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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.

Voter Disenfranchisement By Attrition

Although it was election day in most places last week, it wasn't in New Orleans, and it ain't getting any better says my piece on In These Times:

Voter Disenfranchisement By Attrition
With Friends Like FEMA, Who Needs Jim Crow?

By Benjamin Greenberg

When Hurricane Katrina came ashore in New Orleans, it destroyed half the city’s voting precincts and scattered 300,000 of the city’s residents, most of them black, across the country. With citywide elections still scheduled in February and March for 20 key public offices—including mayor, criminal sheriff, civil sheriff and all city council members—restoring the city’s democratic capability might seem an urgent task to some, but not to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

(Read the rest.)

FEMA Does Vote Suppression

One of Spencer Overton's colleagues, Professor Nate Persily, has first hand info on how FEMA is refusing to give Louisiana the names and current addresses of the evacuees—info the state needs in order to make sure they receive absentee ballots (via Professor Kim).

Professor Persily writes:

"A lawyer working with the Louisiana Governor's office has asked me what remedy the state may have against FEMA for their refusal to release the names and new temporary addresses of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. In particular, the Governor wants to make sure they receive absentee ballots for the February elections. FEMA has cited privacy concerns to justify their refusal to release the names and addresses. For some reason, it also appears that FEMA is unwilling to mail or forward the absentee ballot request forms or ballots itself (thereby not having to release the names) and the post office does not have forwarding addresses for most evacuees, so the state cannot simply mail the forms to the old addresses and have them forwarded. Assume that a FOIA request will prove unsuccessful and that individual evacuees on their own initiative could request and receive absentee ballots.

However, the question is: Are there other constitutional or federal statutory claims that the state could make to compel the release of such a list?"

(Whole thing.)

Remember Sproul & Associates?

You know, the Arizona-based consulting firm that conducted voter registration drives around the US in 2004 and was accused in some places of destroying Democratic registrations and in others of changing them to Republican registrations, without the voters' consent.

Well, back in July Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas published a story, little discussed in the blogosphere, detailing how the RNC paid Sproul $8 million and then tried to hide it.

Election Fraud: Team Bush Paid $8 Million for Dirty Tricks to Suppress Votes - and Tried to Hide It

By Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas
The Baltimore Chronicle

Wednesday 13 July 2005

In the months before the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul & Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states, most of them swing states. The group - run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party - had been hired by the Republican National Committee.

Sproul got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms.

The scandal got a moderate amount of local coverage in some states - and then the election was over. Now anyone who brought up Nathan Sproul, or any of the other massive crimes and improprieties committed on or prior to Election Day, was shrugged off as a dealer in "conspiracy theory."

It seems that Sproul did quite a lot of work for the Republicans. Exactly how much did he do? More specifically, how much did the RNC pay Sproul & Associates?

If you went online last week to look up how much money Sproul received from the Republicans in 2004, you would have found that, according to the party (whose figures had been posted by the Center for Responsive Politics), the firm was paid $488,957.

In fact, the RNC paid Sproul a great deal more than that. From an independent study of the original data filed by the Republicans with the Federal Election Commission, it is clear that Sproul was paid a staggering $8.3 million for its work against the Democrats.

(Read the whole thing.)

About My Language

[Kaspit raised some concerns about my use of the word "genocidal" in my first post about FEMA and the Red Cross. Since others may have felt similarly, I'm going to offer an initial response to my friend's comment out here, as a new post. For ease of reference, I'm going to repost Kaspit's comment in the comments to this post. --BG]

Kaspit,

Thanks for your feedback. I value it a great deal and hope we can have more exchanges on these and other related topics. At the moment it is a little difficult for me know how to modulate my anger in a way that isn't off putting to some (maybe many). Some of that may be warranted by the scale of injustice and some of that may be a reflection of my having much shorter experience than you in doing social justice work, and maybe with experience you learn how to take things better in stride in order to be more effective politically.

That said, this is my personal blog and not the website of an advocacy organization, and I don't know that I necessarily need to do anything differently. I provide the links for my sources, which others can use in other ways, if they wish. I also think there is some value in being open about how angry-making recent events are for me and, I'm sure, for many others (including you, I would guess).

A philosophical and moral question in many areas of the Katrina tragedy is at what point does willful neglect carry the weight of intent? The legal profession uses the categories of gross negligence and wanton misconduct* to describe forms of negligence that border on or are equivalent to intent. Regardless of what could be argued in a court of law, on a moral level I believe that government and Red Cross officials have crossed that line, showing "indifference to whether harm will result."

Willful withholding of food and water that can only result in death, illness, and irreparable harm definitely qualifies in this department, in my opinion—especially when the evidence shows that there is no practical or administrative reason, at this point, that the Red Cross could not have been delivering relief inside of New Orleans for some time. As I said in my post, it is a genocidal policy. That is, the policy has genocidal effects. I do not see how those crafting the policy can be unaware of those effects. Therefore, I hold them responsible.

Maybe it would be helpful if I say a little on how I think about the relationship between institutional and individual expressions of racism (and other forms of oppression). One of my analytical aphorisms is that institutionalized racism promotes individual, local acts of racism. For example, in the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, elections officials created long lines at the polls in heavily African American neighborhoods by purposefully withholding voting machines from those areas. Because there were up to 10 hour waits to vote in some of these places, there were horrendous parking problems. Many had to park illegally in order to be able to vote. At some polling places, poll workers went around threatening to have voters' cars towed, forcing voters to choose between staying in line and paying towing fees. There were also gross acts of cruelty against disabled and elderly voters whom poll workers forced to stand in line with no option to sit or receive other appropriate accommodations.

I feel reasonably confident that those officials, who were administering racist policies at an institutional level, did not instruct poll workers to discriminate against Black voters in local situations. I do, however, hold elections officials culpable for cultivating an atmosphere in which it was okay for individual poll workers to violate the voting rights of, and demean, Black voters. Maybe not legally culpable (lawyers, please opine...)—but definitely morally culpable.

Similarly, long standing institutionalized racism in NOLA made Black people disproportionately vulnerable to profoundly neglectful government policies, individual acts of neglect, and overt, racist aggression on the ground.

I think I understand part of your criticism to be that it is not practical to argue that policies under discussion are genocidal in their effects. In fact, I think you're saying that it's not even that practical to try to convince Americans that the Red Cross is messing up. Maybe from a political strategy / policy making standpoint you are right. However, I feel a moral obligation to speak about the ramifications of behaviors as I see them.

I do hear you when you point out that that the word "genocidal" is potentially inflammatory and that wielding it at the outset, before I've made my argument, may undermine my argument for some readers. On reflection, I think you are probably right and that if I had it to do over, I might have used the word later in my post and defined it in my post. Still, I stand by the usage and think that stating it upfront also has some value, the value of breaking a taboo on speaking directly about the nature of injustices that we have all witnessed.

I know there are fine points in your analysis that I have not addressed as of yet. As time permits, I'll try to get to them back in the comments thread.

Your friend,

Ben

Notes

*Links are to legal definitions in Michigan state law and are being used as reference points only. I make no legal claims about the technical application of "gross negligence" and "wanton misconduct" in Louisiana state or national contexts.

I Forgot To Mention The Other Objective Of Those White Businessmen

Too many Blacks to gerrymander effectively. Too many Blacks to rig elections and not make people suspicious. So, instead, dilute the Black vote by mass deportation and eliminating or shrinking Black neighborhoods.

Not every white business leader or prominent family supports that view. Some black leaders and their allies in New Orleans fear that it boils down to preventing large numbers of blacks from returning to the city and eliminating the African-American voting majority. Rep. William Jefferson, a sharecropper's son who was educated at Harvard and is currently serving his eighth term in Congress, points out that the evacuees from New Orleans already have been spread out across many states far from their old home and won't be able to afford to return. "This is an example of poor people forced to make choices because they don't have the money to do otherwise," Mr. Jefferson says.

Calvin Fayard, a wealthy white plaintiffs' lawyer who lives near Mr. O'Dwyer, says the mass evacuation could turn a Democratic stronghold into a Republican one. Mr. Fayard, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser, says tampering with the city's demographics means tampering with its unique culture and shouldn't be done. "People can't survive a year temporarily -- they'll go somewhere, get a job and never come back," he says.

Marsha Joyner, "40 years on, Voting Rights Act remains landmark"

Marsha has an op-ed in today's Honolulu Advertiser:

The biggest impediment to voting is not the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Council or economic sanctions; it is apathy. The two biggest sources of apathy are oppression and privilege. Privilege enables people to vote their pocketbook, and oppressed people feel there is nothing for which to vote.

Today, far too many people do not appreciate or do not know of the struggles that women, African-Americans, Asians, Pacific islanders and other minorities have gone through for the right to vote.

Consider:

• Not until 1920 were women granted the right to vote.
• In 1946, racial barriers were let down for Chinese and Filipinos so that they could vote.
• In 1952, Japanese, Koreans, and Samoans became eligible for citizenship so they, too, could vote.
• And the 1965 Voting Rights Act removed impediments to voting for everyone.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said, "The nation is entering a mean-spirited attack on civil rights, and with it comes attempts to undermine or eliminate the Voting Rights Act. When President Bush was asked directly to support reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, he refused to make a commitment to extend the Voting Rights Act."

If we are to have peace, justice, and prosperity, we must have open and honest dialogue. We must register to vote and thoroughly participate in our democracy.

Across America, too often it is the lower-income people who have the lowest voter registration, and the people of privilege who have the highest. We need to turn that around.

(Read the rest.)

Black Box Voting Primers On The Mechanics Of 21st Century Jim Crow Technology

INTRO
One reason I like Heather Baum's Born Again Jim Crow essay is that she makes a clear connection between old Jim Crow practices and right wing corporate control of the voting technology industry. This connection is important for understanding the present and it is important for understanding the past.

The irrational race hatred that was (and is) used to enforce Jim Crow keeps some people from seeing the purpose of such discriminatory tactics: to keep power in the white hands of a select few. In his book The Making of Black Revolutionaries James Forman, former Executive Secretary of SNCC, recalled the comment of a white southerner in the 1950s:

"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." (92)

Decades ago, before companies like Diebold and ES&S controlled the ballot casting and vote tabulation processes in a staggering number of US counties, there were methods like Georgia's "county unit" system, as described by former SNCC worker Joan C. Browning, in "My vote was counted …. At least once."

The county unit system of weighing votes meant that it took more than a hundred Fulton County (Atlanta) votes to equal each Telfair County vote.

James Carmichael and my Telfair County neighbor, Eugene "Gene" Talmadge, contended for the Democratic party’s nomination for governor in 1946. Gene, "The Wild Man of Sugar Creek," was financed by the keep-taxes-and-government-services-low corporations – the railroads, Coca Cola, Georgia Power Company. He campaigned on the single issue of keeping African-Americans disenfranchised.

Carmichael received more popular votes statewide than Eugene Talmadge, but under the "county unit" system, Talmadge won the Democratic primary anyway.

In the General Election that fall, the Talmadge Telfair County Courthouse Crowd certified a consolidated county return showing 1,788 voters. Although Gene Talmadge was the only name printed on ballot for governor, 77 of the 1,788 ballots were tallied as write-in votes for his son, Herman Talmadge for governor. In addition to the official countywide voter turnout of 1,788, though, an extra 48 write-in votes were counted for Herman for governor. The 48 extras came from Helena precinct, where those 48 voters "over voted" for both Talmadges for governor. Both votes were certified.

Atlanta Journal reporter George Goodwin found that the last 34 of Helena precinct’s 103 voters had voted in alphabetical order, beginning at the letter A and continuing through the letter K.

Goodwin couldn’t locate fourteen of those 34 voters. The twenty he did find denied having voted at all.

Six of them had lived in Telfair County but had moved away more than two years before the election. Two were dead, one for four years, one for seven years. A Marine had been out of the county more than a year. One was reported to be a fictitious person.

Of the real Telfair County residents Goodwin found, one said he did not vote, and he did not have a wife although his wife was listed as voting. The wife in another couple said, "We never voted for nobody," and that she had never voted in her life and as far as she knew, she had never been registered to vote.

One name was listed twice. Another said that he had once been erroneously registered under the name on the list and that he had corrected his registration, but "neither me nor my wife voted in the general election," he said. "I remember it was raining that day and the windshield wiper on my car was broken, and neither of us went to the polls."

When the Courthouse Crowd certified the county election returns, they added votes: Cobbville precinct listed 86 persons on the voter list, but reported 186 votes; in Jacksonville, 27 became 127; Temperance’s 24, certified as 124; Milan’s 242 was crudely erased and "4" had written over the "2", making Milan’s certified total 442. Telfair County certified 600 "phantom" votes.

Under the county unit system, it would take more than 65,000 Atlanta votes to merely equal the fraudulent votes in Telfair County.

A combination of a discriminatory system, which counts some votes more than others, and an array of underhanded practices controlled the outcome of the 1946 Georgia election for governor, which should sound familiar: high tech and low tech Republican election fraud tactics were brought out in amazing force in swing states like Ohio and Florida, which each cast enough votes in the Electoral College system to have disproportionate control over the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

THE VIDEOS
The following three videos from Bev Harrris' organization Black Box Voting provide a nice primer on the basics of what is wrong with allowing Diebold and ES&S to control 80% of the electronic vote count in the US.

(All should realize that optical scan ballot counters are also electronic voting equipment with many of the same vulnerabilities and problems as DREs (aka, touch-screen machines). Unless the paper ballots that we stick into the optical scan machines are the ballot of record and are counted by hand in every precinct, they are no better than Diebold's infamous DREs.)

• Vendors Are Like Family
• Security Through Obscurity Is A Joke
• Address The Issue . . . Don't Shoot The Messenger

FURTHER READING

• Ellen Theisen, The Privatization of United States Elections [pdf]
• EllenTheisen, Voter-Verified Paper Balllots are not enough to fix DRE Problems
• CountTheVote.org, "Shocking" Election Practices Revealed In Georgia (July 18, 2005)

Born Again Jim Crow

[I originally published this piece by Heather Baum on No Stolen Democracy in January. I republish it here for the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and because it is still deeply relevant. Heather wrote "Born Again Jim Crow" last fall, when we were between the two 40th anniversary dates, mentioned, below. --BG]

by Heather Baum

Who would have thought that on the 40th anniversary of Freedom Summer and the Voting Rights Act we would be fighting for voting rights for all of America? I'm sure you understand that vote suppression is not without historic precedence. The fight for suffrage is elemental to the peoples history. In our own life times, we know this from the history of Jim Crow. A system we fought a bloody battle to bring to an end in the south. We thought it was dead. But it is not. What has happened during the last three or four election cycles is an attempt to give birth to a "born again" Jim Crow. The obvious goal is to bring it to a new era of technological sophistication and spread it throughout the country...If unchallenged this could lead to a permanent one party rule. In Minnesota, we managed to beat it back...but I believe we cannot let this stand.

Bush can not wage war around the world in the name of democracy and fail to practice it at home. What's coming out about election suppression and fraud goes way past whether it's too late to find enough votes to save Kerry. Postmortems are important, but we have a genuine opportunity to reveal the Karl Rove voter suppression strategy. Now is the time to nail the right wing anti-democracy machine to the wall. Fighting for fair elections is fundamental, not just for the future, but for the present. Bush won no mandate. Yet he has already begun to spend his "political capital" in Faluja...and this will cost millions of lives.

The true reality is voter suppression has been a long term strategy the Right has methodically applied to gain control of all four branches of government. They can not win without it and they have admitted this publicly. It is a dynamic strategy...it includes manipulation of the census count...and allowing gerrymandered redistricting. Among other things it also includes voter intimidation, stolen ballots, manipulation of mail in ballots, sending out mass mailings of unrequested absentee ballots in communities of color, mass distribution of racially sorted provisional ballots, creating 10 hour waits at the poles and finally implementation of a paperless unverifiable electronic voting system, owned by the President's supporters.

How can we know if the election is rigged if there is no paper trail? One of the reasons we won here in Minnesota is that we have a paper ballot system...we can count the votes. So to me it has gone way beyond whether Kerry won or lost. If we let this go unchallenged, not four...but two more years..(the Senate election) will come...and something will have changed...the problems will be worse...more entrenched. And then guess what?...We might have to live with Republicans in charge forever. We need to challenge the Right, fight for the vote, learn how to listen, talk to people and organize when we are doing it ...all at the same time.

The reality is that there is ample evidence not only that a totally hackable electronic voting system has been put in place but also that very massive serious voting irregularities took place on November 2nd. It seems odd to me that when you present this evidence to fair minded Republicans... they want it fixed..now. But when presented to many progressives and liberals they go into a swoon of denial... what is that about?

The Right thinks that if it says something often enough...and loud enough...that makes it true. I call that having smoke blown up your ass. The Bush Administration thinks by saying something...over and over...real loud.. they can "make us think" what they say is true. This is designed to divide the people..."progressive bashing"...used to be called "Red Baiting" in the days of Joe McCarthy...It is an old tried and true method of getting people to look the other way while someone has their hand in your pocket. We have a lot of work to do, and so I think we need to be organizing on all fronts. I choose to fight on the voting rights front, because as my Mothers daughter, and as a veteran of the Southern Freedom Movement, that is what I have done all my life. My mother and grandmothers before me fought for suffrage for all..and so do I.

How do we know that there were not enough votes cast to win, if no investigation is done? If people were wrongly prevented from voting, if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all...if we hope to ever have another fair election again... we need to know. This is a question that all fair minded people including Progressives, moderate Republicans and Libertarians want the answer to.

John Conyers On The 40th Anniversary Of The Voting Rights Act

August 6 is also the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Here's a bit from Representative John Conyers to mark the occasion:

Today is the 40th Anniversary of the landmark Voting Rights Act, which was signed by LBJ on this date in 1965. This was one of the first major pieces of legislation I was involved with as a freshman Member of the House Judiciary Committee. While its importance cannot be understated, there is no doubt that much, much more remains to be done so that all Americans' voting rights are respected. My most recent public comments on the perilous state of voting rights in this nation were captured in a forum hosted by Harpers Magazine that I participated in on July 21. The audio feed can be accessed through the media clips associated with this blog.

A number of op-eds noted the anniversary. I read with particular interest Bob Dole's entry in the Washington Post, entitled "Grand Old Legacy" (registration required). Senator Dole makes an effort to highlight the important role Republicans played in the passage and reauthorization of the Act. While this is true, we should be careful not to sugarcoat matters, as my friend Senator Dole does in my judgment. For example, in 1982, many members of the GOP were our allies in extending the law (including current Judiciary Chairman Sensenbrenner), however my recollection is that Senator Dole and President Reagan required considerable prodding to support and sign this legislation, which is not at all apparent from reading the op-ed.

Senator Dole also notes that "while unlawful discrimination persists in America, shame now attaches to those who engage in it and are exposed. Most Americans believe that racial discrimination is wrong and should be punished. " I'd like to believe that Republicans like Senator Dole really believe this, but if that were the case, wouldn't some Republican have spoken out when Georgia recently passed a law requiring photo ID's to vote, even though we know this will have a discriminatory impact on African Americans? I complained about this more than three months ago, and wrote to the Justice Department asking if they agreed it violated the Voting Rights Act, but as of yet, we have not received a response. Also, where were the courageous Republicans to complain about the recent Mississippi and Texas redistricting cases, where districts were clearly drawn to disenfranchise Blacks, and the political heavies at the Department reportedly overruled career staff in accepting these discriminatory plans? Finally, Senator Dole neglects to mention that he was the lead sponsor of the infamous Dole-Canady bill, introduced and pushed in the mid and late 90's, which would have ended affirmative action as we know it -- even the type of outreach which has worked so sucessfully in our military. So, it will take more than a few words by RNC Chair Ken Mehlman or some rhetoric about the importance of the Voting Rights Act to erase the racist legacy of Nixon's Southern Strategy, Bush Sr.'s Willie Horton ads, and his son's demagoguery at Bob Jones University.

Adlena McKinley Hamlett: "I know that she, like Mrs. Keglar, fought for the right to vote and this is why she died."

[Susan Klopfer has posted the following story from her work on Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited in the comments. The story is a deeply relevant companion piece to what I wrote in my last post. People like John G. Roberts, John Ashcroft, and Hans A. Von Spakovsky align themselves with the evil represented by the Klansmen in this story and by the powers who never attempted to bring those murderers to justice. --BG]

For over forty years, relatives living in separate parts of the country worked to learn what happened to Birdia Keglar and Adlina Hamlett of Charleston, Mississipp after they were killed in a car accident.

Now that the story of their torture, death and mutilation has been determined, a Michigan congressional representative will soon call for an investigation of the deaths. These words come from Adlena Hamlett's granddaughter:

Adlena McKinley Hamlett was my grandmother. She had picked me to be a civil rights lawyer when I was a young girl – she and my grandfather, both – but my mother was afraid I would be in danger and so I became a professional secretary and then a teacher.

My grandmother came from a family with land, and that was very important to them. After the Civil War, her mother Julia McKinley was given forty acres and a mule when she was freed. I have a quilt that my great – grandmother made. Her family acquired more land over the years and my grandmother was born and raised on their dairy farm near Scobey, Mississippi in 1888, where I am from, too.

Grandmother Adlena was killed when she was 78 years-old outside of Greenwood, Mississippi when she and her close friend Birdia Keglar were forced off the road on their way home from testifying in Jackson about jobs and voting. Months earlier, they testified in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; both were hanged in effigy and warned they would be killed if they continued.

I know this because my cousin’s wife told me what he learned from others who knew them and I saw her body in the funeral home in Charleston.

At Fox Funeral Home in Charleston, the manager told us that only one family member could view my grandmother’s body. My brother and I went into the room together and something was very wrong with her head and her arms. Her head seemed too small.My brother had to tell me that she had been decapitated and that her arms were severed from her body. There were knife marks on her face.

There was a horrible expression frozen on her face and one of my aunts started screaming when she saw her, later on. I know that my brother examined her body, but he would not let me touch her. I have never let this go.

Sometimes others tell me to give up the search for answers about my grandmother’s death because it happened too many years ago. But I know that she, like Mrs. Keglar, fought for the right to vote and this is why she died.

One day when I was a young girl she took me with her to the courthouse in Charleston. She asked for a ballot and someone at the courthouse took it away and tore it up. She told me not to worry, because some day this would change and I would be able to vote.

I remember my grandmother Adlena and sometimes I still want to cry.

―Nina Black Zachary, 2005
(from Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, 2005)

None of the men were removed from their car that was forced from the road in Sidon, a small town below Greenwood, Mississippi, and a known Klan stronghold.

The women, though, were marched to the edge of the woods where they were tortured, killed and mutilated in the style of the White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan of Mississippi.

There was never an official police report; no one was charged in these deaths. "It was a car accident," their children and grandchildren were told. . .

Stacking The Deck With Roberts: The Right Wing Plot Against Voting Rights

We already know that civil rights enforcement has sharply declined under George W. Bush. I have written previously about the Bush administration institutionalizations of its anti-civil rights agenda through the Department of Justice: it's changes to the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division and the DOJ's lawsuits to radically change the grounds of voting rights enforcement. Some of the most recent revelations about Bush's proposed appointment of John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court suggest that Bush is now trying to give Justices Scalia and Thomas a strong ally against voting rights.

Bush's DOJ Tears A Page Out Of Roberts' Anti-Civil Rights Agenda In The Reagan DOJ
In Monday's Washington Post, R. Jeffrey Smith, Amy Goldstein, and Jo Becker brought to light John Roberts' role in the Reagan Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith.

[Roberts] wrote vigorous defenses, for example, of the administration's version of a voting rights bill, opposed by Congress, which would have narrowed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He challenged the US Commission on Civil Rights's arguments in favor of busing and affirmation action. He described a Supreme Court decision broadening the rights of individuals to sue states for civil rights violations as causing "damage" to administration policies, and he urged that legislation be drafted to reverse it. And he wrote a memo arguing that it was constitutionally acceptable for Congress to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear broad classes of civil rights cases. (Emphasis added.)

In January, I explained that in

court battles, pre-election 2004, over how provisional ballots would be counted and the legalities of voter challenges at the polls, Bush administration lawyers argued that individual voters may not sue over violations of the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act [HAVA]. The DOJ argued, instead, that only the Attorney General has power to bring lawsuits to enforce the provisions of the 2002 law--provisions that include a requirement that states provide "uniform and nondiscriminatory" voting systems, and that they give provisional ballots to those who say they have registered but whose names do not appear on the rolls. In a 1969 US Supreme Court Ruling on enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Justices said "the achievement of the act's laudable goal would be severely hampered ... if each citizen were required to depend solely on litigation instituted at the discretion of the attorney general."

In the Bush Justice Department's attack on private right of action in voting rights cases, we can see a close alignment with Reagan's overtly racist agenda. Bush's policy record on civil rights issues strongly implies that he chose Roberts because of his substantive involvement in Reaganite reactionary politics.

Bush DOJ Wants To Use The Help America Vote Act To Bypass The Voting Rights Act
The DOJ has not yet had a ruling in its favor on the private right of action in voting rights violations. It must be understood, however, that current implementations of HAVA's provisional balloting were a major avenue for depriving citizens of their right to vote in 2004. As long as provisional balloting exists in its current form, there will be a steady flow of voters who lose their vote to this supposedly "fail-safe" procedure, and there will continue to be more lawsuits in which the DOJ can persist in its arguments against the private right of action in voting rights violations. If John Roberts becomes a Supreme Court Justice, the Court will be further stacked against voting rights.

Last fall's court battles over provisional ballots and private right of action indicate that Republican vote suppression strategies have a double purpose. The first, most obvious purpose, of the thousands of Republican challenges to voters was to keep people of color, low-income people, and students from getting to vote. But it was also the case that when challengers questioned a voter's status, the stop-gap measure was often to hand the voter a provisional ballot. Numerous provisional ballots were never counted for purely bureaucratic reasons, and numerous others were thrown out for having been cast in the wrong precinct. Voters who were unfairly deprived of their votes through provisional balloting must seek recourse under the provisions of HAVA and, therefore, provide the DOJ with new opportunities to argue against private right of action in court—which is the the second, little discussed purpose of Republican voter suppression strategies. Each voter disenfranchised through provisional balloting provides the DOJ with a new opportunity to make an unprecedented reversal through the courts of how voting rights can be protected.

The DOJ And The Voting Rights Act: Anniversary Gifts Don't Always Prove Your Commitment
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has recently been pursuing violations of the Voting Rights Act in cases of discrimination against language minorities.

BOSTON - The federal government filed a lawsuit Friday, as part of what it said is a national initiative in several states, alleging that Boston's election practices discriminate against Hispanic and Asian American voters.

The Department of Justice's suit, which a city attorney called "unsubstantiated," claims Boston violated the federal Voting Rights Act. It was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston.

Boston's growing Hispanic population since 1992 has required the city under federal law to provide all election materials in Spanish. But the lawsuit alleges that the city's elections Web site and notices posted in polling places were only in English. A check Friday night of the Web site, however, showed there is a link to a Spanish language version.

Boston also has failed to recruit and maintain a pool of bilingual poll workers to help Hispanic, Chinese and Vietnamese speaking voters, the suit alleged.

"Despite having had an unequivocal obligation _ for 13 years _ to provide Spanish language information to voters who need it... the city of Boston has consistently fallen well short of the mark," Bradley J. Schlozman, acting assistant attorney general, said in a prepared statement.

I have no doubt such violations have occurred in my own hometown of Boston. I support rigorous enforcement of the law in these cases, but with gross inaction by the DOJ in more pervasive violations of the Voting Rights Act [pdf], the Boston case reads as a PR gimmick. As the nation turns towards fortieth anniversary celebrations of passage of the Voting Rights Act, and as debate concerning reauthorization peppers the news, the recent DOJ legal actions will give the false impression of a commitment to enforcement and contribute towards a false sense of security if some version of Voting Rights Act reauthorization goes through in 2007.

The Bush DOJ's Anti-Voting Rights Agenda
In typical Bush administration fashion, it will not matter what the law says if there is not proper implementation or enforcement. Despite token cases such as the new one in Boston, the Voting Section at the DOJ is still the same one that Jeffrey Toobin described in the New Yorker last fall:

The Attorney General had come forward [in 2002] to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft's proposal favored the "integrity" side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would "deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice."

Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access.

Toobin goes on to note that current staff attorney for the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, Hans A. Von Spakovsky, has been emphasizing that "voting integrity will remain a focus for the Justice Department, and that voter access might best be left to volunteers."

In September, 2004, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported [pdf] that:

• "The Voting Section does not have a reliable method to consistently record and document telephone calls received alleging voting irregularities";
• "The Voting Section does not routinely track its election monitoring activities through the Interactive Case Management (ICM) System, the Justice Department's formal process for tracking and managing work activities";
• "The Justice Department, due to its lack of specific information about allegations of voting irregularities, and Justice Department actions taken to address them, is unable to provide the public and Congress with clear information concerning election procedures."

If untold numbers of voting rights violations simply disappear down an Orwellian memory hole, if the DOJ's Voting Section does not consistently promote voter access, if taking cases to court may seriously limit the ability citizens to pursue legitimate complaints, then what what voting rights protections can we hope for right now?

Support Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act
Despite my pessimism about the current enforceability of the Voting Rights Act, I still urge one and all to ask your Senators and Representatives to to renew and restore the Voting Rights Act. The specific measures of the VRA that are at stake are enforcement provisions that allow for federal oversight of state and local voting functions. It is essential that our legislators know their constituents want the legacy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to be revived and carried forward into the twenty-first century.

~
Do read the rest of the Washington Post article that I cited above. Roberts' expressed disdain for civil rights protections was multi-faceted, from voting rights, to job discrimination, to busing, to Title IX, to affirmative action. Thanks to Marsha Joyner for sending me the link. Also see today's post from Professor Kim, which links to the Washington Post article about Roberts and to an earlier piece she wrote about a very personal experience she had with a racist in the GOP, the night Reagan was elected President. I hope Kim will collect her memoir pieces into a book one day.

Right Wing Tactics (I) - The Stalking Of Andy Stephenson

Andy Stephenson, an activist for fair and transparent elections, died of pancreatic cancer on July 7, 2005. He had no medical insurance, but he was fortunate that a combination of good friends and a high profile as an activist led to a successful internet-based fundraising drive for the $50,000 surgery that his condition required.

The progress of the fundraiser, and therefore the Andy's access to treatment, was severely hampered by some malicious individuals. The passage, below, is excerpted from the first-hand account of Elizabeth Ferrari, who helped raise the money and helped Andy obtain care.

You can find documentation of Andy's medical treatment here.

There needs to be a thorough investigation of the circumstances described by Ms. Ferrari.

The first weekend of our fundraiser was without incident, but our jubilation at raising $25,000 in only one hundred hours must have goaded the Bush right. Before the week was out, the rumors of fraud and malfeasance crept over the internet. I began to get anonymous email demanding to know Andy’s most personal information. During the second and last weekend of our effort, the contact information I had made available to donors resulted in my email box being spammed with hate mail. I at that point ignored it. It simply never occurred to me that our effort for our friend would become a political death struggle.

I was in no way prepared for what followed. And, although I have no proof, what followed was a concerted political attack on Andy, on our progressive community, and especially on our ability to raise funds for our projects, as well as an attack on Andy’s productive work as an elections reform activist and watchdog.

What followed was a coordinated effort to block Andy’s medical care or his benefit from the medical care we could secure for him. In specific, the opposition had its agents make small donations so they could then call Paypal with allegations of fraud that froze Andy’s account. They also called Paypal, misrepresenting themselves as the hospital, to “verify” that this effort was a scam.

And it got more vicious from there. Due to the frozen
funds – exacerbating Johns Hopkins' mislaying of a deposit check -- and the confusion it caused us all, Andy’s surgery date was canceled by Johns Hopkins. It was with great difficulty that we were able to persuade the doctor to be put Andy back into the surgical rotation. That cost him two weeks while he suffered from the most aggressive, invasive form of cancer.

The smears and the rumors were seeded all over the internet. Ill, on hold waiting for his surgery, Andy and the rest of us cast about trying to answer questions that were more often simply calculated accusations meant to discredit us all, meant to make Andy’s health care as difficult as possible.

Andy called me one day, happy because he’d been given a new date. Then called again, because they’d moved the date up. He was terrified, sobbing and I was caught flatfooted. Torn between trying to mind Andy’s care and trying to stop or answer the horrible accusations being sown all over our community, I had very little to offer his terror, dealing with my own.

After Andy was admitted to the hospital, the rumors turned into threats. A bounty was offered for anyone who could sneak into his hospital room. It was said he was getting a face lift. A telegram was sent just to see if it could be successfully delivered. The harassment was nonstop. We tried to shield Andy from it, with less success than we would have liked.

A day or so after his surgery, Andy called me from his bed in ICU. I picked up the phone and he began to sing to me, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” I started crying. And when we hung up, I offered that bit of good news to our on line progressive community at the Democratic Underground. Immediately, the opposition took that as evidence that Andy was not in fact recovering from a surgical marathon. And this was their pattern. Every specific I offered to comfort the community was taken up by Andy’s stalkers and used as evidence that we were frauds.

Andy left the hospital and spent two weeks recovering at a friend’s house, learning how to eat again, learning how to move, weaning himself from the morphine that he’d needed post surgery. During this time, one of his supporters in Baltimore had her car vandalized – a message was sent. Shortly after he left to return to Seattle, his second East Coast hostess was stalked to her home and she watched as someone tried to open her front door. His supporters everywhere were systematically intimidated and all the while, they tried to keep it from Andy.

Andy then went back home to Seattle, preparing for a medical course of chemotherapy and radiation. Once he arrived, he found that an anonymous tipster had managed to get his Medicaid shut down. It took us two weeks to get him back in the system. Andy had anaplastic pancreatic cancer and was again forced to wait weeks for follow up care.

By this time, Andy’s stalkers had set up a website. It purported to be concerned that the funds for his surgery were raised fraudulently. Thankfully by this time, Andy spent very little time on line. But it wore on his core advocates who were repeatedly attacked, defamed and baited.

We were threatened with everything from the FBI to the Washington State Attorney General. And of course, because our first concern was Andy, his attitude and his care, our response had to be measured or none. On a good day, we didn’t want Andy logging in and reading that he would soon be visited by federal agents to answer for the mythical hundreds of thousands of dollars we’d supposedly raised.

As late as a week before Andy died, we couldn’t keep this poisonous campaign from him. One of the last times he felt well enough to log into to his email, he found a multipage denunciation, supposedly being filed with his state’s attorney general. He called me, not so much in a panic. Panic was no longer a speed Andy had. He called me in despair, because he could no longer fight the barrage of hatred being leveled at him. I don’t remember what I said to him but I hope it helped for a moment.

The attack from the Bush right never paused, not even through the agony of Andy’s last days. Not at all.
Even the fact of his death is being disputed. Two days after his passing, his advocates are still being harassed, still receiving anonymous hate calls, “It was a scam.” The friend planning his service was visited by two men impersonating sheriffs on the morning after Andy passed. They were there to ask about fraud, they said.

Andy’s physical death has not stopped the attack, has not slowed the hatred, has not stemmed the steady stream of intimidation.

(Read the whole thing.)

August 6, 1965 should be commemorated as the day of deliverance

By Marsha Rose Joyner

Aloha,

On August 6th we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the signing by Lyndon B. Johnson of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And of course, our own, the late Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink was instrumental in is formation and passage.

Almost one hundred years after the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting voting rights to everyone, non-whites in America had not enjoyed the full measure of freedom. The cost of Freedom was exceptionally high.

We, The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition- Hawaii are requesting that you join with us in a VOTER REGISTRATION DRIVE. We feel that it is the best way to commemorate this event as well as celebrating the lives of all of the people who sacrificed so that we may enjoy the right to vote.

Many people from Hawaii made huge sacrifices and involved themselves in the voter registration campaign in the southern states. Southern Blacks who tried to register to vote--and people of other races who supported them--were typically harassed, beaten or killed.

For years, hundreds of thousands of people had worked and died to secure human rights for everyone in the U.S. July 2, 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Civil Rights Act into law. Yet some of the southern states still resisted granting voting rights to everyone. The physical abuse was unimaginable and the economic manipulation deplorable for those who tried to register to vote.

The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights ended three weeks--and three events--that represented the political and emotional peak of the modern civil rights movement. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with “billy-clubs” and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Two days later on March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a "symbolic" march to the bridge. On Sunday, March 21, about 3,200 marchers set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. By the time they reached the capitol on Thursday, March 25, they were 25,000-strong.

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama (March 7, 1965). “There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem,” President Johnson said in his message to Congress three weeks after the televisions images of Bloody Sunday were shown to the world.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required equal access to public places and outlawed discrimination in employment, was a major victory of the black freedom struggle, but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was its crowning achievement. The Act had an immediate impact. Within months of its passage on August 6, 1965, one quarter of a million new black voters had been registered. Winning the right to vote changed the political landscape of the United States. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, barely 100 African Americans held elective office in the U.S.; today there were more than 10,000.

The biggest impediment to voting is not the KKK or the white citizens council or economic sanctions; it is apathy. Today, far too many people do not appreciate or do not know of the struggles that women, African-Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders and other minorities have gone thru for the right to vote.

The Voting Rights Act was costly—100 years, thousands were arrested and served time in jails across America, while others gave their lives for the right to vote. People stand today on the ground won by people yesterday, it is a debt we owe.

"Nations were made by men, not by paper Constitutions and paper ballots"

This voice from the past is a reminder of why voting technology activists need to keep on the front burner the racial politics they embraced widely up through January 6, 2005.

Nations were made by men, not by paper Constitutions and paper ballots. We're not free because we have a Constitution. We have a Constitution because our pioneer fathers who cleared the wilderness and dared the might of kings were free men . . . if you can make men out of paper, then it is possible with a scratch of a pen in the hands of a tyrannical judge or a vicious attorney general, to transform by its magic 18 million blacks into 18 million kings....

This is a white man's government, conceived by white man and maintained by white men through every year of its history. And by God of our fathers, it shall be ruled by the white man until the archangels shall call at the end of time!

(A FIVE POINT ACTION PROGRAM: AN ADDRESS BY LOUIS W. HOLLIS, Executive Director, CitIzens' Councils of America to THE REORGANIZATION RALLY SAVANNAH CITIZENS' COUNCIL SAVANNAH, GEORGIA, July 22, 1963, p. 17)

'

Census treatment of incarcerated felons unfairly dilutes voting strength of non-prison communities

Posted on June 22, 2005

NEWS RELEASE JUNE 22, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Brenda Wright, National Voting Rights Institute (617) 624-3900, ext. 13
Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative (413) 586-4985
http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-22-6-2005.shtml

Today, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is hearing arguments in two cases alleging that New York's felon disenfranchisement laws violate the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution (Muntaqim v. Coombe and Hayden v. Pataki). The National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative have filed an amicus brief with the Court arguing that the Court should consider the redistricting implications of disenfranchisement as part of the "totality of circumstances" which must be examined under the Voting Rights Act. The brief highlights the New York State legislature's racially discriminatory redistricting practice of crediting rural white counties with additional population based on the presence of disenfranchised prisoners in upstate prisons.

New York State is majority White (62%), but its prison population is majority Black and Latino (82%), so disenfranchising prisoners and parolees results in a disproportionate bar to Black and Latino political participation. In their brief, the National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative provide new information to the court showing how New York State's disenfranchisement practices combine with its redistricting practices to diminish the voting strength of non-incarcerated persons of color in the prisoners' home communities.

In drawing state legislative districts, New York uses Census Bureau data that counts the state's mostly urban and minority prisoners as residents of the mostly white and rural prison counties rather than as residents of the home communities where they resided prior to incarceration, where they are deemed legal residents for most other legal purposes. Several upstate legislative districts lack sufficient population to meet accepted one-person, one-vote standards without counting disenfranchised prisoners as part of their population base. At the same time, heavily minority districts in New York City would in all likelihood be entitled to additional representation if prisoners were counted as residents of their home communities for purposes of redistricting.

The brief argues that New York's practice has an historical parallel that the Court should be disinclined to follow. "The practice bears a striking resemblance to the original 'Three-Fifths' clause of the United States Constitution, which allowed the South to obtain enhanced representation in Congress by counting disenfranchised slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment," says Prison Policy Initiative Assistant Director Peter Wagner.

Brenda Wright, managing attorney of the National Voting Rights Institute and the author of the brief, says: "New York's decision to credit disenfranchised prisoners to largely white counties, rather than their home communities, is a critical example of racial discrimination the court should consider."

In the two cases, the Second Circuit has taken the unusual step of granting in banc review by all active judges on the Court. The lower courts initially ruled against the plaintiffs and held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not permit a challenge to prisoner disenfranchisement. The amicus brief of NVRI and the Prison Policy Institute, filed on January 28, 2005, is available on NVRI's website at: http://www.nvri.org/about/new_york_state_policies.shtml and in hypertext on the PPI site at http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/muntaqim.shtml.

The National Voting Rights Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan legal center. Through litigation and public education, NVRI seeks to make real the promise of American democracy that meaningful political participation and power should be accessible to all regardless of economic or social status. The Prison Policy Initiative conducts research and advocacy on incarceration policy. Among its publications are a report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York , which documents how the transfer of a large, non-voting population to upstate prisons, where it is counted as part of the population base for redistricting, artificially enhances the representation afforded to predominantly white, upstate legislative districts.

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Ohio Secretary Of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's Partisan Thuggery

Back in December there were serious allegations by Hocking County, Ohio Board of Elections Deputy Director, Sherole Eaton that an employee of Triad, the company that services all of Ohio's punch card machines, tampered with the tabulator computer, which records the results from the individual machines around the county. There is now evidence that Eaton has been asked to resign or be fired, for her whistleblowing. Even more damning, however, is a recently leaked letter to all Ohio elections officials, from J. Kenneth Blackwell, threatening dismissal of any officials who do not follow his directives.

Though comprised of both Republicans and Democrats, the Hocking County Board now pressuring Eaton continues to act under direct threat from Secretary of State Blackwell. Blackwell administered the 2004 election in Ohio while serving as the state's co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign. He has been widely criticized in Congress, in the media and throughout Ohio for heavy-handed partisan manipulations that resulted in Bush carrying Ohio and the presidency.

In a letter dated October 5, 2004 to Republican Chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Robert Bennett, Blackwell specifically threatened removal of any board member who refused to follow his direct orders. The threat undermines Republican arguments that the election was fair because both Democrats and Republicans serve on election boards. "Be advised that your actions are not in compliance with Ohio law and further failure to comply with my lawful directives will result in official action, which may include removal of the Board and its Director," Blackwell wrote Bennett.

Under Ohio law, all election board members serve at Secretary of State Blackwell's pleasure. Cuyahoga Election Board member James Vu mentioned the letter at a Congressional hearing staged at the Ohio statehouse by Republican Congressman Bob Ney. Ney brought the hearing to Columbus in part because Blackwell refused to testify in Washington. The hearing was highlighted by angry, bitter exchanges between Blackwell and US Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who co-introduced (with Senator Barbara Boxer of California) the historic Congressional resolution challenging the seating of the Ohio Electoral College delegation for Bush.

In his October letter Blackwell made it clear that any Election Board official, Republican or Democrat, who challenged Blackwell's decrees would be summarily removed. Election Board positions are well paid, and Blackwell's threat erased widespread claims the presence of Democrats on Election Boards guaranteed that the election was administered in a neutral, bi-partisan manner.

In fact, with the club of a loss of substantial salaries, this leaked letter makes it clear Blackwell was running the election with an iron partisan hand, and that claims of true bi-partisanship were strictly for show. (Emphasis added)

(Read the whole thing!)

BEV HARRIS, "THE ERIN BROCKOVICH OF ELECTIONS," IS COMING TO BOSTON!

Saturday, May 21 7:30 p.m. Friends Meeting House, 5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge

Bev is a foremost leader in the movement to uncover and expose the dangers of electronic voting.

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting -- Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, is founder of Black Box Voting http://www.blackboxvoting.org/, the national consumer protection group for elections. Long before the 2004 Presidential election, Bev demonstrated how almost anyone with a PC can break into the Diebold GEMS software that is used to tabulate over 50% of America's votes -- and change the results.

Her ongoing and extensive research into the electronic voting industry has led her to discover: a small number of companies owned by partisans are recording and counting a majority of America's votes; a remarkable lack of security; a very lax certification process; huge numbers of uncertified systems; an easily hackable central tabulator; and source code ripe for 'outside' persons to access and alter election results.

An entertaining, informative, and stimulating speaker, Bev will offer an overview of what is needed for true election reform, and how we can take action to get accountability back into our voting systems. This will be followed by a question and answer period and then a training workshop in which she will teach us specific techniques for our being able to audit elections. This event is for the believer and the doubter.

Bev Harris is making history in America and she is not to be missed!

Saturday, May 21
7:30 p.m. Friends Meeting House, 5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge. Accessible. Childcare available.
(off Brattle St., easy walking distance from Harvard Square T)
$10 / person -- more if you can, less if you can't

Presented by:

Coalition Against Election Fraud (CAEF)
http://www.caef.us/

National Ballot Integrity Project (NBIP)
http://www.ballotintegrity.org/

New Hampshire Ballot Integrity Task Force (DFNH-FEC)
http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/922

For more information, call (617) 524-2223 or email: may21@caef.us

PLEASE FORWARD TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED!