said Wilfore, “whether they’re working against civil rights, labor unions or environmentalists, will continue to worm their way through the system until we change the rules of the game.”  “But,” she added, “what a strong partner we have in the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.”

If it wasn’t already evident in its longstanding work on voter protection, LDF has made the point that it takes the right to vote very seriously.  In addition to defending the rights of employers and institutions to use affirmative action programs, LDF defended the integrity of the entire ballot initiative process.  And there’s nothing wrong with a little red carpet romping after a project like that.

Anurima Bhargava accepts the award:
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Watch BISC’s video on anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives:

Smita Ghosh is a Paralegal in the Education Practice of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.