Who We Really Are

This last election was what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 intended, although I am still not ready to give up this most effective civil rights statute.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, this last election, November 2008, had the most diverse electorate ever--nearly one in four votes cast came from a person of color. "The nation's three biggest minority groups--blacks, Hispanics and Asians--each accounted for unprecedented shares of the presidential vote in 2008."

In twenty years, the percentage of white voters reduced from 84.9% to 76.3%. "The white share is the lowest ever, yet is still higher than the 65.8% white share of the total U.S. population."

African American voters increased significantly from 9.8% to 12.1%, which is up almost a third. Hispanic voters doubled in twenty years, from 3.6% to 7.4% in 2008. Most importantly, black voter turnout nearly equaled white turnout: 65.2% for blacks and 66.1% for whites. The upsurge was mainly due to a rise in black women and young people voting.

Download the entire report from the Pew Center for Hispanics.

Unfortunately, although President Obama was elected, we are not yet in a post-racial society. We cannot avoid the painful and long history of racism that infects almost every aspect of our culture. White people might want to believe it's over, as we watch this extraordinary man lead our nation through this perilous time. However, from the perspective of people of color, the lines of respect, the opportunities, and the confluence of race and poverty are constant reminders that we ain't there yet.

And take a look at Alexandra Pelosi's documentary film "Right America, Feeling Wronged," her HBO film and you will see just how brazen and strong this racism is.

That's why we have to challenge ourselves to be intentional in reaching out to create opportunities for all of us to get to know each other. Eric Holder was right, although the media was wrong in how they portrayed his speech before the Justice Department on race. Take a look at it and see whether you are ready to be couragous.

The Whole World is Watching and Holding Its Breath

Today I had lunch with a man who joined Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department back then. He helped to draft the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This gentleman friend is almost twenty years older than I am, so during our lifetimes, there were still men and women living in the United States who had been born in bondage; they had been slaves.

When he helped write the Voting Rights Act, he never imagined that tomorrow he would be voting for an African American man for president who has a good chance of winning.

I spoke with my daughter this evening. She is a college student studying in Prague for the semester. She has already cast her ballot for Obama. She called me while she was filling out the absentee ballot so that we could share her first vote together just as she and I had shared most of my voting from the time she was about two or three until 2004 when she pressed the lever for Kerry although Bush won.

At first, she was furious with me for voting for Obama in the primary.

"Your whole life, " she rebuked me on the night of Super Tuesday, "you have wanted to vote for a woman. How could you not vote for Hillary."

I told her I voted for Obama because I believed that he could change the tone of election politics, end the era of Lee Atwater and lies, I believed that he could engage young people in civic life, that he could attract men and women whose faces might look different, but who wanted to make the United States of America a proud citizen of the planet.

She was still really angry at me that night.

Just now, just tonight, she told me she understood why I had supported Obama all of this time. She understood that Obama had indeed changed the tone of the election, that he never went into negative, he never attacked character, he never tried to divide.

He offered us ways to heal.

My friend Rebecca who works full time, has three adult children and two grandchildren, a husband, too, and who has been traveling to Pennsylvania on the weekends to get out the vote, asked me the other night: What are we going to do after Election Day?

We are going to make this happen, this real collaboration, this real community that includes everyone.

Let's Talk About the Supreme Court

One of the reasons why I am so nervous about this election is that last term, despite an absence of evidence showing widespread fraud or any at all, the US Supreme Court upheld the strictest state laws in Indiana that require state-issued ID as a condition for voting. In all, 24 states have passed laws that require identification at the polls, allegedly to prevent voter fraud.

Ordinarily, that would be fine, to pass laws that maintain the integrity of the electoral process. But that is not what has been happening. Instead, as a revolt against easy registration that followed laws like "motor voter," where people can register to vote at motor vehicles and social services offices, many Republican-controlled legislatures, afraid of new Democratic voters, passed these draconian laws to suppress, not encourage voting.

This afternoon David Iglesias, one of the fired US Attorneys, whose dismissal is now the focus of a special prosecutor investigation ordered by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. He has a new book "In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration." Read a bit about him on NPR.

During Iglesias' interview today, he admitted that since 1965, the focus of the US attorneys and Justice Department had been on protecting voters of color, poor people, and new voters from discrimination that prevented them from voting. A little history here. In the 1960 election between John F.Kennedy and Richard Nixon, for the first time, African American voters in the South voted Democratic instead of Republican. Of course, there was voter suppression: poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation. But the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln and those African Americans who could vote, did usually vote Republican.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been arrested for driving with an expired license and sentenced to hard labor. Both Nixon and Kennedy were approached for assistance with putting pressure on the Georgia governor to release King. It was Bobby Kennedy who made the phone call to get Dr. King out of prison. His role in the release was publicized throughout the South on blue mimeographed sheets of paper distributed in African American churches. For the first time, significant numbers of African Americans voted Democratic for Kennedy. After he became president, Lyndon Johnson understood the potential power of the African American vote and used his influence within the Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law is probably the most powerful and effective use of federal enforcement power ever.

However, under the Bush administration, the energies of federal law enforcement as well as state efforts have been to suppress and intimidate voters, especially those voters who traditionally vote Democatic. Karl Rove is allegedly responsible for the cynical strategy of turning voter laws upside down.

According to Alliance for Justice, "in five years, the Bush administration filed just seven lawsuits under the main anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act. Fourteen were filed in the last two years of Clinton’s presidency alone."

This is why appointments to the US Supreme Court and lower federal courts are so important. The conservative members of the Supreme Court accepted without question this voter suppression strategy, despite the fact that there has been no evidence of any systematic fraud. The 6-3 majority did not question the intent of the legislature's move to insist on government-issued ID when coming to the polls. Now old people, people too poor to have driver's licences, and young voters without the ability to drive can be prevented from voting. Most of the nine fired Attorney Generals were fired because they refused to succumb to political pressure to prosecute voter fraud cases where there was none.

It's not just abortion. It's the tone of America that is at stake in this upcoming election.

Update: This morning's New York Times features an article on the illegal moves, apparently not politically motivated but with dire political consequences, performed by some swing states to remove eligible voters from the roles.

Voting Rights--We Must Protect Them Ourselves

In the 1960 presidential election, the one between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, throughout the South, sharecroppers were evicted from the land they farmed in retaliation for registering to vote. Merchants refused to sell goods to these brave men and women. By 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed and signed into law, we believed in the enforcement authority of the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department to secure the right to vote anywhere in the country.

By the 2000 presidential election, the one between George W. and Al Gore, when we witnessed thousands of people throughout the state of Florida losing their right to vote, we realized that this ability we had, and took for granted often by not exercising it, was more fragile than we believed.

In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which didn't do much to secure the right to vote. Instead it created windfall profits for the Republican owners of untested electronic voting machines that failed to leave paper trails, and added more obstacles to registration and voting.

In 2004, remember, Ohio was the battleground state, and Republican Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, coincidentally also the chair of the Reelect Bush Committee, openly operated with an inherent conflict. He was supposed to make sure the election ran smoothly. His definition of "smoothly" included disenfranchising thousands of qualified voters. At one point before the election, he tried to disallow voter registration forms that were downloaded off the Web because they were on the wrong stock of paper.

This year we need to be vigilant. Now with the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department dismantled, once the pride of the Department, we can't rely on the federal government to protect the right to vote. The US Commission on Civil Rights has been taken over by right wing ideologues. The Supreme Court validated voter ID requirements in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and these essentially knock out the young, the poor, and the very old. In the primary, with Indiana's onerous ID laws in effect, Indiana nuns couldn't vote because they didn't have driver's licenses.

In this election, will eager new voters be able to vote? Florida and Georgia, too, have new ID requirements in effect.

All first time voters must bring ID with them to the polls. Check individual state requirements way ahead to make sure you comply.

We have vote caging, a now notorious voter suppression technique perfected in Florida in 2000. In Ohio, the 2004 battleground state, a 2006 state law requires that a piece of registered mail with election information be sent to every registered voter in the state. The young and the poor are most likely to move residences often, thereby making them more susceptible to no longer being at registered addresses. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner issued a directive that 60-day notices sent by boards of election to voters that are returned as undeliverable cannot be used as the sole reason for canceling an Ohio resident’s voter registration. This is a victory since some 660,000 pieces of mail were sent out. Republicans are screaming bloody murder.

In Michigan, some Republican Party operatives were overheard saying that they were going to obtain foreclosure notices as a way of challenging residency. Lose your house, lose your vote.

There is more voter hanky panky going on in Wisconsin, another battleground state where the State Attorney General just so happens to be the co-chair of the McCain Committee. Read Josh Marshall for more details.

Check out the PBS news show NOW from July 2007, where David Iglesias, one of the fired US attorneys general, adds credibility to the charges that voter caging is a strategy of the Republican Party and the current administration.

Check out The Truth about Fraud website of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

We have to be vigilant. How?

1. We need to have poll watchers, armed with mobile phones that have video capacity, at every vulnerable polling place.

2. We must take testimony at all polls. In Pittsburgh, at a public hearing, voters testified that they had been turned away from participating in the primary because they were wearing Obama tee shirts. We have the means now to broadcast any and all attempts to prevent people from voting.

3. One North Carolina county organization called African Americans and reminded them to register to vote. The problem was that the deadline had already passed, and many of the calls were made to registered voters. Confusion and intimidation resulted. Report all robo-calls to the local ACLU, Obama Headquarters, District Attorney.

4. Read Black Box Voting to learn about the tactics being used to disenfranchise, and the counter strategies to guarantee the vote.

We are part of a community. We can't do this alone. We have to work in concert so that this election, especially, is fair, clean, and that everyone's vote is counted.