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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)
What’s Wrong with Voter ID
The US Supreme Court has hammered another nail in the coffin of the voting rights protections my father and many, many others risked their lives to establish for all Americans. (Why do I say “another” nail? See the related links at the end of this post.)
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law on Monday, concluding in a splintered decision that the challengers failed to prove that the law’s photo ID requirement placed an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.
The 6-to-3 ruling kept the door open to future lawsuits that provided more evidence. But this theoretical possibility was small comfort to the dissenters or to critics of voter ID laws, who predicted that a more likely outcome than successful lawsuits would be the spread of measures that would keep some legitimate would-be voters from the polls.
(link)
In light of the Supreme Court decision and the likelihood that it will encourage more states to pass voter ID laws, it seems appropriate to re-run some information that I compiled two years ago.
[Originally posted January 30, 2005]
(emphasis added)
New York
excerpt from:
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/voting/20020401/17/728
First, there is the straightforward practical concern. As many as 3 million New York City voters do not have a driver’s license. Indeed, 1990 census data showed that less than 50 percent of New York City’s voting age residents had a driver’s license compared with 91 percent of the state’s residents overall. Also, members of minority groups are far less likely to have a driver’s license than whites; recently naturalized citizens (and new immigrants from Puerto Rico) are also less likely to have a driver’s license. For many of those potential voters, it may also prove onerous for them to have another valid form of identification handy when they go to the polls. This requirement, then, could depress the voting power of New York City and members of minority groups.
Second, application of the identification requirement is likely to create a host of problems. An identification requirement will require poll workers to use their discretion and judgment. More discretion and judgment will be required when the voters use a form of identification other than a driver’s license. Unfortunately, poll workers often get the rules wrong. The more complicated the rules, the more likely they will not be applied properly – and this set of rules could seem complicated. A study of New York City’s 2001 general election by the New York Public Interest Research Group demonstrated that most poll workers did not know basic rules about where someone should vote if they moved or who could help a disabled person vote. This suggests that poll workers will not be able to apply an identification requirement properly. Under the bill, the first-time voters who fail to provide proper identification should be permitted to vote with an affidavit or paper ballot, with which they sign an affidavit promising that they are who they say they are. But, again, given the reliability of the poll workers, it is quite likely that significant numbers of voters could be wrongly turned away. In fact, New York election lore is full of stories about poll workers who do not know when someone should use such a ballot and denying voters access to such ballots.
The i.d. requirement also creates opportunities for discriminatory treatment. African-Americans have a history of being subjected to special scrutiny at the polling place – as have members of other minority groups and recently naturalized citizens. Stories abounded in Duval County, Florida of African-American voters being asked to show a form of identification – sometimes two – while white voters were allowed to sign in without presenting any i.d. Similarly, a survey conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense Fund found that in the 2001 New York City general election one in six Asian voters was improperly asked to show identification before voting.
Finally, there is no evidence that such a rule is needed. In even the closest elections, there is rarely any evidence of voter fraud at the polls. And, the experience of states with same-day voter registration suggests that identification is not needed to protect against fraud.
Wisconsin
excerpt from:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/mar03/129305.asp
Guess how many verified cases of identification fraud lawmakers cited in advocating a new rule that residents show a Wisconsin driver’s license or a state ID card each time they vote? Answer: Zero.
That’s right. Backers of the measure noted not a single instance anywhere in Wisconsin in which it was shown that a voter lied about who he or she was in casting a ballot. So the ID rule, approved this month by the Assembly, fixes a problem that lawmakers have failed to show exists.
Well, the rule won’t do any harm, right? Wrong: It will do harm. This added step is sure to stop some eligible voters from exercising their franchise. That price is worth paying only if identification fraud amounts to a serious problem in state elections.
Ease of voting has put the state among the leaders in voter turnout – a tradition lawmakers should safeguard. Wisconsin requires proof of residency at the time one registers, not a state ID each time one votes. Right now, only eight states require all residents to show identification on each trip to the polls, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and only one of those states, South Carolina, mandates the use of driver’s licenses or state ID cards. That’s company Wisconsin shouldn’t keep.
True, for an overwhelming number of residents, the ID requirement would amount to a small or no inconvenience. But for a minority, it could act as a stumbling block to the polls, which should be easily accessible to all eligible voters.
The rule could keep from the polls: newcomers with out-of-state driver’s licenses; poor people too consumed with day-to-day existence to take the time to get the proper ID; elderly or disabled people lacking the mobility to conveniently get the required cards; and residents who have misplaced their ID cards or have simply forgotten to bring them to the voting sites.
New Mexico
excerpt from:
http://abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/223359opinion09-15-04.htm
Like most states, New Mexico has never required voter ID. New Mexico’s checks on voter fraud include a computerized system that verifies that voters are real, live where they say, and are eligible to vote. Voting twice is a crime, and voters’ signatures are in county clerks’ records for comparison.
Voter ID requirements have been shown to interfere with balloting by students and by voters who don’t: drive; have a utility bill in their name; bring “proper ID” to the polls; or understand the complicated procedure for providing ID to vote absentee.
An ID requirement, particularly one imposed at the last minute, would effectively turn many lawful voters away.
Two weeks ago, despite these facts, Republican Party lawyers concocted a “voter ID” controversy by loudly proclaiming their “shocking discovery” that voter registration groups had filed “at least 3,000 fraudulent registrations in Bernalillo County alone.” This provoked the public freakout the Republicans wanted. Their charge, however, turned out to be fabricated. When their lead plaintiff was under oath, he had to admit they had no evidence of fraud. The “3,000 fraudulent registrations” were duplicates, forms with illegible addresses, omitted Social Security numbers, unsigned forms and the like. In other words, just what you would expect among 60,000 new registrations. None were added to the voter rolls, nor could they have resulted in a fraudulent vote. The only arguably “fraudulent” registration apparently was a teenager’s prank that would have been routinely screened out during computerized cross-checking of Social Security numbers.
In court, the director of the Bureau of Elections and a county clerk’s representative carefully explained how New Mexico’s databases eliminate felons, dead people, people who have moved away, and other ineligible voters.
National studies confirm the United States does not have the “voting fraud” problem the Republicans are braying about. What we do have is a pattern of exclusion of lawful voters. This is the ugly picture that emerged in Florida where thousands of black voters were wrongfully denied the vote. It does not take a vivid imagination to know what a requirement for “proper ID” would translate into in Florida or, for that matter, what kind of chaos would reign at New Mexico polls if a last-minute “voter ID” requirement were imposed on thousands of new voters when there is no agreement on what constitutes a valid ID. –snip–
So why are the Republicans beating the drum for voter ID for new registrants? The answer is simple. There are more than 120,000 new registrants in New Mexico— 44 percent Democrats, 24 percent Republicans and the rest “Independent” or “Won’t Say.”
Add to that the fact that ID requirements historically disrupt voting by students, minorities (particularly Native Americans in remote areas), the institutionalized elderly and the poor. These groups (surprise!) tend to vote Democratic. If you think the Republicans would be demanding voter ID if new-voter numbers were reversed, I have a bridge to sell you.
The percentages being what they are, a voter ID requirement would likely shave a couple of points off the Democrats’ margin in this swing state. Republicans are about as concerned with “voter fraud” as they are with protecting the spotted owl. They want the chaos and vote suppression they managed in Florida.
Related Posts
- Georgia Voter Disenfranchisement Legislation Signed Into Law
- GONZALES VOTE GOES TO SENATE FLOOR – VOTING RIGHTS AT ISSUE
- Stacking The Deck With Roberts: The Right Wing Plot Against Voting Rights
US Census Practices Violate International Law
The Prison Policy Initiative—with Demos as a partner—has submitted analysis to the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva of the discriminatory US Census approach to counting prisoners. PPI and Demos conclude that US Census practices violate international law.
NEW YORK, Dec. 13 — The United States Census practice of counting prisoners in their districts of incarceration rather than their home districts for the purpose of establishing electoral and Congressional representation is a violation of international treaty. This month, the non-partisan public policy and advocacy centers Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) submitted their analysis to the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva.
Demos and PPI urged the committee to scrutinize the racially discriminatory redistricting practice of crediting rural white counties with additional population based on the presence of disenfranchised prisoners in violation of Article 5 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The Demos/PPI comments were included in a larger submission [PDF] prepared by the U.S. Human Rights Network.
The United States ratified the CERD treaty in 1994, and therefore is bound under international law to work to eliminate policies that are intentionally or unintentionally racially discriminatory. The CERD treaty obligates each country to report every two years on its progress at eliminating racial discrimination. The United States submitted its report [PDF] in April and will be questioned by the CERD Committee in Geneva in March 2008. The Committee looks to individuals and organizations in each county to critique the reporting counties report and to highlight omissions.
See the press release, the text of the Census/redistricting section or the entire prison submission.
Also see my coverage of PPI’s work from a couple of years ago. US Census policy is quite similar to the old “three-fifths clause” of the US Constitution.
Census Must Count Prisoners in Their Home Communities
The Prison Policy Initiative and State Senator Eric Schneiderman have brought together an in impressive coalition of organizations and legislators to call on the US Census Bureau to change its policy on counting prisoners—and to kick off a national advocacy campaign on the issue.
“Counting prisoners as residents of the prison districts where they do not vote or otherwise participate in those communities is simply bad policy,” said State Senator Eric Schneiderman. “Disenfranchised people become an undeserved source of political power for legislators who benefit from locking up more people for longer sentences.”
“The Census Bureau’s insistence on counting prisoners as residents of rural counties creates big problems when counties like St. Lawrence go to draw county legislative districts. Because our county districts are so small, a single prison can have a huge negative impact on equal voting power,” said letter co-author Tedra L. Cobb, vice-Chair of the St. Lawrence County Board of Legislators.
Yesterday, federal, state, and local legislators presented a letter signed by 32 elected officials from New York, Texas, and Illinois to Charles Kincannon, Director of the Census Bureau, requesting that the agency collect the home addresses of all incarcerated persons in the next national decennial census and count them at those addresses. According to these officials, counting prisoners at their pre-incarceration address is essential for compliance with the “One Person, One Vote” rulings of the Supreme Court, which require that legislative districts at every level of government contain equal numbers of residents in order to ensure fair and equal representation for all.
“The Census Bureau considers redistricting to be the second most important use of its data and it wants to hear from the elected officials who use that data.” said Prison Policy Initiative Executive Director Peter Wagner. “I call upon all supporters of democracy to ask their own elected officials to join New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman and St. Lawrence County Legislator Tedra Cobb in their appeal to the Census Bureau.”
In addition to the Prison Policy Initiative, the elected officials were joined by criminal justice and democracy advocacy groups, including the Brennan Center for Justice, DEMOS, Citizens Against Recidivism, Coalition for Parole Restoration, Seven Neighborhoods Action Partnership, JusticeWorks Community, Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, Community Service Society, The Correctional Association of New York, Families Rally for Emancipation and Empowerment (FREE!), and the Drug Policy Alliance.
Currently, the Census Bureau includes everyone housed in federal, state, and local prisons in its count of the general population of the Census block that contains the prison. New York State law, however, defines residence as the place where one voluntarily lives. Many states, including New York, also have constitutional clauses or election law statutes that explicitly declare that incarceration does not change a residence.
Unfortunately, the current Census methodology disregards this, instead counting a significant proportion of our national population in the wrong place. According to advocates, crediting the population of prisoners to the Census block where they are temporarily and involuntarily held creates electoral inequities at all levels of government.
“Every decade, states use federal census data to update their legislative district boundaries,” continued Mr. Wagner. “The goal is to ensure that each district contains the same population, as required by the federal constitution’s “one-person, one-vote” rule. The Census Bureau counts people in prison where their bodies are located on census day, not where they come from and where they will return, on average, 34 months later. The Bureau’s current practice made sense before prison populations became large enough to distort democracy. However, more people now live in prison than our three least populous states combined, and African Americans are imprisoned at 7 times the rate of whites. Today, this Census practice undermines the rule of law,” Peter Wagner explained.
(Read the whole press release.)
News Flash: Giuliani Still a Racist
Max Blumenthal has been reporting on Rudy’s White Power problem: Giuliani has chosen Arthur Ravnel, Jr.—a hardcore, ideological neo-Confederate—to be the regional chair of his presidential campaign in South Carolina. Ed Sebesta, an authority on the neo-Confederate movement, has more on Ravnel here.
“By appointing Ravenel to his campaign,” Blumenthal writes, “Giuliani has recognized the influence neo-Confederates have in the South Carolina GOP.” Blumenthal concludes:
But Giuliani’s alliance with neo-Confederates like Ravenel is not surprising, nor is it necessarily novel. Those who lived under his regime in New York City are familiar with his penchant for exploiting racial divisions for political gain. Now that Giuliani has introduced his Southern strategy in the GOP primaries, he is truly the Copperhead Candidate.
Indeed, everyone should be reminded that in 1993 Giuliani beat out New York’s socialist Black Mayor, Dave Dinkins, by relying on Republican voter suppression tactics.
The 1993 New York City mayoral contest was a bitter rematch between incumbent Democrat David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor, and Republican Rudolph Giuliani. Four years earlier, Dinkins had edged out Giuliani 50-48%. Racial issues, and fears of racial division, loomed large in the 1993 campaign-as did fear of fraud and intimidation. A New York Times article summed up the latter worries shortly before the election:
The Dinkins campaign expressed concern that off-duty police officers supporting Giuliani might intimidate Democratic voters, while the Giuliani campaign demanded extra police officers to make sure no fraud occurred in polling places where the Mayor’s supporters outnumber the challenger’s.141
Giuliani representatives earlier had sent a letter to the New York City Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, asking for at least 2,700 police officers to be assigned to the polls, in addition to the “thousands” of volunteer poll watchers provided by the Republican Party.142 Kelly responded by assigning 3,500 officers and creating 52 “captains” to supervise the poll watching.143 This decision was a compromise designed to please both sides: the 3,500 poll-watchers were assigned to watch for voter fraud, and the 52 captains were assigned to ensure the poll-watchers did not intimidate voters. Mayor Dinkins warned that it was improper for poll-watchers (especially officers who supported Giuliani) to “exert their influence and intimidate people” and “to throw their weight around.”144
Meanwhile, New York State Republican Party Chairman William Powers made it clear that his party’s volunteer poll-watchers would be out in force in majority- Democratic precincts: “We will be manning polls that have never seen a Republican before,” he announced.145 The Giuliani campaign had been worried for months by rumors that many Democratic voters registered more than once or were illegal immigrants.146
On Election Day morning, Mayor Dinkins held a news conference stating that “we appear to be seeing an outrageous campaign of voter intimidation and political dirty tricks afoot in today’s election.”147 This allegation was based on three initially unsubstantiated reports by Dinkins’ poll-watchers, and Giuliani responded, “I can assure you this has nothing to do with my campaign and it is precisely what we expected of them.”148 The reports were that off-duty police officers physically threatened a Dinkins volunteer and that intimidating posters had been placed in black and Latino neighborhoods.149 The second report was later confirmed. Posters had been placed at several polling places, and read: “Federal authorities and immigration officials will be at all election sites. . . . Immigration officials will be at locations to arrest and deport undocumented illegal voters.”150 Dinkins called on the Department of Justice to investigate, and a statement issued by the department advised voters to disregard the posters and pledged “to protect the rights of minority voters.” It also announced that “the Department of Justice and the FBI are conducting an investigation to determine who prepared and posted these notices.”151
(Chandler Davidson, Tanya Dunlap, Gale Kenny, and Benjamin Wise. REPUBLICAN BALLOT SECURITY PROGRAMS: VOTE PROTECTION OR MINORITY VOTE SUPPRESSION—OR BOTH? (pdf 476kb) A REPORT TO THE CENTER FOR VOTING RIGHTS & PROTECTION, SEPTEMBER 2004. Footnotes are below the fold.)
The Republican Party’s dirty secret is that winning federal elections with the so-called Southern Strategy also involves running racist campaigns throughout the country (remember Ohio?). If Giuliani gets the Republican nomination, the GOP will be stylin’ with an old pro.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
Census Bureau’s Own Study Says Bureau Should Stop Miscounting Prisoners
I’m a little late on this, but since I’ve been following the issue for about a year and a half, I want to make note of an important development concerning how the Census Bureau counts people who are in prison.
Quick refersher: Many people are aware that the disproportionately Black and Latino population in US prisons cannot vote. Less widely discussed is the problem that the Census Bureau counts this largely Black and Latino population as residents of the places where they are imprisoned. All too frequently the prisons are located in predominantly white rural areas. This practice makes the redistricting process grossly unfair, diluting the votes of everyone in the state who lives outside the districts that maintain prisons.
The Prison Policy Initiative, which is the leading organization working to change how prisoners are counted in the US Census, announced last month that:
The National Research Council of the National Academies … released a report calling for the Census Bureau to begin collecting the home addresses of people in prison and to study whether this alternative address should be used in the Census. The report, authored by leading demographers, statisticians and sociologists, was commissioned by the Census Bureau to reexamine where people should be counted in the Census….
The panel expressed deep concern about where people in prison were counted, stating that “the evidence of political inequities in redistricting that can arise due to the counting of prisoners at the prison location is compelling”. The panel cited an article by Eric Lotke and Peter Wagner that “nearly 9% of all African-American men in their twenties and thirties live in prison” and that most prisons are located in largely White rural areas….
The National Research Council report called for the Census Bureau to initiate a major “research and testing program, including experimentation as a part of the 2010 Census” to evaluate assigning incarcerated people to other addresses outside the facility. The panel also recommended that that the Census Bureau rely less on administrative records and more on specialized forms and interviews to count people in prison.
Prison Policy Initiative Executive Director Peter Wagner and Soros Senior Justice Fellow Eric Lotke had earlier submitted a proposed finding and recommendation to the National Academy of Sciences [pdf]. In their submission, Wagner and Lotke elaborated on the problem that the Census Bureau needs to respond to:
Prisons present a significant distortion on local populations. Currently, there are more than 2 million people in prisons and jails. Since the 1980 Census, the percentage of Americans incarcerated in correctional facilities has increased four-fold, with more than 0.7% of Americans currently incarcerated in a prison or jail. For certain demographic groups, such as African-American men in their late 20s, more than 12% of the population is currently incarcerated.
Recent research has shown that correctional facilities are increasingly located in areas that are geographically and demographically far removed from the communities that most incarcerated people belong to. According to Department of Agriculture Demographer Calvin Beale, although non-metro counties contain only 20% of the national population, they are the host for 60% of new prison construction. In the 1990s, an astonishing 30% of new residents of upstate New York were people being sent to prison.
The result of counting large external populations of prisoners as local residents leads to misleading conclusions about the size and growth of communities. One study of incarcerated populations in the Census found 21 counties in the United States have at least 21% of their population in prison. Counties that see prisons close report that their populations declined when in fact they did not. Conversely, population growth reported by some counties is due to the importation of prisoners to a new correctional institution. If not for the construction of new prison cells, 56 counties the Census Bureau identified as growing during the 1990s would have reported declining populations.
Because Latinos and Blacks are incarcerated at three to seven times the rate of Whites, where incarcerated people are counted has tremendous implications for how Black and Latino populations are reflected in the Census. For this reason, the African-American subcommittee of the Census Bureau’s Race and Ethnicity Advisory Committee recommended that the Census Bureau count prisoners as residents of their pre-incarceration addresses.
Following last month’s release of the National Research Council report, Peter Wagner said the Council “has defined what a good faith examination of the feasibility of counting incarcerated people at their pre-incarceration addresses would look like. The Census Bureau should get to work today.”
My First Academic Citation
I just discovered that in her recent publication in the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy Melanie Campbell cited my article on voting rights for New Orleans evacuees.
Benjamin Greenberg reported in his In These Times article on 17 November 2005, that there are roughly 219,000 New Orleans evacuees who are voting age [over the age of 18] and estimates that 70 percent of those are Black, which represents 153,300 Black voters who will not have access to the ballot in the 2006 elections. “This is voter disenfranchisement by attrition,” states Greenberg (Greenberg 2005).
(Melanie Campbell, “Right of Return Means Access to the Ballot, Access to Neighborhoods,and Access to Economic Opportunity [pdf],” Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, Volume XII (2006).)
My same article was also cited in congresssional testimony by Wade Henderson, Executive Director Leadership Conference on Civil Rights:
HOUSE JUDICIARY SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION OVERSIGHT HEARING ON THE “VOTING RIGHTS ACT: EVIDENCE OF CONTINUED NEED [pdf]” MARCH 8, 2006.
Maybe I’m bragging a little, but it’s great to find that my work has had some lasting value.
Hunger Strike Calling for Blanco to Provide a Fair Election – Call to Join/Support evacuees
Tens of thousands of voters will be disenfranchised in the April 22nd
election in New Orleans, most of them Black. State officials know it, and
they know how to prevent it – by providing satellite voting for displaced
New Orleanians outside the state of Louisiana. But despite large grassroots
efforts demanding satellite voting, the state has refused to take the
necessary measures for ensuring a valid election process and setting up
satellite voting. The only thing preventing this important election from
becoming a fair election is one signature by one person: Gov. Kathleen
Blanco.Hillary Charlot and two other displaced survivors are set up below the steps
of the State Capitol. They are taking part in a hunger strike to pressure
Governor K. Blanco to sign an executive order to postpone the election until
satellite voting can be put in place. They will stay until Governor Blanco
takes appropriate action to ensure a fair election, or until the day of the
election.Please Join Us
For the evacuees’ voice to be effective, they need as much support as they
can get. If you can, please join them in Baton Rouge today through the
scheduled 4/22 election date, either to participate in the hunger strike or
to stand in solidarity with them and the cause for a just election.Contact James Rucker (415.505.9048 or james@colorofchange.org) if you have
questions or are able to provide help in any way.Forward this to anyone you know who might be interested in participating in
or supporting the effort.(Via Jordan Flaherty.)
Adopt A Racist Boor For Martin Luther King Day
I really have not kept up on what CORE does these days, but now I am utterly disinclined to try. For Martin Luther King Day 2006, CORE is honoring Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour—panderer to white supremacists who wears the confederate flag on his lapel with pride.
“We have invited Gov. Barbour as a representative of all of the great people of Mississippi in recognition of the state’s progress in race relations after the successful prosecution of the 1964 murders of CORE volunteers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner,” said CORE national spokesman Niger Innis.
“America looks upon Philadelphia, Mississippi’s bi-racial jury holding Edgar Ray Killen responsible for those murders as a shining example of the progress our nation has achieved since the Civil Rights era.”
In observance of the King federal holiday, CORE hosts an annual Ambassadorial Reception and Awards Dinner in New York City. This event has grown to become one of the largest events in the country honoring Dr. King with more than 2,000 people from all walks of life attending each year.
This year’s 21st annual black tie event will be held at the New York Sheraton Hotel and Towers at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 16, 2006.
If you’re relatively new to HungryBlues, you may not know that I have a somewhat different view of the significance of the Edgar Ray Killen trial.
The article is from the Jim Prince edited Neshoba Democrat, so not only do we get the drivel, above, we get a whole lot more about Barbour’s “historic” role in supporting the “call to justice” of the Philadelphia Coalition, which Prince co-chairs.
The indictment of the ex-Ku Klux Klan leader in January followed a community-wide call for justice which the governor and other elected officials embraced here in June 2004 at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the slayings.
At the commemoration the governor said it was a complicit sin to ignore evil….
Gov. Barbour was in Philadelphia and joined in the call for justice at the event which drew about 1,800.
“We know that when evil is done it is a complicit sin to ignore it, to pretend it didn’t happen even if it happened 40 years ago. You have to face up to your problems before you can solve them,” Barbour said at the time.
One year later, on June 21, 2005, a Neshoba County jury found Edgar Ray Killen guilty of three counts of manslaughter in connection with the murders.
Let’s just say that neither Barbour’s appearance at nor the Philadelphia Coalition’s role in the memorial were universally appreciated.
Past honorees have included Laura Bush and Rudolph Giuliani. How many people remember that Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign ran a full-blown, racist voter suppression operation to get him elected? I guess Barbour will be in good company.
I’ll be even a little more blunt. Haley Barbour refuses to disavow his affiliations with the neo-confederate movement and its powerful Mississippi mouthpiece, the Council of Conservative Citizens—the same organization that under a different name (White Citizens Council) fostered the environment in which a gang of klansmen, including law enforcement, could beat and shoot to death James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—and so many others—with total impunity. A few nice sounding words on the podium of a farcical memorial don’t change anything. As Katrina Survivor Leah Hodges said before the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, “If I put a dress on a pig, a pig is still a pig.”
See also: The “Shakedown Gang”: Roy Innis and the New Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
Hear Peter Wagner Speak About Prison Policy
I received the following announcement from Peter Wagner’s Prisoners of the Census email list:
Tomorrow, Saturday Dec. 3 in Providence RI, I’ll be giving the keynote lecture at the “U.S. Prison System: Community and Political Impacts” conference. My lecture will be at 1pm in Starr Auditorium, MacMillian 117
at Brown University. This conference is organized by Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Education Department, Africana Studies, Brown Green Party, Brown Democrats, Democracy Matters, American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Informed Democracy, and Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.Next Saturday, Dec. 10, I’m going to be in New York City as the guest speaker at the Community Service Society of New York Roundtable Discussion on Prisoner Re-entry Issues. The discussion is from noon to 3pm in Conference Room 4A at 105 East 22nd Street.
More info about Peter Wagner:
Peter Wagner, JD, Executive Director. Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. His current focus is on working to demonstrate – through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses – the distortion of the democratic process that results from the U.S. Census Bureau’s practice of counting the nation’s mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated. The New York Times editorial board has twice supported his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the “leading public critic” of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, and a keynote address to a conference at Harvard University. Mr. Wagner’s publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).
Also see the Prisoners of the Census and Prison Policy Initiative websites.
Evictions On Hold; Notices To Be Mailed
A major victory for Katrina survivors who were renters before the storm.
All pending evictions are on hold until landlords send eviction notices to their tenants, according to a settlement struck Tuesday in federal court that ends a lawsuit brought by unions, activists and individual renters. Eviction hearings cannot take place until 45 days after those mailings are postmarked.
“No longer can landlords just rely on tacking notices on doors while the tenants don’t know they’re getting evicted,” said Judith Browne, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs. “It’s going to provide fair rules so that people can come and defend themselves and, ultimately, protect their property.”
In an added twist, the Federal Emergency Management Agency agreed to supply court clerks, constables and justices of the peace with addresses of evacuees — a first in litigation since Katrina, Browne said.
“FEMA will have to supply the addresses to the evictions courts in Orleans and Jefferson,” Browne said. “They know where they are.”
FEMA will make every effort to provide names and addresses of tenants, upon request by the courts, from its database within five business days, the settlement says. But clerks are not to share the information with anyone, the deal said, and the federal Privacy Act will protect that information.
The settlement, approved by U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval Jr., resolves a lawsuit filed Nov. 10 against every parish and city official who deals with evictions in Orleans and Jefferson. The rules are good for one year from Tuesday.
“There won’t be any eviction hearings next week or the week after, or for at least 45 days.” said attorney Bill Quigley of the Loyola Law Clinic, which represented plaintiffs. “It is going to help every renter in the metropolitan area, and renters, by and large, are people who don’t have a lot of money or resources.”
Note the irony of the parts in bold. As I detailed in my article in In These Times, it took Louisiana Secretary of State Al Ater much more time and quite a lot more trouble to reach a compromise where FEMA would attempt to reach evacuated voters with information about how they can vote in upcoming elections.
On October 5, Ater asked FEMA’s liaison to his office, Arvin Schultz, for FEMA’s list of evacuees. Schultz responded On October 14 to Ater’s requests with a terse e-mail, writing that FEMA “will not fund the outreach program. They will not let you have a copy of the FEMA applicant list. Sorry!!!” Two days later, Ater appealed to Deputy Federal Coordinating Officer Scott Wells, the top FEMA official in Louisiana. Ater’s appeal was rejected, this time with the rationale that releasing the list of evacuees would violate the Privacy Act of 1974.
Ater then went to Washington, D.C., to negotiate with FEMA and lobby Louisiana’s representatives and senators to push the agency to reverse its decision. He suggested a compromise: FEMA could take the voter rolls from him and mail the election materials itself to avoid disclosing the evacuees’ addresses. Though FEMA said it wanted to work with Ater, agency officials dragged their heels for nearly two weeks. FEMA Spokesman Butch Kinerney says the main problem was “mechanical questions” about the best method for reaching voters while protecting privacy.
On November 8, FEMA finally made a clear concession. The agency said it would pay to send a one-page flyer to all evacuees that would explain voting rights and include ways to contact Ater’s office. Yet, Ater still does not know when FEMA will mail the flyer.
FEMA would not agree to give the information to Ater to protect voting rights, and “mechanical questions” made reaching a compromise position a protracted and demanding process. Apparently protecting the property rights of New Orleans landlords makes FEMA feel comfortable sharing the personal information with numerous people—”clerks, constables and justices of the peace”—while to protect voting rights, FEMA would not share the information with even one, high ranking state official.
See also: Katrina Survivors Win Stay of Evictions
Postscript: On The Phone With FEMA
In my article that just came out on In These Times, there’s a passage where I recount Louisiana Secretary of State Al Ater’s correspondence and negotiations with FEMA officials about obtaining the list of evacuees to reach them with voting information and getting funding for a Nationwide Voter Outreach and Education Campaign.
Here is a little more about all of that, not published in my article:
On November 9, I called FEMA’s media desk to ask some questions about the respective roles of Deputy Federal Coordinating Officer Scott Wells and Project Officer Arvin Schultz. Spokesman Randy Welch explained Well’s leadership role in Louisiana and that Project Officers, like Arvin Schultz, go around with local and state government officials to assess material damage and determine needs for funding.
“Does FEMA prioritize material damage to items like voting machines over other needs, like the Secretary of State’s voter education campaign?” I asked.
“I have to defer to whatever Butch Kinerney [another FEMA spokesperson] answered on that one, the last time you called us,” Welch said.
About ten minutes after we hung up, my cell phone rang again.
“It’s Randy Welch. I wasn’t sure you heard they resolved the voting issue,” he said, referring to the agreement FEMA finalized the day before, to mail voting information to evacuees on behalf of Al Ater.
“Yes, I did hear that,” I said.
But the “voting issue” is not resolved for Al Ater. The Secretary of State still thinks FEMA might pay for public service announcements on the radio, his spokesperson Jennifer Marusak said on November 11.
The other parts of the Voter Outreach and Education Campaign are not currently on the table, however, nor has Ater been invited back to Washington.
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