Hungry Blues

VOTER EDUCATION

After the 2000 election, there was broad consensus among administrators, voting rights advocates, elected officials, and elections scholars that the country needs more voter education. This includes not only education about the candidates and the issues, but information on how to register, how to cast a ballot, provisional balloting, and how to use the voting system machinery. Voters need education, too, on their voting rights under the law (especially the disabled and minority language voters). As the National Commission on Federal Election Reform Report noted, “Some administrators believe, with cause, that they can get more improvements, dollar for dollar, from voter education and poll worker training than they can from investments in new equipment.” The Democratic Caucus Special Committee on Election Reform report also urged increased voter education efforts, especially targeted to new voters. The Caltech/MIT report supports increased voter education, including the publication of sample ballots and establishment of instructional areas at polling places to reduce the number of lost votes. Other organizations that called for additional voter education included the League of Women Voters, the Constitution Project, and the NAACP

There is much evidence to suggest that giving voters proper instructions, through education and well-trained poll workers, is one of the most effective ways to protect the integrity of the vote. As an analyst for the Florida Division of Elections said, “‘Human error is the biggest threat to the integrity of any voting system. Even with your crudest systems, if the human does everything they’re supposed to, that system will work.’”

This conclusion is demonstrated by the reports we commissioned. For example, Los Angeles still uses the punch card ballot system, just like Florida. Yet at the same time, Los Angeles invests a great deal in a comprehensive voter education process—it is one of the best in the country. Moreover, it stepped up its voter education activities even more for the 2001 election, undertaking a public campaign called “Got Chad?” As a result, Los Angeles’ record of lost votes was much better than Florida’s and many other states that used punch card machines in 2000.

Miami also used punch card ballots again in its mayoral election in 2001. In the 2001 primary, however, in addition to regular poll workers, each polling site had a “tutor” to demonstrate how to use the punch card machine properly. The residual ballot rate was greatly improved over 2000. Then, in the runoff, every poll worker was also given a script to read to voters telling them they could not vote for more than one candidate and reminding them to check their ballots for hanging chads. Citywide, only 1.28 percent of ballots were discarded because of overvoting or undervoting. In the five precincts with the highest number of uncounted ballots in the primary election, where spoilage rates had been between 9 percent and 15 percent, in 2000, the rates plummeted to between 0.29 percent and 2.7 percent. . . .

In light of what transpired during the 2001 elections, it will certainly be interesting to observe how the country fares in the elections of 2002 and 2004. Except perhaps among activists involved in the issue, there seems to have been quite a lull in public interest or worry about the topic of election reform, especially with the advent of the nation’s war on terrorism. Perhaps that is the reason why the jurisdictions that performed relatively well on Election Day 2001 were ones that already had progressive systems in place and had made some further improvements immediately after the 2000 election, such as Los Angeles and Virginia. Jurisdictions such as New York City and New Jersey, operating with somewhat retrograde systems to begin with and stymied by both politics and budget shortfalls— especially after September 11—continue to be at a distinct disadvantage. Numerous other states and cities throughout the country find themselves in a position similar to that of New York City and New Jersey: they had faulty systems prior to the election of 2000, and then after that election made it clear how severe the problems were, they lacked the political wherewithal and/or the funding to take any strong measures to fix the problems.

(Ronald Hayduk, The 2001 Elections in New York City [pdf 348 KB]. A Century Foundation Report for The National Commission on Federal Election Reform. xviii-xxi,emphasis added.)

LANGUAGE MINORITY VOTERS

One of the most serious though under-reported problems with the American election system is the lack of accessibility to the polls for language minority voters. It is difficult to quantify the number of minority language voters who are wrongfully and often illegally disenfranchised because required measures are not taken to assist them in voting. However, there was plenty of anecdotal evidence of such disenfranchisement in the 2000 election. For example, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that several thousand Spanish speaking voters were disenfranchised in Florida, as well as a large number of French-speaking Haitian voters. The commission reported, “Many poll workers were not properly trained to handle language assistance issues. Some voters found that even when volunteers were available to provide assistance, the volunteers or precinct workers were prevented from providing language assistance. In some instances, bilingual poll workers were directed to not provide language assistance to voters who were in need of that assistance.” As the two most diverse cities in the country, Los Angeles and New York City both face enormous challenges with respect to language minority voters: each has more minority voters than the states of New Jersey and Virginia combined.

Congressman Xavier Becerra testified before a Senate committee that fourteen poll sites in Los Angeles did not display or make available bilingual materials provided to them. At the same time, Los Angeles does a great deal to prepare for the complexities involved in administering an election that requires it to provide voting materials in seven different languages. The city works directly with the communities and ensures there are sufficient bilingual poll workers and translators at voting sites. The ongoing challenges Los Angeles faces are cultural ones—helping new immigrants understand the system politically and administratively. As a result, this and other similarly situated jurisdictions must focus their voter education efforts particularly on new immigrant voters. In addition, Los Angeles was hindered by its use of punch card ballots, which cannot provide ballot choices in a large number of languages as easily as other technologies. . . .

Not only are many poll workers unprepared to provide adequate services to language minority voters, particularly Asian Americans, but New York City also continues to experience a dearth of bilingual workers at the polls, despite increased efforts at recruitment. In 2001, the city was short 122 Chinese interpreters out of a total of 483 positions, 256 Spanish interpreters out of a total of 779 positions, and 19 Korean interpreters out of a total of 32 positions. New Jersey encountered a similar problem in 2001. In one county that must provide materials in Spanish, instructions in Spanish on the absentee ballots were reversed, so that voters were told to place their mark below (abajo) their preferred candidate rather than the correct way, above (sobre). Many of those ballots were counted when the votes were tallied, thus potentially distorting the result.

(Ronald Hayduk, The 2001 Elections in New York City [pdf 348 KB]. A Century Foundation Report for The National Commission on Federal Election Reform. xvi-xviii.)

POLLING SITE PROBLEMS

Another major problem highlighted during the 2000 election was the large number of people who for one reason or another were unable to cast a vote when they arrived at polling stations. For some, it was because their names were not on the voter registration list. According to a study by the organization Demos, “In at least 25 states, inaccurate or purged lists prevented some eligible voters from casting ballots.” For voters in jurisdictions that do not allow for provisional ballots in lieu of voting on the machines, this meant they had no opportunity to vote regardless of whether the error was theirs or that of the election administrators. According to the Caltech/MIT report, “We lost between one-and-a-half and three million votes because of the registration process in 2000. According to the U.S. Census, Current Population Survey, 7.4 percent of the forty million registered voters who did not vote stated that they did not vote because of registration problems.”

Other voters were discouraged because their polling sites were moved, poll workers gave out faulty information, or lines were too long. Again, according to Caltech/MIT, “We lost between 500,000 and 1.2 million votes because of polling place operations. According to the U.S. Census, Current Population Survey, 2.8 percent of the forty million registered voters who did not vote in 2000 stated that they did not vote because of problems with polling place operations such as lines, hours, or locations.” . . .

In New York City, there were still many problems at voting sites, but due to new funding, fewer than in previous years. Among the major problems were poll worker shortages, consolidated—and thus fewer—polling sites, a shortage of voting machines, and machine breakdowns, all leading to inadvertent but wrongful disenfranchisement. The worst problem may have been poorly informed poll workers. Although New Jersey’s complex and decentralized system makes it difficult to assess poll site problems, there clearly were some. By far the most troubling were incidents of outright voter intimidation aimed at minority voters. In the very jurisdiction being monitored by the Department of Justice because of past problems, many Latino voters received a threatening postcard warning them about election laws and claiming that there would be armed monitors at the polls. In addition, county administrators reported problems with poll workers who withheld information about the availability of provisional ballots. When provisional ballots were made available, poll workers failed to give voters instructions on how to cast those ballots. On the positive side, an increase in poll worker pay greatly increased the number of available poll workers. . . .

Cases of outright voter intimidation need to be addressed through federal law enforcement. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) does an admirable job of trying to monitor elections and pursue violations of the voting rights laws. Yet, intimidation occurred in a federally monitored jurisdiction in New Jersey in 2001. It may well be, therefore, that the federal government needs to bolster its commitment to monitoring elections and pursuing enforcement actions. . . .

(Ronald Hayduk, The 2001 Elections in New York City [pdf 348 KB]. A Century Foundation Report for The National Commission on Federal Election Reform. xiii-xvi, emphasis added.)

VOTES LOST BY THE VOTING SYSTEM

Perhaps the most widely publicized problem in the 2000 election was the number of votes that were not counted because of voting system errors (often called “spoiled” or “residual” ballots). As researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Caltech/MIT) found, “two million ballots, or two percent of the 100 million ballots cast for president in 2000, were not counted because they were unmarked, spoiled, or ambiguous. Of this two percent it is estimated that 0.5 percent did not intend to vote for president, so 1.5 percent (or 1.5 million people) thought they voted for president but their votes were not counted.” As widely re ported in numerous articles and reports, certain technologies seemed consistently to perform better than others, with punch card ballot machines singled out as the worst culprit when it came to lost votes. Studies also showed that more votes were lost in poor and minority jurisdictions, and some reports found that inferior voting systems were disproportionately located in poor and minority jurisdictions.

In the elections analyzed in our reports, Los Angeles and Virginia fared considerably better than New Jersey and New York City with respect to spoiled ballots. Although Los Angeles widely used the notorious punch card ballots, the city initiated an intensive voter education program in the wake of the 2000 experience and succeeded in reducing the number of residual ballots in the 2001 mayoral election to about 1 percent, down from the national average of about 2 percent the previous year. Virginia, which already had an uncounted ballot rate below the national average in 2000, also cut its level in half in 2001, largely by instituting new technology that enabled voters to verify and correct their ballot choices if necessary, even if they used punch card systems. . . .

Thus, the 2001 elections reinforce evidence that the type of voting machinery employed is not necessarily the most significant factor affecting the rate of spoiled ballots. Even the alleged main culprit of the 2000 debacle, punch card ballots, performed well when voter education efforts were undertaken in Los Angeles and when they included technology that allowed a voter to double check and correct his or her vote, as in Virginia. By contrast, only New Jersey replaced punch card machines with little apparent effect. New York City was able to improve the performance of its thirty-eight-year-old lever machines to some extent by investing in poll workers. The success of these efforts, however, does not mean that old machines should be left in place eternally. Evidence suggests that optical scan and Direct Recording Electronic systems (DREs) perform better than other methods when technologies are assessed overall. More advanced technologies generally do produce better results. Moreover, electronic forms of voting have the potential to make it easier for the disabled and citizens who have difficulty reading English to vote. For example, such technology can include ballots in unlimited numbers of languages and facilitate private polling place voting by the blind. The main lesson, though, is that replacement of machinery is not enough; it should be part of a menu of reforms.

(Ronald Hayduk, The 2001 Elections in New York City [pdf 348 KB]. A Century Foundation Report for The National Commission on Federal Election Reform. xi-xiii, emphasis added.)

We have an ongoing problem with racism and elections that has been amplified by recent technological developments. Presuming we remove the technological impediments to fair elections, I don't foresee substantive improvement in African American access to voting without a broad based administrative response to racist machinations at the polls. We will establish more laws and improve technology to support the intent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the basic racist framework will remain intact.

Desegregation without integration.

Allow the legal principle but resist the social reality by every means possible, whether it be bureaucratic obstructionism, underhanded schemes of disenfranchisement, or overt hostility and intimidation.

You may not have read far enough in my lengthy post on voting rights and James Forman's book to read the above. But this was what I really wanted to impress upon my readers. Instead of writing another post to say this in a more focused way, I've been writing it in the comments at other blogs. Over at Body and Soul I wrote:

my point is that the problems with voting far exceed those with the electronic machines. Yes we need paper trails, but if that's all we focus on, there will still be mass disenfranchisement of minorities. . . . It's not just about Florida. It's about the whole country and it's espeically about districts that are predominantly African American, whether in NJ, Florida, Tennessee, or NYC.

This is also question of emphasis. I think the emphasis should be a little less on "keeping the Republicans from stealing the election" and a little more on making voting democratic. It's easy to dismiss cries of election theft as partisan sour grapes. But fair elections—truly inclusive elections—is profoundly non partisan. If that becomes the issue politicians have to answer to, they will look a lot worse if they oppose or passively obstruct it.

And from earlier in the same thread:

Our national electoral system is very broken. To name just a few of the problems:

•decentralized systems [pdf] with appalingly little coordination between localities and state authorities

•understaffed polling places and poll workers who are improperly trained if they are trained at all

•unequal distribution of financial resources for functional voting technology, voter education and poll worker training

The opportunities for fraud and manipulation are rife, and it's reasonable to assume corrupt Republicans and corrupt Democrats alike will take advantage when and where they can. Rather than trying to determine which party is more corrupt we should focus on which people are losing out of the democratic process: minorities—especially African Americans—and poor people.

There is here grist for a more research filled post, but that will have to wait a little while—at which point I'll also explain where this post's title comes from.

Dr. Gwendolyn Patton, veteran of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is featured on Emory University's Southern Spaces.

Gwen Patton never imagined herself as an archivist until her grandparents began giving her their memorabilia from the Civil Rights Movement. She then realized the need for a grassroots archive for local students and community members. At Trenholm State Technical College, Patton helped establish the only archive in America at a two-year community college. Here she discusses the reasons why Trenholm State has this archive, the problems she has overcome to establish the archive, and what the archive has taught her and can teach the community.

The feature consists of two short videos (Real Player), Dr. Patton talking about herself and the history of the archive (9:57) and then giving a tour of the archive (3:54).

A choice quote from Dr. Patton:

They said, "well why this college, this two year college?" . . . the students at this college, mainly first generation . . . high school GED students . . . they are the original, the authentic heirs of the grassroots people who marched and walked and protested . . . and they have ownership of these materials.

Also take a moment to look at the archive's Collections Online.

We must both modernize the machinery of voting and improve procedures for the administration of elections. Both of these issues deserve significant attention and funding at the federal level.
—Wade Henderson, Executive Director, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

[T]he State spends $30 million annually to instruct people on how to buy lottery tickets but allocates nothing for statewide voter education programs.
—A member of Governor Jeb Bush’s task force on election reform in Florida

Previously, in writing about voting rights in Florida, I also talked about a broader state of emergency that exists throughout the US. I pointed to how the systems set into place by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) were not currently adequate to address the existing problems before this November's elections. I cited the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) April 2004 study that showed how the funding for HAVA initiatives has not been disbursed to the states and how the necessary federal oversight has not been provided. I focused on the two systemic problems in Florida that have led to mass disenfranchisement of African American voters: purged voter rolls and spoiled ballots. Regarding the latter problem, where ballots are cast but not counted, I noted that the USCCR found that "Statewide, [in Florida,] based upon county-level statistical estimates, black voters were nearly 10 times more likely than nonblack voters to have their ballots rejected." I alluded to but did not get into other problems, such as the ones detailed in first hand accounts in Chapter 2 of the 2001 USCCR report:

• Voters not on the rolls and unable to appeal
• Polling places closed early or moved without notice
• Voters who registered through motor voter programs did not appear on the voting rolls
• Numerous problems with absentee ballots
• Possible intimidation of African American voters by Florida Highway Patrol officers

Though these problems, reported by many individual citizens, were not unique to Florida, it is hard to say exactly how pervasive they were. When it comes to spoiled ballots, however, we know the statistics in Florida hold widely in the US. The following graph [pdf] is from Democracy Spoiled, a study released in July, 2002 by the Harvard University Civil Rights Project.

This graph is "based on data collected from Election Data Services, Secretaries of State, and local county election officials" everywhere it was available in the United States. The researchers found that ballot spoilage increases proportionally with the size of the black population in a given county. The more blacks, the more spoiled ballots. I have some more to say about this, but first I want to tell you about a book that I've been reading.

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James Baldwin, Joan Baez, and James Forman (left to right) enter Montgomery, Alabama on the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights, 1965.

For a while now, I've been reading around in James Forman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries via its index. Recently, I started reading the book from the beginning. I already knew that it is a valuable book, but now, a little more than 100 pages in, wow. This is another one of those books about an African American born early in the 20th century who managed to have first hand experience of many of the cultural and historical currents of African American life in the first half of the 20th Century. I'm thinking of books like Ellison's Invisible Man, and also Lawrence Jackson's excellent biography of Ellison, and Barbara Ransby's important biography of Ella Baker.

Forman's book is also fabulous writing. Forman makes no literary pretensions, but his book is a deeply literary one. In addition to being a fine memoirist and historian, Forman is a master of voices—his interior emotional and philosophical voce, his documentarian voice, the voices of regular folks, the voices of eloquent orators like MLK and Bayard Rustin—he can write them all. The book is written in what are usually short, always well-paced episodes, often ordered in forceful juxtapositions while they also reproduce chronology.

Forman was part of the Southern black migration to northern cities: he lived his early childhood with his grandmother in rural Mississippi. At age 6, he joined his parents in Chicago, still spending many summers in Mississippi. Foreman served in the Air Force for three years between WWII and the Korean War and was one of the black soldiers who was used as a test case in the desegregation of our armed forces. By the time he was 16, in 1944, Foreman had already become radicalized on the subject of race:

I was aware of my blackness and my inability to take any shit of any white man. And I was reading Richard Wright. I did not accept, but I understood fairly well the society's conception of my role and status: I was a nigger, a Negro. At the same time I would rather die like a man than take insults off crackers. Not me. (35)

In the 50s in college and graduate school, Forman developed a sophisticated revolutionary ideology, inspired by thinkers like Fanon, Sartre, Richard Wright, DuBois and Frederick Douglas, by African liberation movements abroad, and by developments at home like the Montgomery bus boycott and the Brown vs. Board of Education legal victory against segregated schools.

At around this time, in the mid to late 50s, there was an increasing number of Americans, black and white, who all started to coming to conclusions like James Forman did:

We cannot fight racism and exploitation once we are dead. Action is necessary and me must carry it out now, for death always faces us—it is the only certainty in life. When people overcome the fear of death, then and only then are they willing to lay down their lives for humanity. We as black people must develop the love for humanity which will make us act in the name of justice and die for the future of blacks and all humanity, for we are an indivisible part of mankind. (108)

Arkansas National Guardsmen keep black students out of school (Will Counts)

By 1961, Forman had become the Executive Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC), but before that, starting in the mid 1950s, he took an individual interest in events and struggles relevant to the lives of African Americans. While he was still living in Chicago and attending Roosevelt University, he attended the 1956 Democratic National Convention and watched the newly formed Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, headed by Roy Wilkins, fail in its attempt to add a civil rights plank to the Democratic platform.

In September of 1958, Forman traveled from Boston, where he was attending graduate school, to Little Rock, Arkansas to involve himself in the struggle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School.

In The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Forman has an insight about Southerners' resistance to integration in the 1950s.

I learned that the Southerners believed integration meant the total acceptance of the American Negro in the American way of life. Desegregation meant the removal of the legal barriers that prevented Negroes from having access to the American way of life.

I became convinced that Southerners deliberately fostered this distinction between integration and desegregation as a rationale for evading the 1954 Supreme Court decision. For instance, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 said that Southern schools should be desegregated. That is a legal question, a legal right which is indisputable. However, when you twist the removal of legal barriers to mean that one must accept (how gracious) us totally into the American way of life, then the justification for hostility increases. (91-92)

In Little Rock, Forman wrote news stories for the Chicago Defender. He interviewed one of the students who was supposed to enter Central High, who noted a similar distinction, put in personal, socio-economic terms.

She had been writing on a pad before I came into the room and left it on a chair. I glanced at it later and saw that she had written, "Is it dignity to be able to go into a five-and-ten-cent store and buy a coffee pot, but not be able to buy a cup of coffee?" (113)

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"Why, in the county where my friend lives, the Negras are nine to one and his father is the sheriff of that county. Do you think if the Negras had the right to vote that they would elect his father as sheriff? We got the power and we intend to keep it." (Forman, 92)

Georgia, Illinois and Texas all had more spoiled ballots than Florida. Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wyoming all had higher rates of ballot spoilage than Florida. (Chart from Democracy Spoiled: AL-MT, NC-WY). And there were significant rates of ballot spoilage in many other states. You can follow the links to the chart and see the rest of the numbers, but consider this warning from the authors of the study:

This “where the missing ballots are” approach is useful in considering where improvements in election system performance will contribute most to assuring the greatest possible number of citizens that their votes will be counted. On the other hand, this is a very different agenda from ensuring that each state is as successful as they should be at treating all voters equally, or that voters in different states are treated equally. (2)

Let's look at that graph from the Civil Rights Project again. The more blacks, the more spoiled ballots. But also notice that as the percent of blacks increases, the variance among counties also increases. When you get to counties where the spoilage rate is upwards of 14%, you also have counties in the same state with almost no votes lost. States like Florida that have among the worst rates of spoilage also have counties with with excellent, near zero spoilage rates. To be clear, the Harvard study finds that "as the white voting age population in a county increases, the spoiled ballot rate correspondingly decreases."

Examining the 100 counties with the worst (highest) spoilage rates nationwide, our analysis also found that 67 of these have black populations above 12%. Of the top 100 counties with the best performance (lowest spoilage), the reverse is true – only 10 had sizeable black populations, while the population of 70 of the counties was over 75% white. (8)

Thus you can have states like Virginia. Virginia's state-wide spoilage rate is 1.91%, just slightly below the national average of 1.94%. That's a lot better than Florida, whose state-wide average is 2.95%. But these state averages are virtually meaningless. In Florida there are predominantly white counties with rates as low as .27% and predominantly black counties with rates as high as 12%. Though Florida is above average and Virginia is "below average," the disparities in Virginia are similar to those in Florida.

In Virginia, there are some counties with rates as low as .37% and others with rates as high as 10%. (5-6)

And the problem does not abate merely by taking income, education and other factors into consideration. In Florida, racial disparities in ballot spoilage across counties persisted even when comparing counties with identical income, education, and other factors. Taken together, these statistics reveal the persisting vote dilution of blacks on a county, state, and national level. (8)

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John Lewis, the SNCC leader from Nashville via Troy, Alabama . . . debarked with Birmingham's Katherine Burke onto the loading dock. As they talked into the NBC cameras, a hundred white men and women surged around the bus, swinging metal pipes, bats, and pocketbooks. . . . Some of the twenty-one students still on board suggested exiting through the back door to placate the mob, but Jim Zwerg, a white dentist's son from Wisconsin in his junior year at Fisk, led the way out the front.

"Filthy Communists, nigger lovers, you're not going to integrate Montgomery," someone shouted as Zwerg took the first blows. . . .

The only law enforcement presence was a stone-faced FBI agent, writing his description of the flying bodies on a bureau notepad. (Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 228)

If you follow blogs like Election Law, Votelaw and Florida Politics, you can get a pretty steady flow of alarming stories about touch screen voting machines, punch card ballots, and shady election practices. And one should be alarmed. Very alarmed. We can be thankful that there is some very good legal work and organizing being done by groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, American Civil Liberties Union and Black Box Voting.

Even if these important organizations are as successful as we need them to be, we will still face problems in making sure that African American votes get counted.

[T]echnological improvements in the voting machinery alone do not solve the problem of ballot spoilage, and often are not even the most important improvement. Studies by researchers at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin both found that ballot spoilage rates and disparities are still significant, even when controlling for voting technology. Evidence from the study by the Government Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives supports these findings, noting that while improved voting technology reduces the percentage of discarded ballots across the board, these improvements still do not fully address the disparities between voting precincts, particularly between high-minority and low-minority districts. (Democracy Spoiled, 9, emphasis in original)

African American ballots spoil within a broader framework of strategies to keep African Americans and other minorities from voting. Spoiled ballots are the end result of a broader set of problems that range from unequal distribution of resources to African American communities to a range of seedy tactics to hinder African American voting. Ballot spoilage and voter roll purges are important issues partly because they allow us to quantify the effects of racism on voting. There is no way to measure the number of votes lost to intimidation and trickery.

• In Louisiana, flyers were distributed in African American communities stating, "Vote!!! Bad Weather? No problem!!! If the weather is uncomfortable on election day [Saturday, December 7th], remember you can wait and cast your ballot on Tuesday, December 10th."
• In Texas, two poll watchers representing U.S. Senate candidate (and now Senator) John Cornyn were removed from their polling places because they were engaged in acts of voter intimidation, including making racist remarks.
• In Arkansas, five Republican poll watchers, including two staff members of Senator Tim Hutchinson's office, were present at the courthouse in Pine Bluff – a heavily Democratic area – for the first day of early voting. They allegedly focused exclusively on African Americans, asking them for identification and taking photographs. They claimed to be "targeting anybody who does not have an ID to prove who they are." Trey Ashcraft, chairperson of the Jefferson County Democratic Party and the Jefferson County Election Commission said the tactics caused some frustrated black voters to not vote. "They are trying to intimidate African American voters into not voting." Guy Cecil, a Democrat coordinating national efforts with Arkansas' campaigns, said, "They were literally going up to them and saying, 'Before you vote, I want to see your identification.'" Cecil said that under Arkansas law poll watchers could not confront voters. Local law enforcement officials escorted the poll watchers out, but they later returned.
• In Maryland, an unsigned flier circulated in African American neighborhoods in Baltimore spread false information aimed at suppressing voter turnout. The flier read "URGENT NOTICE. Come out to vote on November 6th. Before you come to vote make sure you pay your parking tickets, motor vehicle tickets, overdue rent and most important any warrants.

This is the short list from 2002. There were many more examples [pdf] of these kinds of occurrences across the country, North and South. They are not recent developments. People for the American Way and the NAACP just released a special report, The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today (via Prometheus 6), showing that the examples above are part of a persistent trend that began with the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Though many of the oppressive methods of segregation were successfully eradicated, new ways to curtail minority political power evolved. The Voting Rights Act and federal enforcement methods provided newly empowered voting rights activists with powerful tools to combat these efforts, but they persisted nonetheless. Strong organizing and a commitment to change patterns of social injustice were needed, but so was continued federal presence and more legislation and litigation. (16)

We have an ongoing problem with racism and elections that has been amplified by recent technological developments. Presuming we remove the technological impediments to fair elections, I don't foresee substantive improvement in African American access to voting without a broad based administrative response to racist machinations at the polls. We will establish more laws and improve technology to support the intent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the basic racist framework will remain intact.

Desegregation without integration.

Allow the legal principle but resist the social reality by every means possible, whether it be bureaucratic obstructionism, underhanded schemes of disenfranchisement, or overt hostility and intimidation.

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We now live in a society where pervasive, violent racism is no longer the norm. Progressives and conservatives congratulate themselves for living in a color blind society. If many African Americans still face difficulties, it's largely because they've abdicated responsibility for themselves—or so the argument goes. People who make this faulty assumption have the freedom to do so thanks to the risks and sacrifices of the likes of James Forman, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Katherine Burke, James Zwerg, the Little Rock 9, and many others we can name from the annals of Civil Rights Movement history. And also thanks to many, many others whose names we don't know.

In the Fall of 1960, James Forman went to Fayette County, Tennessee because

a group of black farmers . . . were fighting desperately against the White Citizens Council. Because they dared to register and to vote in the United States in 1959-60, seven hundred sharecropping families in Fayette and Haywood counties found themselves evicted from lands where they had lived and farmed for decades. Black farmers found themselves unable to purchase groceries, medical supplies, and gasoline (vital to those who had tractors) or to obtain crop loans to buy seed and fertilizers for anticipated harvests. Local clinics refused to give medical treatment. Anyone on the council's blacklist (let's change that word to whitelist) was subjected to a total boycott by the white people who ran the banks and owned most of the stores. (Forman, 126)

The evicted sharecroppers moved into tents on donated land—what became known as Tent City. One of the sharecroppers was Georgia Mae Turner. On Christmas night, 1960 Forman tape recorded Ms. Turner talking with him in her tent.

They say if you register, you going to have a hard time. Well I had a a hard time before I registered. Hard times, you could have named me Georgia Mae Hard Times. The reason I registered, because I want to be a citizen. Mr. Ferdie Franklin told me I had as much right to register and vote as anybody else. This here is a free country, that's what he told me. I registered so that my children could get their freedom. I don't figure it would do me no good. (126)

Georgia Mae Turner didn't bear up against the elements in her tent and against gunshots so we could congratulate ourselves over our progress. She did it so her children could get their freedom.

Further reading

• America's Election Snafus: 2001-2002 (People for the American Way)
• Defending the Vote: NAACP Voter Empowerment 2001-02 Election Reform Report [pdf 3.5 MB]
• Income and Racial Disparities in the Undercount in the 2000 Presidential Election (Minority Staff Special Investigations Division Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives) [pdf]
• Voting Technologies in the United States: Overview and Issues for Congress (Congressional Research Service) [pdf 140 KB]

Yesterday I exchanged some interesting emails with Susan Klopfer, who, with her husband son Barry, will soon be publishing Uncivil Rights ... Where Rebels Roost .

Susan and Barry run The Middle of the Internet, a bookstore and information site on Civil Rights and the Delta Blues. It's one of those websites with lots of links that take you to other pages with still more links to all kinds of information, including primary documents from their book, which is a wide ranging history of Civil Rights in the Delta. The Middle of the Internet is well worth some of your time. Check it out. . .

corrected 9/7/04

via Florida Politics.

Rights delayed and likely denied
St. Petersburg Times Editorial
Published July 26, 2004

Gov. Jeb Bush appears to be deliberately trying to frustrate a recent appellate court ruling directing the Department of Corrections to assist former inmates in getting their civil rights restored. The governor, it appears, would rather obfuscate and delay than implement the court's directive. The likely result will be that thousands of released felons will be left in the dark as to how to get their right to vote back.

In response to a lawsuit filed by the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators, the 1st District Court of Appeal unanimously ruled earlier this month that the process currently employed by the department to assist inmates in the restoration of their right to vote was flawed. Although one part of the application was electronically sent to the Board of Executive Clemency, the vast bulk of inmates also needed another form to be sent. That form would start the process for an eventual hearing - a step necessary for 85 percent of inmates. The court directed the department to begin assisting inmates who were about to be released with the submission of this form.

But rather than comply, Bush abolished the form. Now, in order for these inmates to get their voting rights back, they will have to wait for the clemency office to inform them in writing that they should get in touch with the office to begin the process. Because former inmates tend to be a transient population it can sometimes take months and years for mail to eventually find them. This will undoubtedly cause many felons who wish to get their rights restored to slip through the cracks. There are currently between 400,000 and 700,000 felons in the state without voting rights.

Whole thing.

via Florida Politics.

Ezzie Thomas . . . said that elderly voters from Orlando's west side are scared to cast ballots in the fall elections since being questioned by FDLE [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] agents.

He said the agency is working for Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, who is trying to make sure his brother President Bush wins re-election in November.

"It's because of the presidential election coming down the pike," Thomas said. "It's going to be a close race. If you can water down the African-American vote, which tends to go Democrat, you might tip the scales."

Thomas, a 73-year-old retired small-business owner, is president of the Orange County Voters League, a nonpartisan volunteer group that encourages minority voting.

FDLE investigators have questioned four women who volunteer with that group: Geraldine Jordan, Charlene Crume, Mamie Powell and Willie Thomas. They said Saturday that they worked on behalf of the Voters League -- not Dyer's campaign -- to get people to the polls and collect absentee ballots.

On Saturday, the women said the FDLE had sullied their reputations and the work of the Voters League. State agents have questioned many voters in the black community, the women said, including elderly people who can remember being discouraged from voting when they were younger.

"These are the people they seem to be preying on: older people who may be voting for the first time in their lives," Willie Thomas said.

One elderly voter said in a written statement that she felt intimidated after a visit from the FDLE: "The man informed me that I was part of a criminal investigation. I asked if I had done anything wrong and the man answered 'yes and no.' "

(emphasis added)

Read the whole thing and you'll see that Ezzie Thomas, head of the Orange County Voters League, has been accused of manipulating absentee ballots. The accusation sounds like Jeb Bush and Co. playing hardball.The charges are questionable, involving a total of four or five ballots, and came up in the context of Thomas' helping elderly voters to vote.

Last week on the House floor, Representative Corrine Brown (D FL) accused her Republican colleagues of stealing the 2000 presidential election. Her outburst was in response to Representative Steven Buyer's (R IND) proposed amendment to HR4818, relating to "appropriations for foreign operations, export financing, and related programs." Buyer's amendment (H.AMDT.701) required "that none of the funds made available in the Act may be used by any official of the United States Government to request the United Nations to assess the validity of elections in the United States." This amendment was meant as a means to obstruct the request that Corrine Brown and seven other members of Congress made in a letter to Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations on July 1, 2004. In their letter, the eight Representatives requested that the Electoral Assistance Division of the United Nations Department of Political Affairs "send election observers to monitor the presidential election in the United States scheduled for November 2, 2004." "We are deeply concerned," the Representatives wrote, "that the right of U.S. citizens to vote in free and fair elections is again in jeopardy."

As you may know, the 2000 presidential election was steeped in controversy. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan federal agency, investigated widespread allegations of voter disenfranchisement and questionable practices in the state of Florida relating to the purging of names from voter registration lists, methods of balloting, and the independence of counting and certification procedures. In a report released in June 2001, the Commission found that the electoral process in Florida resulted in the denial of the right to vote for countless persons and further that the "disenfranchisement of Florida's voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of black voters" and in poor counties.

It was not shocking that the Republican majority of the House unanimously voted to support Buyer's amendment. What was surprising was that 33 House Democrats also supported Buyer's amendment. If the 33 Democratic supporters of Buyer's amendment had reservations about the UN, a vote against Buyer's amendment would not have been a certain road to UN monitoring of US elections. A no vote, however, would have demonstrated support for the reenfranchisement of African American voters. A no vote would have made a show of understanding the state of emergency of the electoral system in Florida and in the nation as a whole—a state of emergency that federal and state measures will not be able to redress by this November. In 2001, in response to the tragic 2000 election, the Democratic National Committee formed the Voting Rights Institute as an "all out effort to ensure democracy is not denied in future elections" (press release). If there's been an all out effort in the last three years, there has not yet been any respectable advancement in guaranteeing the civil rights of African American voters in Florida.

            ***         ***         ***
Let's review some of the well known and some of the not so well known facts regarding the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections in Florida. There was a staggering array of problems in Florida's 2000 elections, far too numerous to list here. To get the whole picture, read the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) 2001 report, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election. I am only going to touch upon a few of the problems found by the USCCR in their investigation, primarily spoiled ballots—ballots that were cast but not counted—and purged voter roles.

Regarding vote spoilage the USSCR found:

The disenfranchisement of Florida’s voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of black voters. The magnitude of the impact can be seen from any of several perspectives:

•Statewide, based upon county-level statistical estimates, black voters were nearly 10 times more likely than nonblack voters to have their ballots rejected.

•Estimates indicate that approximately 14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 1.6 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted.

•Statistical analysis shows that the disparity in ballot spoilage rates—i.e., ballots cast but not counted—between black and nonblack voters is not the result of education or literacy differences. This conclusion is supported by Governor Jeb Bush’s Select Task Force on Election Procedures, Standards and Technology, which found that error rates stemming from uneducated, uninformed, or disinterested voters account for less than 1 percent of the problems.

•Approximately 11 percent of Florida voters were African American; however, African Americans cast about 54 percent of the 180,000 spoiled ballots in Florida during the November 2000 election based on estimates derived from county-level data. These statewide estimates were corroborated by the results in several counties based on actual precinct data.

In anticipation of the November 2002 elections in Florida, the USCCR issued a briefing summary, Voting Rights in Florida 2002. The USCCR noted that

It was important for the Commission to revisit Florida to discuss the implementation and likely impact of Florida’s reforms. Unfortunately, the Commission found that the governor, the secretary of state, and other state elected officials are no longer willing to discuss voting rights and election reform.

On June 20, 2002, the USCCR held a briefing in Miami and heard testimony from "state and national organizations, local election officials, policy analysts, and voting rights organizations on the scope and implementation of the election reforms adopted in Florida." None of the high ranking state officials mentioned above showed up. After hearing the testimonies, the USCCR expressed substantial concerns that Florida's reforms did not:

•Remove the burden from the voter to prove registration status.

•Allow automatic restoration of voting rights to former felons who satisfied their sentences.

•Establish uniform hours for polling places.

The Commission was also alarmed that:

•Purging errors are still likely because the Division of Elections has not provided step-by-step instructions on how supervisors of elections should verify the accuracy of any information that may purge a voter from the central voter file.

•Sufficient funding for voter education, poll worker training, and the timely replacement of voting machinery to reduce ballot rejection or spoilage rates is uncertain.

•The absence of a process and timetable for identifying and promptly reinstating voters erroneously purged from voter rolls in 2000 may continue to disenfranchise voters.

November 1, 2002, on the eve of the 2002 Florida elections, Greg Palast published an exclusive article in Salon.com, Jeb Bush's Secret Weapon. Palast wrote:

There's another close race in Florida. This time, younger brother Jeb is fighting to fend off a challenge from Bill McBride for the governor's race. The Nov. 5 face-off could again come down to thousands, if not hundreds, of votes.

And even though the list has been widely condemned -- the company that created it admits probable errors -- the same voter scrub list, with more than 94,000 names on it, is still in operation in Florida. Moreover, DBT Online, which generated the disastrously flawed list, reports that if it followed strict criteria to eliminate those errors, roughly 3,000 names would remain -- and a whopping 91,000 people would have their voting rights restored.

Eventually the list will be fixed, state officials have promised, in accordance with a settlement with the NAACP in its civil rights suit against Florida following the 2000 election. But not until the beginning of next year -- and after Jeb Bush's reelection bid is long over. . . .

The state's list, most of which has been obtained and reviewed by Salon, contains such alleged criminals as Thomas Cooper, whose inclusion on the list represents either the dawning of a "Minority Report"-era of predicting criminal behavior -- or a glaring error. According to the list, Cooper is listed as a felon convicted on Jan. 30, 2007. In all, the list includes more than 400 people whose crimes were apparently committed in the future. More than 8,000 on the list have no conviction date at all. And eight, remarkably, appear to have been convicted before they were even born. . . .

The racial bent of the scrub list and its particular bias against Democrats -- was a foreseeable result of the purge methodology. African-Americans account for approximately 46 percent of felony convictions in the United States, so it's no surprise that ChoicePoint's report for the NAACP on its scrub lists found that less than half of those on the Florida list are identified as white. (The Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires Florida to ask voters to state their race on registration forms.)

Florida's black voters are expected to cast ballots by at least 4-1 against Jeb Bush on Nov. 5, according to a recent Miami Herald poll. And a University of Minnesota study indicates that nine of 10 ex-cons, on leaving jail, vote Democratic, no matter their race.

Last Friday, a press release on Palast's blog stated:

The New York Times has reported that the State of Florida has stopped purging voters from registries. This is plain false, a canard traceable to the partisan office of the Florida Secretary of State.

In May, Governor Jeb Bush's appointed Secretary of State ordered local officials to begin removing 47,000 voters from registries, supposedly illegal "felon" voters. As in a similar list used in 2000, the new "purge" list turns out to contain few felons but many Democrats - four to one over targeted Republicans.

Excluding such innocent voters -- about half of them African American -- won Florida and the White House for the Bush family in 2000.

Given the problems which persisted in Florida, despite its legislature's passage in 2001 of the Florida Election Reform Act, it should have been encouraging that "The Commission urged Congress to act swiftly to set milestones and allocate sufficient funding for the development and delivery of federal election guidelines." However, "Congress did not act swiftly, but took two years to pass election reform legislation, and state implementation shows signs of being equally retarded."

Nearly two years after the November 2000 elections, and after a lengthy and divisive debate, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) [pdf], and President Bush signed it into law on October 29, 2002. . . .

HAVA authorizes distribution of $3.86 billion in federal aid over three fiscal years ($2.16 billion in 2003, $1.05 billion in 2004, and $650 million in 2005) to states for improving elections. HAVA sets dates and standards for rendering voting equipment, registration lists, and general election administration fair, accurate, and representative of the needs of America’s populace.

However, a year and a half since HAVA passed, many mandated milestones remain unmet. For example, HAVA required that, by 2004, states offer provisional ballots to voters, verify identities of first-time voters who register by mail, post voting information at polling places, and establish complaint procedures for cases in which voters experience problems at the polls. . . . [M]ost states have passed legislation necessary for those actions, but few have built the infrastructure, made purchases, or acted to implement all of the law’s requirements.

Although states are responsible for implementing election reform and ensuring compliance with HAVA, the federal government has the responsibility to provide funding and guidance to the states. ("Is America Ready To Vote: Election Readiness Briefing Paper," April 2004, 13 (pdf), web)

I have been reviewing a small subsection of Florida's failures in implementing election reform. "Is America Ready" also details the federal government's failures "to provide funding and guidance to the states."

By mid-June 2003, GSA [General Services Administration] had disbursed almost all of the $650 million in early money to the 55 jurisdictions covered by HAVA. Another $15 million was appropriated to reimburse some states that adopted new voting technology early. HHS [US Dept. of Health and Human Services] paid out $13 million to states for improving voting systems for individuals with disabilities, and another $2 million to state disability protection and advocacy systems. An additional $830 million appropriated in 2003 for “requirements payments” has not been distributed. Thus far, approximately 18 percent of the total $3.86 billion authorized (for fiscal years 2003–2005) has been distributed to states.
Without the money transferred to state coffers yet, it will be difficult if not impossible for states to have all systems in place by November. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) . . . was supposed to be established and acting independently within 120 days of HAVA’s passage (that is, by February 26, 2003). However, it was not until December 2003—nearly 10 months behind schedule—that its members were confirmed by Congress. EAC is responsible for reviewing and approving state grant requests. (Is America Ready, 15-16, emphasis added)

In its responsibility to provide guidance to states, the federal government has been alarmingly ineffectual:

Title III [of HAVA] directs EAC to adopt voluntary guidance for voting technology standards by January 1, 2004, for provisional voting by October 1, 2003, and for voter registration lists by October 1, 2003. HAVA establishes that the recommendations must be reviewed and updated at least once every four years. . . . EAC appointments were delayed 10 months; thus, it has not met any of the milestones so far. Nor has EAC begun a comprehensive review of the areas in which states are dependent on guidance before they act, such as equipment and registration list technology; it has offered no commitment for when it will make guidelines available. EAC met for the first time as a formal body on March 23, 2004, but it is still without office space, designated staff, or basic administrative infrastructure. (Is America Ready, 18, emphasis added)

At the same time that Florida, along with the other United States, lacks funding and oversight to properly administer required electoral reforms, there continue to be disconcerting flaws in the measures Florida has succeeded in taking. Just last month, Florida's Democratic Representative Robert Wexler issued a press release that included his June 8 letter to Florida's Attorney General, Charlie Crist:

[R]ecent developments in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties have fueled serious concerns about Florida's flawed elections system. A recent article printed on Saturday, May 15, 2004 in the Miami Herald cites that Election System & Software (ES&S), which makes touch-screen voting machines for Miami-Dade, Broward and the nine other ES&S counties, "will need to have to work around a glitch in the machines' auditing systems because the software that would correct it will not be certified by the state in time for the fall elections."

In order to solve this costly and widespread problem, laptops will apparently need to be purchased and attached to each of the 6,600 or so voting machines to extract voting information. The same format will be developed in Broward County where there are approximately 6,020 touch-screen voting machines. The error in this decision is that this process of extracting information from the touch-screen voting machines has not gone through the proper Florida certification standards that all other voting equipment must adhere to; therefore, it is unlikely that the problem will be fixed before Election Day (emphasis added).

Wexler goes on to enumerate questionable abdications of responsibility for these problems by Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood and Division of Elections Chief Ed Kast—officials who both refused to meet with the USCCR in 2002 to discuss voting rights and election reform.

Assesing the nation as a whole, the USCCR concludes:

[T]he potential is real and present for significant problems on voting day that once again will compromise the right to vote. Avoiding this will require unprecedented effort by all with authority and responsibility for implementing HAVA and voting generally, and will necessitate extraordinary cooperation and coordination between federal and state officials, as well as among various state and local officials.

The federal government could consider adopting an emergency posture and use all available means to ensure that every eligible citizen can vote and have his or her vote counted. Securing voting rights was the result of many acts of courage, determination, and sacrifice. When the right to vote is infringed, whether by poor planning or intentional actions, the nation as a whole suffers. As President Lyndon Johnson foreshadowed in 1965, the denial to any group of citizens the right to vote should raise concerns about the system’s integrity as a whole. (Is America Ready, 54)

To its own question, Is America Read to Vote?, the USCCR does not make a direct answer, but the findings in their April 2004 study add up to a resounding NO! If the suggestion here is that an "emergency posture" is needed "to ensure that every eligible citizen can vote and have his or her vote counted" in the nation as a whole—then the emergency in Florida must be some order of magnitude greater, something more like an impending catastrophe.

            ***         ***         ***
I want each of the 33 Democratic Representatives who voted with the Republicans on Representative Buyer's amendment to explain why they voted against UN monitoring of the 2004 Florida elections. I can think of three Democratic objections to UN monitors of a US election:

1. It would be an international embarrassment.

Why is it more embarrassing to have UN election inspectors in Florida than it is to have the world know we are not able to conduct fair elections in Florida or in the US as a whole?

2. The Representative or the Representative's constituents don't trust the UN.

The evidence is clear that we cannot trust our current electoral mechanisms and in some states, like Florida, we cannot trust the officials who administer our electoral mechanisms. What evidence is there that we cannot trust neutral outside observers from the UN? Our own resources to address this fundamental failure of democracy have been insufficient to guarantee anything but more civil rights disasters in the 2004 elections.

3. The Democratic National Committee's Voting Right's Institute has pledged "to make sure that every legitimate ballot that is cast is counted and we are going to deploy 10,000 lawyers across the country to reinforce the point" and, therefore, outside monitors are unnecessary.

If the feds and the states and the existing mechanisms in various stages of reform can't do it, how can an army of volunteers, solicited on the DNC website? Whatever the the VRI may find, it will be impossible for them to say anything that will not be dismissed as partisan. I also have to say that the VRI's activities are so poorly documented on the DNC website, that it's hard to have much confidence that the VRI will serve any function beyond sorry-you-got-screwed-but-see-we-tried PR.

Whether it was for one of these three reasons or others I haven't considered, the 33 Democratic Representatives need to explain themselves. Their yes votes on H.AMDT.701 to HR4818 implied that they stand with their Republican colleagues in opposition to true democracy.

Let's ask them why.

Below are the 33 Democratic Representatives in question. If you're from their state—and especially if you live in their district—use the contact information below to ask them to issue a press release on why they voted with the Republicans on H.AMDT.701 to HR4818.

(Note: I have not found an existing list of the 33 Democrats who voted yes on Buyer's amendment. I compiled the list by comparing this with this . It is possible that I've made errors. Corrections are welcome.)

Florida
1. Allen Boyd (D - FL02) 202-225-5235 (DC phone) 202-225-5615 (DC Fax)
Georgia
2. Jim Marshall (D - GA03) 202-225-6531 (DC phone) 202-225-3013 (DC Fax)
Illinois
3. William O. Lipinski (D - IL03) 202-225-5701 (DC phone) 202-225-1012 (DC Fax)
4. Jerry F. Costello (D - IL12) 202-225-5661(DC phone) 202-225-0285 (DC Fax)
Kentucky
5. Ben Chandler (D - KY06) 202-225-4706 (DC phone) 202-225-2122 (DC Fax)
ben.chandler@mail.house.gov
Louisiana
6. Rodney Alexander (D - LA05) 202-225-8490 (DC phone) 202-225-5639 (DC Fax)
Minnesota
7. Collin C. Peterson (D - MN07) 202-225-2165 (DC phone) 202-225-1593 (DC Fax)
Montana
8. Ike Skelton (D - MO04) 202-225-2876 (DC phone) 202-225-2695 (DC Fax) web form
Mississippi
9. Gene Taylor (D - MS04) 202-225-5772 (DC phone) 202-225-7074 (DC Fax)
North Carolina
10. Mike McIntyre (D - NC07) 202-225-2731(DC phone) 202-225-5773 (DC Fax)
North Dakota
11. Earl Pomeroy (D - North Dakota At Large) 202-225-2611 (DC phone) 202-226-0893 (DC Fax)
New Jersey
12. Robert E. Andrews (D - NJ01) 202-225-6501(DC phone) 202-225-6583 (DC Fax)
New York
13. Michael R. McNulty (D - NY21) 202-225-5076 (DC phone) 202-225-5077 (DC Fax)
Oklahoma
14. Brad Carson (D - OK02) 202-225-2701(DC phone) 202-225-3038 (DC Fax)
Oregon
15. Peter A. DeFazio (D - OR04) 202-225-6416 (DC phone) 202-225-0032 (DC Fax)
Pennsylvania
16. Tim Holden (D - PA17) 202-225-5546 (DC phone) 202-226-0996 (DC Fax)
South Carolina
17. John M. Spratt, Jr. (D - SC05) 202-225-5501 (DC phone) 202-225-0464 (DC Fax)
South Dakota
18. Stephanie Herseth (D - South Dakota At Large) 202-225-2801 (DC phone) 202-225-5823 (DC Fax)
Tennessee
19. Lincoln Davis (D - TN04) 202-225-6831 (DC phone) 202-226-5172 (DC Fax)
20. Jim Cooper (D - TN05) 202-225-4311 (DC phone) 202-226-1035 (DC Fax) web form
21. Bart Gordon (D - TN06) 202-225-4231 (DC phone) 202-225-6887 (DC Fax)
22. John S. Tanner (D - TN08) 202-225-4714 (DC phone) 202-225-1765 (DC Fax)
Texas
23. Max Sandlin (D - TX01) 202-225-3035 (DC phone) 202-225-5866 (DC Fax)
24. Jim Turner (D - TX02) 202-225-2401 (DC phone) 202-225-5955 (DC Fax) web form
25. Chet Edwards (D - TX11) 202-225-6105 (DC phone) 202-225-0350 (DC Fax)
26. Martin Frost (D - TX24) 202-225-3605 (DC phone) 202-225-4951 (DC Fax)
27. Gene Green (D - TX29) 202-225-1688 (DC phone) 202-225-9903 (DC Fax)
Utah
28. James D. Matheson (D - UT02) 202-225-3011 (DC phone) 202-225-5638 (DC Fax)
Washington
29. Richard R. Larsen (D - WA02) 202-225-2605 (DC phone 202-225-4420 (DC Fax)
rick.larsen@mail.house.gov
30. Brian Baird (D - WA03) 202-225-3536 (DC phone) 202-225-3478 (DC Fax) web form
31. Norman D. Dicks (D - WA06) 202-225-5916 (DC phone 202-226-1176 web form
32. Adam Smith (D - WA09) 202-225-8901 (DC phone) 202-225-5893 (DC Fax)
Wisconsin
33. Ron Kind (D - WI03) 202-225-5506 (DC phone) 202-225-5739 (DC Fax) web form

Rep. Corrine Brown used the s-word. On the House floor she said the Republicans stole the 2000 presidential election.

I come from Florida, where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure it doesn't happen again," Brown said. "Over and over again after the election when you stole the election, you came back here and said, 'Get over it.' No, we're not going to get over it. And we want verification from the world.

Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., requested Rep. Brown's words be stricken from record.

The House's presiding officer, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, ruled that Brown's words violated a House rule.

"Members should not accuse other members of committing a crime such as, quote, stealing, end quote, an election," Thornberry said.

The House also censured Rep. Brown, keeping her from speaking on the House floor the rest of that day.

The context?

The verbal battle broke out after Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., proposed a measure barring any federal official from requesting that the United Nations formally observe the U.S. elections on Nov. 2. His proposal was approved 243-161 as an amendment to a $19.4 billion foreign aid bill, with 33 Democrats joining all 210 voting Republicans in voting "yes."

Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., and several other House Democrats have made that suggestion. They argue that some black voters were disenfranchised in 2000 and problems could occur again this fall. (Whole thing, via Ms. Lauren.)

What's the most interesting detail here? 33 Democrats joined all 210 Republicans in voting against UN oversight of our 2004 presidential elections. Why did 33 Democrats vote with the Republicans on this one? I think Greg Palast has the answer:

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation's worst spoilage rates. That's not surprising. Boss Daley's Democratic machine, now his son's, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago's black vote. . . .

Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking. (Whole thing.)

Following the striking of her words from the record and her censure last week, Rep. Brown issued a press release:

Striking my words from the House floor is just one more example of the Republican Party's attempt to try and cover up what happened during the 2000 election and of their activities this year in the state of Florida in preparation for stealing this year’s election as well. What is the Republican Party so afraid of? Let me tell you what I'm afraid of: another stolen election and four more years of the Bush administration. When the words of Corrine Brown are stricken from the floor, so is the voice of her 600,000 constituents in Florida's third congressional district. . . .

Many of the problems that were caused in the last election were caused by the unfairness of the people that were in charge of ensuring a fair election in the state of Florida. For example, not only did Governor Bush support his brother’s election, but the Secretary of State (the very agent responsible for ensuring a fair election) served as the top campaign official in the state of Florida for the George W. Bush presidential campaign. What I believe is needed is a neutral party (like the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who has incidentally, said they will send preliminary observers in September) to oversee and monitor our elections in an unbiased manner, just as they monitor other elections throughout the world, often at the urging of The United States.

With UN monitoring of the 2004 elections officially barred by our Congress, our main hope for fair elections resides with Kerry and Edwards, who need to make the disenfranchisement of African American voters a campaign issue, front and center. As Palast puts it, "Senator Kerry is no Corrine Brown.":

The man who would be President is first trying out the 'D' word in front of the friendly natives at the NAACP. But still, it's a step: mentioning out loud the massive, systematic Disenfranchisement of the Black vote.

But the real change won't come until Kerry can say the 'D' word in front of say, a gathering of the members of his wife's country club, and until he confronts the boys holding the electoral lynching ropes in both parties.

I have a dream. I imagine John Kerry taking this message to the floor of the convention next week, proclaiming, "Three decades after Martin Luther King's murder, one million African-Americans cast ballots never counted. This will not stand!" Imagine it: at that moment, for the first time in a generation, the Democratic Party will have nominated a democrat.

Last Friday (7/15), Palast testified before the US Civil Rights Commission in Washington on the purging of African American voters from Florida's 2000 and 2004 voter roles.

Following Palast's testimony, Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, Dean of the Law School at the University of California at Berkeley, said that on the basis of evidence from Palast and state officials and contractors, "There appears to be a criminal violation of the Civil Rights Act." In response, the Chairwoman of the Commission, Mary Frances Berry, at the request of the Commissioners, is sending a letter to the Justice Department to demand investigation of the criminal or civil violations which appear to have occurred. (Whole thing.)

The only major networks covering the Civil Rights Commission hearing were from Germany and Britain. At this writing, Google News turns up no coverage of Friday's Civil Rights Commission hearing. It's hard to imagine that Ashcroft's Department of Justice will pursue any kind of investigation before or after the 2004 elections. But the DOJ's lack of progress towards such an investigation should be covered as a major law enforcement scandal. And we should barrage the DOJ with letters and emails demanding an investigation. This would be a perfect item for one of those MoveOn.org petition drives. The criminals get to keep stealing elections as long as they can strike the truth from the Congressional record and enjoy the collusion of a press that doesn't report on violations of the Civil Rights Act.

There has been some good, nuanced coverage of Bill Cosby's "lower economic people" remarks by bloggers such as Earl Dunovant, George Kelly, Lester Spence, and Kim Pearson.

In the mainstream press, coverage of Cosby's remarks are the closest we get to coverage of social and economic issues in the African American community. In an election year especially, good journalism in this area ought to be ongoing. Without such coverage there are no terms for a proper debate and the candidates get a free ride on important domestic issues. It's been heartening to me to see gay and lesbian civil rights issues covered as election year issues—but what about African American civil rights issues? African American issues aren't covered as part of election year politics because the press does not consider them news and because the press does not provide the context we need to understand current African American realities. Kim Pearson breaks it down with some good analysis and a some questions journalists ought to asking.

The major problem that black writers, artists, intellectuals, activists, parents, preachers and teachers face in trying to get control of their families and communities is that the institutions that transmit ideas and values to black youth and adults are perverted by the corporate commodification of blackness. Rather than having their self image and goals shaped by the authority figures in their own homes, neighborhoods, schools and religious institutions, they are being molded by an amoral popular culture that will use anything to sell products.

Right now, that popular culture, which has been driven by an appropriation and caricaturing of African American culture since the days of Stephen Foster, teaches that authentic blackness includes a disdain for formal education, hypersexuality, and mindless,amoral acqusitiveness. This picture of who black people are and what we value is a cynical lie that a few blacks participate in perpetuating, because the corporate marketers figured out that the suburban kids whose dollars fuel hiphop don't want to hear from people with a mentality like Chuck D's:

I didn’t want to rap about ‘I’m this or I’m that’ all the time . . . . My focus was not on boasting about myself or battling brothers on the microphone. I wanted to rap about battling institutions, and bringing the condition of Black people worldwide to a respectable level."

To turn the tide, here are some of the questions I want to see journalists asking:

(3) We need press coverage of some of the initiatives that have worked and are working! For example, while there is a dearth of black scientists, there are also programs such as the Cooperative Research Fellowship Program and the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which have helped dozens of blacks get Ph.Ds. in mathematics, physics and other scientific and technical disciplines.

(5) Let's have some reporting on the state of the institutions that some successful blacks have created to reach back into their communities. Where is the Coalition of 100 Black Men these days? Where's BEEP? What about the the various ethnic affinity groups in the nations top corporations? What are they doing to address these problems? What do their successess and failures tell us?

(6) Conservatives seem to think they have the answers to the problems Cosby outlined. Between faith-based initiatives, school voucher programs, and the No Child Left Behind Law, conservative approaches have received substantial support over the last several years. If Cosby's charges signify the need for a close examination of what parents are doing, don't they also suggest the need to scrutinize these programs as well? Yet I'm not aware of any comprehensive examination of this type?

Read the whole thing.

the spin of the earth impaled a silhouette of the sun on the steeple
and I gotta hear the same sermon all of the time now from you people
why are staring into outer space crying
(Elliott Smith)

My friend Lisa died in her late 30s the day before yesterday, suddenly, of a brain aneurism. My friend Larry's mother died this morning of cancer, in old age. Lisa was ill with rheumatoid arthritis since her 20s, but no one expected this.

I was practicing yoga tonight. My practice has been very steady for a couple of years now, usually without more than a couple of days off in any given week. Because of travel and other circumstances, tonight's practice was the first time in seven days.

In a simple kneeling pose (adomukha virasana) I curled my toes under to push up and raise my tailbone vertically and settle back into downward facing dog (adomukha svanasana). Before there was any verticle movement at all, just in the simple act of bringing the pads of my feet into contact with the floor, I felt a wave of emotion, as if this somewhat more precise than usual repetition of a ritualized physical action was affirming something vast and elemental.

When people we love die, we need to affirm the good we mean to strive for. We feel guilty for getting diverted, for losing sight of our right intentions.

In 1995 my father had surgery to remove his bladder. Recovery from a resulting infection laid him low. He became depressed and didn't want to eat much of anything. He was extremely withdrawn. It was hard for anyone to reach him. I needed some way to make him know I understood him. One morning, I came into his sick room and read from Walt Whitman:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me.
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

The lines, if you don't already know, are from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, a poem about the passage from life to death. When I finished reading these lines I told my father that after I drive back to Boston I am going to call him every day at 8:00 a.m. You need to have things that you anticipate, that you expect to happen at a certain time. I took his lack of refusal to mean that he agreed.

The transience of the people and water and animals and industry that Walt Whitman sees signal his own death and assure him that beyond death he will know us and we will know him:

I too many and many a time cross'd the river of old,
Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air
      floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left
      the rest in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water,
Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,
Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilothouses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolic-some crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd
      on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated
      lighter,
On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys
      burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow
      light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of
      streets.

My father's depression broke. He started to eat more. Or rather, his doctor prescribed Ensure, he regained some strength, and his depression broke. He lived about two more years. I wish I could say he was graceful and dignified, but he wasn't really. He did the best that he knew how.

My friend Lisa and my friend Larry's mother, each with different challenges, were marvelously graceful. They knew what they were holding onto and wouldn't let it elude them. My father seized hold of it, rode it fiercely until it shook him free. He watched it drift away.

I finished my yoga practice, as always, with savasana, the corpse pose, letting go of effort, relaxation after exertion, the body's memory of itself. Lying still, feeling the pressure of my body against the floor, another wave of emotion:

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the
      men and women generations after me!
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!
Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!
Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!
Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;
Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;
Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all
      downcast eyes have time to take it from you!
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one's head, in the sunlit water!
Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail'd schooners, sloops, lighters!
Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower'd at sunset!
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at
      nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses!

Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,
You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,
About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,
Thrive, cities-bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers,
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,
Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside-we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not- we love you- there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.