BAMN/AWAKE Efforts Succeed in Oklahoma

BAMN PRESS RELEASE 4/5/2008:

BAMN/AWAKE Efforts Succeed in OklahomaWard Connerly Fraud ExposedAnti-Affirmative Action Petitions Withdrawn!

BAMN (The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary), the national organization that has led the fight against Ward Connerly, and AWAKE (All Working to Keep and Achieve Equality), an organization that led the fight against Connerly’s fraud in Oklahoma, forced the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative (OCRI) to withdraw its petition to place an anti-affirmative action referendum on the Oklahoma ballot in 2008.
OCRI withdrew its petition in response to the challenge that BAMN and AWAKE initiated on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 when they held press conferences in Oklahoma City and Tulsa exposing the fraud employed by OCRI to gather signatures for the ballot petition and announcing the filing of a ballot challenge. Among the main spokespersons at those press conferences were Pleas Thompson, President of the Tulsa Chapter NAACP and David Bernstein of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa—who had been defrauded into signing the petition and who were demanding that their names to be removed. BAMN and AWAKE’s efforts to challenge the OCRI were subsequently supported by the ACLU and the NAACP/LDF, who also filed challenges with the Oklahoma Supreme Court. A hearing to schedule the investigation into the charges against OCRI was scheduled for Tuesday, April 8, 2008.
BAMN also today announced plans to force Connerly to withdraw his petitions in the four other states that he has targeted (Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado and Arizona). The first step is Missouri, where BAMN and local organizations will begin circulating a petition for voters to withdraw their signatures from Connerly’s petitions in that state.
Shanta Driver, an attorney on the Oklahoma challenge and the National Co-Chair of BAMN, said, “As he did in Michigan, Connerly tried to get his proposal to ban affirmative action on the Oklahoma ballot by defrauding black, Latina/o and Native American voters into signing what he said was a civil rights proposal. He withdrew his petition in Oklahoma because he did not have enough signatures and because he knew that his fraud would be exposed, which would have hurt him in other states.”
The New York Times (SEE ARTICLE), Black Enterprise, Diversity Inc., and other media have carried a number of recent articles detailing Connerly’s attempts to defraud voters in Colorado and other states. Two years ago, in response to a Voting Rights Act lawsuit filed by BAMN, the United States District Court in Michigan and the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued decisions describing the fraud that Connerly used to get on the ballot in Michigan.
Regina Goodwin, a leader of AWAKE, was the first to expose Connerly’s fraud in Oklahoma. She said “Affirmative action is needed in this Nation. Employment and higher education must include everyone and affirmative action is essential in that effort. We are prayerful that fraud will fail in the other four states and in the future.”
George Washington, a lawyer for BAMN on the challenge in Oklahoma, said that “Oklahoma should be very proud that it defeated Connerly. But to keep him from coming back two years from now, we must defeat him in the other four states. We have to show him that he cannot take us backward based on defrauding the very people who will be most hurt by his proposal.”
http://www.bamn.com/doc/2008/080405-oklahoma-victory.asp