Reply #31: How activists and a senator from the CA forced Congress to discuss voting

[dzika]

Jan. 12 - Jan. 18 2005

Boxer's rebellion

How activists and a senator from the Bay Area forced Congress to discuss voting rights

By Rachel Brahinsky


Speaking about his boss's move to force a congressional debate over the November election, David Sandretti wasn't just serving up the usual politico spin. "We made history last week," Sandretti, spokesperson for Sen. Barbara Boxer, told the Bay Guardian. "Voting rights haven't gotten this much attention since the 1960s."

Boxer was savaged by Republicans and some journalists for her Jan. 6 decision to join members of the U.S. House of Representatives in challenging the certification of Ohio's Electoral College vote. They called it pointless and politically divisive. But to her supporters, it seemed to be just a matter of common sense: reporters and congressional investigators had found major problems with the election, and those problems needed to be discussed before it was certified.

Yet Boxer was the only senator willing to step forward and bring about a kind of debate that has occurred only once before in the past century. Four years ago, members of the House tried to mount a similar challenge to the electoral vote count. Their effort was documented in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 in a chilling scene in which, one by one, black members of Congress walked to the podium and demanded a debate on the legitimacy of Florida's balloting. They needed one senator – just one – to join the protest. But none would join, the debate never happened, and most Americans never knew that anyone even tried to make it happen until the film came out last year.

Since then, as more information emerged about voter disenfranchisement in the Sunshine State in 2000, activists slowly began to wake up. This time they didn't leave it up to chance and generated thousands of phone calls to senators around the country. The intense lobbying effort, which included hundreds of Bay Area activists, must have given Boxer the backing she needed to follow Ohio representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones's lead in calling for the vote challenge, which forced a two-hour debate in both houses on the irregularities in Ohio. (Since the debate, Boxer's office has reported receiving thousands more phone calls thanking her.)


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http://www.sfbg.com/39/15/news_boxer.html