Many minority votes could go up in smoke

BY CHRISTOPHER EDLEY JR.; Christopher Edley, Jr
is dean of Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

October 10, 2004  Newsday

The conduct of elections is the first, most fundamental investment we make in national security. And in opportunity. And justice. Each vote - each effort to vote - should be treated as precious, and voters needing assistance should get help, not hassles. Yet only weeks before the election of 2004, thousands of ballots in minority communities are at risk of going up in smoke, as they did in the presidential election of 2000.

The cure for chad-phobia was a surge nationwide in voting technology investments, but funding evaporates when it comes to training poll workers and educating voters. This produces confusion, breakdowns and frustrated efforts to cast ballots by voters who actually care enough to show up. At the rate we are going, unavoidably high numbers of ballots again will be spoiled - generally by voting twice for the same office or unintentionally failing to vote for an office.

The single greatest voting rights threat, revealed in 2000, is the huge difference in rates at which ballots are tossed out in predominantly poor and minority communities, as compared with others. In Florida, some minority precincts had more than one in five of their ballots go uncounted as spoiled, while in precincts on the other side of the tracks it was as few as one in 200. Six states had worse records than Florida, among them Georgia, Illinois and Indiana, but of the 100 worst-performing counties nationally, 82 were in the deep south. (New York had 2.01 percent spoiled, slightly worse than the national average.)

In voting, neither class nor color should count. If the infrastructure of democracy - the simple ability to reliably record my preferences and have them counted - varies in quality from neighborhood to neighborhood, then the system is rotten in its fundamentals. Yet our over-reliance on county-level election financing produces exactly that.

Perhaps 150 years ago it was of little broad consequence if local officials wanted to operate elections of, for and by knuckleheads. But today, in a far more national community, I'm worried if your local knuckleheads are determining who will be my president or the leaders in Congress. Racial disparities make the case even stronger.

Compounding all this, examples of voter suppression and disfranchisement are approaching a torrent as ambitious voter-registration programs confront recalcitrant officials, and anti-fraud efforts offend some as having a partisan or even racial edge. A Texas district attorney, for example, threatened to prosecute students at historically black Prairie View A&M University if they tried to vote locally, even though this is permitted by a 1979 Supreme Court case.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on which I sit, has heard many hours of testimony on these abuses, and civic groups are sounding alarms. Dismayingly, Attorney General John Ashcroft has not met the rising flood of examples with high-profile investigations and criminal indictments. Instead, state and local officials face little more than embarrassment in the media.

The Justice Department remains tight-lipped about what they are or aren't investigating, but Ashcroft stated to civil rights groups a few months ago that the priority would be voter fraud, rather than suppression or management malfeasance.

This explains how, even after 2000, Florida officials could try to repeat the travesty of purging the voter rolls by relying on grossly inaccurate computer lists riddled with mismatches between listed felons and registered voters. True, they eventually backed down this time. But then they left resource-strapped county officials with unguided discretion about how to conduct the required felon purges themselves, and the resulting county-level chaos will be harder to track and correct.

Given the huge over-representation of minorities among Florida's ex-felons, it defies common sense to think that this two-step dance has anything but a partisan motive. Its racially disparate impact stinks to high heaven.

 

Across the nation, abuses far more common include poll workers who fabricate illegal requirements for identification, refuse to provide translation assistance or refuse to allow persons with disabilities the accommodations supposedly guaranteed by law.

Even since the post-2000 Help America Vote Act, advocates have reported to the Civil Rights Commission serious problems with officials who illegally demanded identification from, for example, Latino voters in Chicago, Native Americans in South Dakota and Asian Americans in New York City. There are no comparable reports for Anglo voters in Republican precincts.

Congressional legislation has pressed states to adopt "provisional ballots," so that if a voter arrives at the polling place and is not on the rolls, he is offered a "provisional ballot," to be counted after eligibility can be verified. But Florida and seven other states have adopted a mean-spirited, restrictive version in which the ballot is discarded if the voter turns out to be registered, but at a different precinct.

We might attribute these various problems to limited resources and poor training. Or, there may be conspiracies, perhaps criminal, to disfranchise particular voters or communities. In between is the possibility that officials are willfully indifferent.

At the moment, the best we can do is support efforts at "election protection" that are trying to deter and resolve polling place problems with nonpartisan monitors, and get traditionally shortchanged locations the equipment they need.

As for finally mastering the lessons of 2000, there are at the moment plenty of failing grades around the nation. But Nov. 3 starts another semester.