Dear friend,

BAMN, the national youth led leadership and civil rights coalition, is working to defend affirmative action and integration programs by ensuring that the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative (ACRI), the anti-affirmative action initiative, stays off the ballot.

The people backing the ACRI, led by Republican Ward Connerly, have tried to place ballot proposals to ban affirmative action in five states simultaneously—Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Arizona. In Oklahoma, Connerly was forced to withdraw his petitions when faced with legal challenges to his fraudulent signatures.

And in Missouri, BAMN and others mounted a youth-led voter education project that shadowed his circulators and told voters the truth about his petitions at the very moment his circulators asked the voters to sign. Connerly failed to get enough signatures to file his petitions. We won!

In Arizona, we know we can win because of all that we have been able to accomplish. In just the past 6 weeks in Arizona, we have been blocking signature gatherers in 110-120 degree weather, exposing the ACRI’s voter fraud, getting circulators and leaders in the petition company to come forward and reveal election violations that they and others have committed around the ACRI. We have also filed a preemptive lawsuit that is a part of our petition challenge.

Now we urgently need your financial support so that we can defeat Connerly in Arizona. We can win this fight! Connerly has said Arizona is “ground zero,” and that is because the far right wing is bolder in Arizona than anywhere else in the country. For that reason we need to give this right-wing movement a hard blow especially around the issue of affirmative action and equal opportunity programs, the most important gain of the civil right movement.

In order to have accomplished all this, we had to be in Arizona, and we need to be back in Arizona no later than August 1st in order to finish the job. That is the day that the Secretary of State will produce a 5% random sample (approximately 16,000) of the signatures to check their validity, and they usually invalidate about 20% of that. In order to win, we have to invalidate an additional 10% ourselves.

BAMN has mobilized youth organizers from around the country to spend August in Arizona exposing and legally challenging Connerly’s fraud.

We can win this historic fight, and change the direction of our country. But the next month is critical. We need your help today.

Our organizers are primarily college and high school youth. They are rich with social commitment and energy. But they are poor when it comes to money. And every day—in Arizona’s 110-degree heat—they need food, water, housing and transportation. In order to finish the job and get this work done, we need the support of absolutely everyone to get students back to AZ.

Whether Connerly wins in Arizona will help determine whether he can win in other states, and will help determine how the federal courts decide the pending legal challenges to his Michigan initiative.

Americans do want change. Our youth organizers are finding fresh evidence of that every day as they work to defend the very best of our nation’s accomplishments.

Senator Obama has declared his opposition to the so-called Arizona Civil Rights Initiative. But as we learned in Michigan, we must expose the voter fraud to keep Connerly’s initiative OFF the ballot if we are to win in a state with a majority white electorate.

Please help our young people seize this historical moment and press forward to victory.

What happens in the next month in Arizona is critical to our success.

What you do today can help make the difference.

To contribute, DONATE ONLINE or write a check to "BAMN Committee to Stop ACRI" and send it immediately to P.O. Box 10741 / Phoenix, AZ 85064-0741.

Thank you for standing up in the fight for equality.

Sincerely,
Shanta Driver, National Chair
Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)

ACRI Fraud Finder:

STOP ACRI's growing evidence of the ACRI campaign's illegal tactics and fraud.