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The Sting of Victory
By Amanda Cary
As a lifelong New Englander, I spent the final days of this election season in California. On the evening of November 5, after searching every newsstand for a newspaper to remember the historic day that came before, I finally found a copy of the San Jose Mercury Times. The two headlines read: “Obama Elected Nation’s First Black President in Commanding Victory” and “Gay Marriage Ban Heads Toward Victory.”
A week later, the word “victory” still stings.
I am not from California, I am not gay and the idea of marriage is not particularly appealing to me, and yet I am profoundly troubled by the vote last week to approve proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage in California.
You should be troubled too, whether you are directly affected or not. From Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” On November 4, a great injustice was brought upon California as well as Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas, where other discriminatory propositions were passed.
President-Elect Barack Obama is living proof that injustice can be overcome and equality can triumph over intolerance. And yet, being in California after volunteering with the Vote No on Prop 8 Campaign to defend marriage equality, I could not help but feel disheartened on election night by a loss that I was not expecting.
Just a short time after leaving my Vote No on 8 polling station in Alameda County on Tuesday night, my grandmother called to tell me that Barack Obama had been elected president. I was heading to the San Francisco Vote No on 8 Campaign party. I was preparing for a long night of nervous, but cautiously optimistic TV watching and couldn’t quite believe this incredible news. I had to grill my overjoyed grandmother on her sources before I believed it.
The streets of San Francisco sprang to life. People were honking horns, yelling “Yes we can!” and dancing in celebration outside the Vote No on 8 party location. People were celebrating inside too—at least in the beginning.
The first poll numbers listed on the LA Times California electoral map projected on two giant screens in the main room showed Proposition 8 ahead in the polls right from the start. But we told ourselves not to despair; after all, the numbers only reflected a few reporting precincts and didn’t yet include the major metropolitan areas of LA and San Francisco.
When the LA area poll numbers started popping up on the screen, I felt the caution in the air.
As the night went on, and the number of reporting precincts increased with little change in the percentage of no on 8 votes, the mood became decidedly somber. I looked to the Vote No on 8 Campaign organizers who had given me my volunteer training. They looked scared. I watched as the line of reporters packed up their cameras and computers. The press would not be covering a victory party that night.
I thought of one of my fellow Vote No on 8 polling station volunteer, who had just married his husband the week before. Would courts end up deciding if the passing of proposition 8 would alter the legal standing of his marriage?
Disillusionment set in as I stood in a room amongst people who were stripped of a fundamental right, vote by unfair vote. Perhaps I hadn’t been in CA long enough to be bombarded by all the negative ads or to understand the size and scope of the Yes on 8 Campaign. Visiting from my beloved Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was baffled by the poll numbers that came flooding in to support a ban on same-sex marriage. Surely on a night so victorious for racial equality in America, such overt discrimination against another group of Americans could not be injected into the California constitution?
Through lies and manipulative advertising, proponents of proposition 8 were able to force discrimination into the California constitution and, on a day that will always be known as a victory for racial equality, we received a painful reminder of how far we have to go on the road to GLBTQ equality.
The GLBTQ community is being singled out because of the pervasive and accepted discrimination throughout our society, now further established into law. GLBTQ rights are human rights. “Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled,” as President-Elect Obama called out during his victory speech, must play a role in defending and promoting the rights and dignity of one and all.
On November 15, be part of history. Join the Impact is a nationwide protest of proposition 8 being organized at City Halls across the country this Saturday. Join the protest at location near you and get involved in your community. The movement for equality is not just a gay rights movement; it is a civil rights movement. It must not be a Californian movement; it must be an American movement.
There’s no stopping the movement that has started, and I am so proud to have joined my friends and family in the struggle. Someday people will look back and marvel at the progress we made for equality, as we are marveling today at the progress marked by President-Elect Obama.
Amanda Cary is a global AIDS advocacy associate at a health and human rights organization in Cambridge, MA.
Eyes on the Prize
"I guess if we ignore it, it'll probably go away" by like_shipwrecks (Nicole).
This is Nicole. She is one of the many talented photographers whose work I follow on flickr.
The same night that the country voted for a Black president, majorities of voters voted against gay families and the rights of gay people in California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas.
Nicole is angry and so am I.
We are PEOPLE. We are not an alien race. We are not a cult. We are people, with lives, jobs, families, and feelings. We are constructive members of society and to deny us of rights that all PEOPLE should have is just WRONG.
Voting against us is not going to make us or the issues disappear. We’re not giving up. We’re fighting back. We aren’t going anywhere.
We didn’t vote away racism and we didn’t vote away other bigotry and inequality, and these votes against GLBT people were one of this Election Day’s ugliest demonstrations of what we have not yet overcome.
In California it’s been saddening to also see another demonstration of what we have not yet overcome as some protesting the bigotry of Proposition 8 have been directing their anger at Black Californians. The thinking and behavior is racist—and it’s wrong-headed to target a particular group as responsible for the fearfulness of a cross-section of the electorate.
My friend Adina pointed out that whether you’re talking about the possible inappropriate participation of the Mormon Church in political organizing for Prop 8 or the possible votes of some Black voters for Prop 8, the fight really lies elsewhere.
But let’s be real here—there was 49% turnout in San Francisco County and 55% turnout in Alameda which voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8. There was 59% turnout in San Mateo county. If we the supporters of marriage rights for all had done a better job of helping our neighbors and friends to vote, the result would have gone the other way. The result was in many respects a failure of execution. I care much less about yelling at Mormons and much more about turning out allies and persuading people on the fence about justice for all.
This is precisely how Obama won out over the fearfulness that could have prevented many more people from voting for him. We need to help the people who want to support us to follow through and we need to reach out to the people we can influence. That kind of reaching out is infectious and is what will win the day. It will win elections—but more importantly it will win us the community we need to move forward as a society.
Election Night in Chicago
By Rebecca Thal
We were way back in the crowd, on a patch of the lawn where it was possible to see the jumbotron only from tiptoe, and completely impossible to see the stage. So, when my flexed toes finally gave out, while Barack Obama’s words resonated around us, I kept myself occupied by looking around at the people standing packed around me.
There was the middle-aged Black lady to my right, absorbed alternately in clasping her hands in reverent disbelief and cheering boisterously. When McCain, in his concession speech, spoke of the historic moment of electing our first African-American president, she shouted, “That’s RIGHT!” and shook her head fervently, eyes wide and rimmed with tears.
There was the grandmother behind me, who dialed up some family member on her cell phone and held it out up over the crowd to hear, saying only, “Listen. This is live.”
And there was the couple in front, two men dressed in vests for a night much warmer than this one. The shorter of the two had a view of the TV screen and was leaning over someone else’s shoulder to watch. His partner stayed still, not looking up to the screen, just shaking his head and weeping. He kept it up all through Obama’s speech. He kept having to remove his glasses to wipe his eyes.
So that’s it. That’s how it was, in Grant Park, with hundreds of thousands of people on the eve of the election. There was no riot and there was no ruckus. People were too busy to riot, and what they were busy with was crying.
Not that it wasn’t also celebratory. As the crowd dispersed I found myself on the receiving end of vehement handshakes from all sorts of strangers—congratulations, they said, and I told them “you too” since I didn’t know how better to respond.
On the bike ride home, going south on King Drive, every car that passed leaned on its horn. “Obama!” the drivers would shout, waving their arms out the windows. “Obama!” we yelled right back, at stop signs and to people out on porches and to kids outside the convenience store. It was like nobody could believe their luck. We had to keep shouting it back and forth to each other, to affirm it—yes, this is real, and it’s not going to go away. It’s happening to us, now.
And already I can feel the cynic in myself mobilizing. There’s a time for that—a certain spirit of political skepticism that I tend to think of as healthy—but for now, just for the moment, I am holding it off. I think we just witnessed something big, and I’m not going to pass my quick judgment on that. It has been too long coming.
Rebecca Thal is a student at the University of Chicago.
Barack Obama for the Generations
Our election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States of America has been filling me with overwhelming emotions. As it has been doing for so many people.
It has been hard to put any of this into words. For me it begins with my being a child of the Civil Rights Movement. As many readers of this blog know, in the early 1960s, my father worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as Special Assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked in the SCLC NY office and fought on the front lines of the civil rights battle in Birmingham, AL. One of the youth leaders of the Birmingham movement, the late William Douthard (aka Meatball), lived with us when he first moved to Albany, NY in 1978.
I started this blog to write about my father’s history in the Movement and in the process I have had the privilege of getting involved with the broader community of Civil Rights Movement veterans. I’ve made new friends and joined hands with them in the continuing struggle for racial justice in America.
It is incredibly potent to see images of a Black man elected to be President—in a historic, landslide victory, no less. To see that, and to see America’s embrace of the Obama family, and to see Michelle and Barack’s two little Black girls who are going to grow up in the White House—is to see barriers broken that I hoped but did not expect to see broken in my lifetime.
This is not the ultimate fulfillment of the struggle imparted to me by my father and his comrades—but it is a watershed moment. America still has a long way to go. And we don’t know what kind of president Obama will turn out to be; he may well end up being a centrist Democrat in the tradition of Bill Clinton. There are also indications that his administration will promote unprecedented changes in American government and society. It is likely that the Obama administration will be a mix of these things. But Obama’s candidacy and election are more than these emotions and are more than the sum his policies and accomplishments of his administration.
One of the Civil Rights Movement veterans I’ve gotten to know is Joyce Ladner. Joyce grew up in Palmers Crossing, Hattiesburg, MS. She and her sister Dorie became leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and were involved in much of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. Joyce has gone on to be a prominent sociologist, a pioneer in Black women’s studies, a president of Howard University, a Clinton appointee to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
In January, Joyce launched her Ladner Report blog to support Barack Obama in the midst of the contentious and often ugly Democratic primary race. Before the election results were known on Tuesday night, she wrote:
Joyce Ladner and Michelle Obama
I am posting this piece before the election results are in, so I don’t know if Senator Barack Obama will become President Obama. I going out to an election returns party tonight. But the race has already been won. I don’t know if the numbers will allow us to call him “President Obama” but what I do know is this: we have turned this country around. It can not, it will not shift back to the greed, mean spiritedness, selfishness, and all the other negative adjectives I could call it.
I was reminded of a passage written by Franz Fanon:
Each generation must define its mission,
Fulfill it, or betray it.I think Fanon’s words have a lot of relevance today because older generations worked in this campaign to restore us to our better selves, while the young stepped forth to define their missions. In time, they, too, will step up and figure out how to carry them out. They will have a great transformational leader in a President Obama.
With this in mind, I told a fellow volunteer at the Obama campaign office today that the laws of the universe helped to shift us away from the horrors that led people to rise up and clamor and work for CHANGE. Obama was a conduit for the change we citizens must have. He understands that too because he keeps telling us that the election is not about him but it’s about US.
I spent some time yesterday and today waving my Obama sign at major intersections in this beautiful Florida city that is so deeply Republican. I saw many McCain-Palin supporters taking their last breaths in their old identities. Several very old men gave me the finger sign, which shocked me because they looked like it was hard for them to raise their arms. Infirm. Old. Set in 19th century ideas, but still nasty, hostile, and in some cases racist. It’s not enough to say that these people are driven entirely by self interest. It goes deeper than that. It is about the redefinition of who we are as a nation. It taps into the better part of our selves for the negative experiences to which we have been subjected are destroying our inner spirits….
Let’s hope this two year experience many of us have had with this campaign will leave us all with a renewal of energy and optimism, that will fuel our desire to sacrifice for the changes the society needs. I have not had experiences similar to those in this campaign since I was a college student civil rights activist. I hope we who had similar experiences in the past can now feel content to bequeath to the younger generations that same sense of struggle and morality, optimism and hope, hard work and sacrifice. They are up to the task and we should be more than ready to move to the side and urge them to lead.
May God protect Senator Obama and may he guide and protect us as well, as we work for higher purposes and goals that demand that we all step outside ourselves to work for the greater good.
On Wednesday morning, I wrote an email to my friend John Due.
John was born in Indiana, where he attended Indiana University. There, in 1957, three years before the Southern sit-in movement, he helped organize a testing campaign of segregated off-campus housing, restaurants and barber shops. After several more years of activity in the NAACP and union organizing, John went to Florida A&M in Tallahassee to attend law school and get in involved in the Civil Rights Movement there. John worked for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, which sent him to Mississippi in 1964, where he conducted a dangerous investigation of violent reprisals against Black citizens and their SNCC and CORE workers seeking the right to vote in Southwest Mississippi—the same area of Mississippi my current investigations of civil rights era racial violence focus on. John has been active in practically every civil rights organization one could name. More recently he was a leader of the successful campaign for Miami-Dade County to adopt the most comprehensive living wage ordinance in the country. John’s wife, Patricia Stephens Due, a civil rights leader in her own right in the Tallahassee movement and beyond, co-authored with one of their daughters, Tananarive Due, the book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.
My subject line to John was “Congratulations to us all.”
I’m thinking of you and your family today. I just tried to call your home to say congratulations and that the news that we have elected Barack Obama as President of the United States is more meaningful because I know you.
John replied in a vein similar to Joyce’s blog post:
Like John Lewis—as Obama has said—my wife, myself, your father and other unsung heroes are and were the Moses Generation.
Obama said he was of the Joshua Generation, like you are.
And crossing the Red Sea that was made easy by the Lord is nothing compared to the River Jordan that you and your children will have to do because the Jordan is still not crossed yet. You will soon find out the difference between McCain saying “I,” and Obama saying “You.”
So I accept your congratulations as a matter of recognition of helping to put you and your generation in place. “To Come This Far.” Now it is your turn. So I agree—”Congratulations to us all.”
Neither Joyce nor John have illusions that Obama is the silver bullet for our nation’s woes. They are ardent supporters of Obama, who see him and his candicy as having invigorated my generation and American politics with the capacity to now start moving ahead to the next stages of evolution. It will be no less of a struggle. But there is hope now that we can meet it. Yes we can.
MA Voters: Vote No on Question 1
If you are in Massachusetts, please vote NO on Question 1 this Tuesday. Question 1 is a dangerous, binding proposal to repeal the state income tax, effectively cutting the state budget by $12 billion or almost 40%.
Redesign
You may have noticed that Hungry Blues has changed its look. After more than two and a half years with my heavily modified versions of Scott Wallick’s VeryPlainTxt theme, I’ve been feeling the urge to change up the look of my site. When I came across Lucian E. Marin’s Journalist theme a little over a year ago, I wanted to switch to it right away. When it was first released, however, it didn’t offer widgets for managing the sidebar, and I didn’t have the time to learn how to widgetize it myself. But the Journalist theme is now fully widgetized, so I’ve made the switch (and a few modifications).
In addition to changing the design, I’ve added the Disqus comment management system, I’ve pared down the sidebar, and I’ve added pages for my Opentape and for my other activitiy around the web (twitter, flickr, tumblr, last.fm, ma.gnolia, etc.) via friendfeed.
I made one other change, which, for me, was the biggest. When I launched this blog in 2004, the tagline was “Searching the life and times of my father, Paul Greenberg,” and that has remained the tagline until this redesign. Now the tagline is the much blander “Ben Greenberg’s weblog.” One reason for the change is that the original tagline has sometimes misled new visitors to site. I’ve received a good number of comments and emails addressing me as Paul. While it’s an honor to be mistaken for my dad, I’d rather avoid the confusion.
But the main reason for changing the tagline has to do with how other things have changed since I began this blog. When I started Hungry Blues I was figuring out, through my blogging, what my father’s history had to do with my present. That isn’t really a question anymore. I’ve made the connections, and it’s changed the course of my life. Around the time I moved this site from the hosted Typepad blogging service over to my own Wordpress setup, I wrote:
Starting this blog has led me to friendships and political activism with Movement veterans. It has taken me to Mississippi and Alabama. Hungry Blues has led to my current work as a journalist and in internet communications for a human rights organization.
The focus of Hungry Blues broadened, but most everything on the blog has been part of “searching the life and times of my father.” This is still the case, and it will continue to be explained on the About page.
Today is the fourth of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar—my father’s eleventh yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). It just so happened that in 1997, the fourth of Cheshvan fell on Election Day. It was oddly apropos for my dad. He fought for voting rights in the South as one of Dr. King’s lieutenants, was an expert on proportional representation, designed and implemented the overhaul of New York City’s method of school board elections and was a director of and advisor to many electoral campaigns—perhaps most notably those of New York City Mayor John Lindsay.
Bob Adamenko, Paul Greenberg and John Lindsay in 1965 at Lindsay's first public appearance after becoming Mayor of NYC.
It’s sad that my father did not live to see this presidential election. He would be so thrilled with Barack Obama quite possibly on the threshold of becoming America’s first Black president—and with how Obama’s campaign has been so expansive and revitalizing for American politics. (I can also imagine the arguments he would get into about whether Obama is a progressive candidate; the main thing would be to argue, not to settle on a position.)
Thank you to the readers and commenters at Hungry Blues, to the people from my father’s past who have contacted me through this site, and to all of the new friends and contacts I’ve made through the work I started here.
—
(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)
Our Votes Don’t All Need to Be Counted if the Election Isn’t Close
That’s pretty much the New York Times analysis.
Provisional ballots will also come into play if a huge turnout causes long lines in Ohio, leading lawyers to ask the courts to keep polls open late. When polls are kept open after hours, the ballots cast must be provisional.
Problems with the ballots will not affect the outcome if the race is not close…
If they are counted at all, provisional ballots don’t get counted until after the election has usually been called.
Ohio officials cannot count such ballots for 10 days after the election, while in Florida, officials must count them two or three days after polls close…
Though the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer L. Brunner, has standardized the methods of determining which provisional ballots count—previously this was determined county by county—there has been no concerted effort to stem the use of ballots that don’t get counted until after most elections have been decided.
In 2004, 2006 and this year’s primaries, Ohio, unlike most other states, increased the percentage of provisional ballots used by voters. In the 2004 presidential election, which hinged on Ohio, the margin between the candidates was about 118,000 votes, of 5.7 million cast. Of those, more than 158,000 were provisional ballots.
Even more of these ballots will be cast in Ohio on Nov. 4, voting experts predict, because many newly registered voters may bring the wrong form of identification to the polls, failing to comply with the state’s new voter law that requires all voters to show government-issued identification or an approved document with a voter’s name and address. Others may go to the wrong polling place, or show up at the polls only to find that they are not listed on the state’s new computerized voter registration list, which has already been the subject of intense partisan wrangling.
Do you see the elephant in the room? No, not there.
Thousands of voters across the country must reestablish their eligibility in the next three weeks in order for their votes to count on Nov. 4, a result of new state registration systems that are incorrectly rejecting them….
The scramble to verify voter registrations is happening as states switch from locally managed lists of voters to statewide databases, a change required by federal law and hailed by many as a more efficient and accurate way to keep lists up to date.
But in the transition, the systems are questioning the registrations of many voters when discrepancies surface between their registration information and other official records, often because of errors outside voters’ control.
The issue made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which yesterday blocked a challenge to 200,000 Ohio voters whose registration data conflicted with other state records.
It is impossible to know how many voters are affected nationwide. There are no reports of large-scale problems in Virginia, Maryland or the District, but the trouble is cropping up in many states.
In Alabama, scores of voters are being labeled as convicted felons on the basis of incorrect lists.
Michigan must restore thousands of names it illegally removed from voter rolls over residency questions, a judge ruled this week.
Tens of thousands of voters could be affected in Wisconsin. Officials there admit that their database is wrong one out of five times when it flags voters, sometimes for data discrepancies as small as a middle initial or a typo in a birth date. When the six members of the state elections board — all retired judges — ran their registrations through the system, four were incorrectly rejected because of mismatches.
If you prod the elephant you find out this is a vast new frontier of voter disenfranchisement.
The law requires each voter to have a unique identifier. Since 2004, new registration applicants have had to provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number to register (voters who don’t have them are assigned a unique number by the state). States are required to try to authenticate the numbers with motor vehicle records and the Social Security Administration database.
But databases are prone to errors such as misspellings and transposed numbers, and applicants are prone to make mistakes or write illegibly on applications. The Social Security Administration has acknowledged that matches between its database and voter-registration records have yielded a 28.5 percent error rate.
States vary in how they treat applicants whose records don’t match, and experts say rules in some states could prevent thousands of eligible voters from casting ballots or having their votes counted in November. Those who don’t match in Oregon, for example, can cast a ballot, but their vote for president or any other federal race on a ballot won’t be counted. There are currently about 9,500 voters in Oregon who fall into this category, but a state spokesman says matching issues will be resolved with most of them before November so they can vote in federal races. Fewer than 500 voters were affected by this during the state’s primary.
“One of the big problems is that states just haven’t been very transparent about how they’re operating their new database,” says Dan Tokaji, law professor at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. “So it’s really hard to tell how this is going to play out. A few states have implemented overly stringent matching rules, the consequence of which could be that some citizens’ votes don’t get counted.”
In the 2000 election, about 1.3 million registered voters said they didn’t vote due to trouble with their registration, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey, which didn’t elaborate on the nature of the troubles. In an election when record numbers of new voters are expected to participate, experts say the number of voters who find they can’t cast a ballot this year could be higher.
Voter registration databases are central to the democratic process in every state except North Dakota — which doesn’t require registration. Everywhere else, the registration roll is the gatekeeper determining eligibility to vote in an election. Voter lists aren’t used just for elections, however. Shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, before statewide databases were mandated, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly ordered that voter registration lists be checked for links to terrorists.
Until HAVA, each county or election district in most states maintained its own voter list, which often resulted in duplicate registrations when voters moved and re-registered — creating opportunities for fraud. States were supposed to consolidate their lists by Jan. 1, 2004, but most got an extension to 2006. Creating a statewide system that interfaces with multiple county registration databases built by different companies proved to be difficult. About a dozen states missed the 2006 deadline, and four were sued by the Justice Department.
There have also been a number of issues involving companies that make the systems. Some states built databases in-house; others outsourced to companies like Election Systems & Software (which also makes voting machines), and the Bermuda-based Accenture. Accenture was hired by several states, but lost contracts in all but one for missed deadlines and other issues.
Colorado — a crucial swing state — completed its $13 million database this year after firing Accenture in 2005. A little-known Oregon company named Saber, which has created databases for 11 states, replaced it. Accenture retained its contract in Pennsylvania, though problems occurred there as well. In 2005, one state official called the $20 million system “seriously if not fatally flawed.”
HAVA requires databases to have “adequate technological security” but doesn’t specify details, such as encryption. And although the databases interface with every county election office, access controls haven’t been developed in some states.
A 2006 audit of Florida’s registration system found that the state hadn’t established adequate access levels for various users and had no process for maintaining or monitoring audit logs, making records vulnerable to theft and manipulation. A June 2008 follow-up found some of the same problems. One former election office employee, for example, still had access to the database three months after leaving his job.
In 2006 in Denver, electronic poll books made by Sequoia Voting Systems crashed extensively, causing long lines that resulted in an estimated 20,000 voters leaving polls without voting. During Georgia’s primary this year problems with e-poll books made by Diebold Election Systems led to voting delays up to three hours long.
It is good to know that possibly 1/3 of the electorate may have voted early this year and that Obama has assembled the United States’ “largest law firm” to monitor the election. The potential problems are so many that I tend to think the best hope is for Obama to win by such a landslide that his victory will be undeniable.
In other words: GOTV!
(h/t @andrewjcohen)
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