Former Florida GOP chair slams party: Voter ID a 'marketing tool' to suppress minority votes

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Echoes of Michael Steele

In voicing his frustrations about black outreach, Greer echoes the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who has often described similar frustrations in trying to convince the party, at a national level, to reach out to black voters.

Greer was an early Steele supporter, and was seen as one of Steele’s biggest boosters in the latter’s run for RNC chair.

“I was gonna run for national chairman,” Greer said of that period after the 2008 election, when the Republican Party was sorting out its next steps, following a painful loss for its standard bearer, Sen. John McCain. “At that point and time my stock was pretty high. I thought: I like Michael Steele.  I thought it would be a great thing to have an African-American as our party chair.”

But Greer said his idea to back Steele met with a cold reception among other members of his party.

“I’d say to a room of 600 people that if the country can celebrate its first African-American president, why can’t the Republican Party have its first black chair? And I’d get like, four applause.”

“I chaired Steele’s communications committee,” Greer said. But he said that after Steele won, following several contentious votes, the RNC chair would face a fate that Greer found familiar.

“The same thing they did to me, they used the same gamebook on him,” Greer said of Steele. “I used to open up the paper and it would say, ‘Chairman Greer spends $50,000 at Yankee game’ — limousines, booze and women … and I was at home with my wife. And I’d find out it was the legislators who were in New York over the weekend and they’d put the expenses through the party.  Then one day I open up the paper and it’s almost the same story about Michael Steele, and I said to my wife, ‘they’re going after him. Look what’s coming.’”

But Greer’s allegations about the desire of some within the party to “get rid” of Steele, include darker allegations about attitudes regarding the former national chair.

“There’s a state committeeman who will remain nameless who in a back room called Michael Steele a ni–er,” Greer said. “He said, ‘he’ll never be chairman of this party.’ But it’s the same idiot who told me John McCain would never be the nominee of our party, so he lost in both instances.”

Greer would not name the person who made the alleged remark.

But it is in the area of outreach that Greer said the party’s lack of interest in reaching out to black voters was most apparent.

“They used to ask me to come to the quarterly RNC meetings to make a presentation to all the chairs about what we were doing in Florida for minority outreach,” Greer said. “They’d put it on the agenda and I’d have six show up out of 50. And the six who were there were very interested.”

Greer said the GOP’s strategy for dealing with minority voters is to put outreach aside, in favor of a more immediate strategy – using the legislative process to stymie non-Republican voters at the polls. He calls voter fraud a “marketing tool” in this process, whose goal is “to provide a way to swallow the pill as to why you’re changing the election process.”

Greer claims that the near halving of the early voting period in Florida in 2010 actually had its origins in the aftermath of the 2008 election, and that such legislative ideas are strictly business for the party and its top consultants.

“The whole elections package that they passed in 2010, they presented to me and Crist in 2009 and we wouldn’t go along with it, and that’s why it wasn’t done in 2009,” Greer said. “Each year, the consultants put together a package of election law changes that they believe are beneficial to the party in the upcoming elections.”

Among the consultants, Greer names former Crist deputy chief of staff and political consultant Jim Rimes, who he calls “the technocrat who comes up with a lot of this stuff” – meaning legislation – (and who later became a consultant to the Rick Perry presidential campaign), and consultants Andy Palmer, lobbyist Richard Heffley, who runs a firm based in Tallahassee, and Matt Williams, who was a strategist for former Florida attorney general Bill McCollum.

“These are the paid people,” Greer said of the consultants. “It really needs to be exposed [because] there is millions of dollars involved now in winning elections — in pollsters and political advisers.”

“They get bonuses,” said Greer, referring to the practice of paying “success bonuses” to consultants who run winning campaigns. “We’ve had people who get $50,000, $100,000 … one gentlemen got $200,000.”

“I don’t really fault them,” Greer said of the consultants. “It leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a citizen, but they are only doing what they are hired to do. And each year, around January or February they would pile into my office and say, ‘we have an elections bill that we want to run, and we have these legislators who are going to sponsor it.’”

Greer said those ideas included moving the Florida primary to January from March, which Greer said he supported because it gave Florida more influence in the process, and another bill that “eliminated the prohibition of statewide officeholders having to resign if you ran for federal office, because there were several legislators seeking to run for higher office and they wanted that law change.”

Greer said that after 2008, the consultants recommended restricting the governor’s ability to extend voting hours “because they were pissed at [Charlie] Crist.”

“We had two special elections in districts that leaned Democrat but that we thought we were gonna win,” Greer said. “One was in Palm Beach County in ‘08, and what happened was the polls were supposed to close at 7 p.m., and before that somebody called in a bomb threat. So what happened was we thought we were winning that race. Exit polls showed that. When the bomb threat got called in, the consultants got on the phone to me and begged me to get on the phone with the governor and tell him not to extend the voting hours because they thought it would give Democrats time to go and get more voters or let people in line vote. I told them I wouldn’t do it.”

In the revised legislation, according to Greer, a future governor could only extend voting hours if he got a request from a supervisor of elections.

Greer said that in 2009, Republican legislators and consultants “came with this whole package because they were obsessed with what happened in 2008, because remember, I was [also] chair of the rules committee for the national RNC. There was an obsession that we can’t ever let that happen again.”

Greer said the package “included reducing early voting days, it included restricting the governor, it included ID at the polling places, it included provisional ballot issues and it was just a complete briefing on, here’s what we need to do to make sure 2008 doesn’t happen  again.”