Operation Eagle Eye was a Republican Party voter suppression operation in the 1960s in Arizona to challenge minority voters. In the United States only citizens have ever been able to vote, and in 1964 only literate citizens could vote, so it was legal to ensure that (1) a potential voter was literate, and (2) a potential voter was a United States Citizen. Through the employment of literacy tests, oral demands to interpret the United States Constitution and detailed questions about a potential voter's origins and how long the potential voter had been in the United States. Republican workers would challenge minority voters, especially those with broken English. William Rehnquist, later chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have "directed the voter harassment teams". Operation Eagle Eye was a two-year effort, and the laws in Arizona have since made this kind of challenge illegal.
Famous quotes containing the words operation, eagle and/or eye:
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.”
—Bible: Hebrew Proverbs, 30:18-19.
From the oracle of Agur, son of Jakeh.
“Wi’ joy unfeigned brothers and sisters meet,
An’ each for other’s weelfare kindly spiers:
The social hours, swift-winged, unnoticed fleet;
Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears;
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;
Anticipation forward points the view:”
—Robert Burns (1759–1796)