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Edited on Tue Jan-04-05 07:36 PM by intheflow
I go to a seminary, so we refer to him as Rev. King rather than Dr. King, generally. The column still needs the final edit and approval of my boss, but she's cool and probably won't change much. Obviously I would have added oodles more, linking it to other fraud in this election and in the last (particularly Florida), but space is very limited in our newsletter.
Anyway, here it is:
The 2004 Presidential Election: Everything old is new again
By -----
“A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the state's segregation laws was democratically elected?”
~Martin Luther King, Jr. ~
Rev. King wrote those powerful words from the Birmingham jail in April, 1963. Yet how well was his message incorporated into the American election process? If the presidential vote in Ohio is any indication, not at all.
Even without computer “glitches,” the vote in Ohio was rife with voter suppression, disenfranchisement, and intimidation. During two weekends in December, Ohio voters turned out to give sworn testimony of the problems they encountered while trying to vote in minority and heavily Democratic precincts on November 2nd. A partial listing of the troubles they had while voting include:
* machine shortages caused long lines, some as long as eleven hours, even though there were up to 81 machines in storage areas throughout the state. This is a possible violation of the Equal Protection Amendment. Meanwhile, at nearby, heavily Republican precincts, there were no lines.
* voters were called or told while in line that they had to vote at different locations, or that Democrats were to vote on Nov. 3rd or 4th due to heavy expected turnout.
* precincts were given insufficient ballots.
* Democrats were forced to use provisional ballots, which are subjected to more rigorous scrutiny and more open to challenges than regular ballots.
* in some precincts, voters who were in line at 7:30 were told they had to leave, even if they had been in line for hours already, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act.
* a group called “The Texas Strike Force” made intimidating phone calls to likely voters.
* Warren County election officials locked down the vote count, refusing reporters and independent observers to watch, citing a Homeland Security warning given them by the FBI. The FBI has denied giving such a warning. Country employees received a memo about the lockdown six days before the election, which suggests political motivation rather than security concerns.
* police roadblocks were set up in strategic locations impeding access to certain polling places. Cars were ticketed and towed while voters waited in long lines to vote.
Most of the problems originated with the office of Ohio’s Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell. In addition to serving as the Secretary of State, Mr. Blackwell was also the associate chairman of George Bush’s re-election campaign. To have the head of the elections working on behalf of a particular candidate seems on par with Rev. King’s contention that those who set the rules for this election were unaccountable to the actual voters.
People will argue that Mr. Blackwell did nothing racially discriminatory because Mr. Blackwell himself is an African American. But this is a ludicrous argument against the facts—including the fact that history is replete with examples of oppressed peoples identifying with their oppressors, and of people disassociating with their own race once they have achieved a degree of economic and/or political power. Mr. Blackwell’s race is of no consequence to the truth of this election.
And the truth is that Jim Crowe has survived even while Rev. King’s life and work has been given lip service. We’ve given Rev. King a holiday but not felt the need to continue--or even maintain--the few advances he and others made in voting rights for people of color. We cannot allow another election to come to pass without making sure that the elections are fair and free, not only in Ohio, but in every state in the union.
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