When Ohio officials shortchanged some African-American precincts of voting machines during the 2004 election, lines grew long and tempers short. But one person untroubled by events was John Tanner, the head of the voting branch in the Justice Department's civil rights division. He even wrote a letter to the Ohio officials defending the decision to send machines disproportionally to white precincts.
When, the following year, the Georgia Legislature passed a stringent voter ID law that would have effectively disenfranchised many poor people lacking driver's licenses, many lawyers in Tanner's office saw it as an effort to suppress minority voting. But not Tanner. He quickly decided not to challenge the law.
Despite these questionable actions, Tanner largely escaped notice until a recent conference in Los Angeles, where he opined that voter ID laws might disenfranchise elderly voters but not minorities, because they "don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first."
USA TODAY Nov. 2, 2007
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