No change in no-account system

November 23, 2004   Chicago Sun Times

BY JESSE JACKSON
Four years after the vote scandals of 2000, our system of voting remains a disgrace. Faulty machines that provide no paper record, obscure obstacles to registration, partisan state election officials using their office to exclude voters, millions of votes uncounted, millions more citizens stripped of the right to vote the evidence of systemic malfunction is overwhelming.

The trouble starts at the foundation. Americans have no right to vote for president. That sounds crazy, even un-American. We are the oldest constitutional democracy on the face of the earth, so we assume we have the right to vote. Not so. Our Constitution prohibits discrimination in voting on the basis of race or gender, and gives 18-year-olds the right to vote. But it has no clause guaranteeing citizens the right to vote for federal officials.

We're writing constitutions that provide that right in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it does not exist in the United States. One hundred eight countries have the right to vote in their constitutions, but not the United States.

Instead, our Constitution delegates voting rights to the states. State legislatures can appoint the electors who vote for president in the Electoral College any way they want. This all seemed pretty irrelevant until the Florida mess in the 2000 election. There, the Republican-controlled legislature, acting at the behest of Gov. Job Bush, announced that it would simply a pro-Bush Electoral College delegation if the outcome of the popular vote was still unsettled on Dec. 12.

Then, in the infamous Supreme Court decision on Bush vs. Gore that ordered that the popular vote not be counted, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared that, since the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for the president of the United States, Florida's legislature could do whatever it wanted.

The reforms that Congress passed after Florida were basically a bribe trading federal funding for state reforms. States were free to ignore the law, as New York thus far has done, or to interpret it in entirely different ways.

Voting, as Chief Justice Earl Warren said, is the essence of being an American. Yet today, because of the misrule by states, Americans are routinely deprived of their basic right to vote. Since the right to vote is a matter of states rights, there is no uniformity. Even within states, some people get to vote on state-of-the-art machines, others on paper ballots, others on lever machines.

Poor technology, registration obstacles and tactical suppression of voting at the state level routinely deprive several million Americans of their vote in federal elections. Roughly another 8 million American citizens, a majority of them racial and ethnic minorities, are disenfranchised by law, a situation that will not change without an amendment to the Constitution.

This includes over 570,000 draftable citizens living in the District of Columbia who lack any voting representation in the Congress, although they pay more in federal taxes per capita than the residents of every state but Connecticut.

In addition, 1.4 million ex-offenders have paid their debt to society but are permanently disenfranchised in thirteen states, mostly in the Deep South. This mass electoral suppression discriminates against blacks and Latinos. In Florida, more than 30 percent of all African-American men are permanently disenfranchised. In Texas, more than 20 percent. In Virginia and Mississippi, about 25 percent.

There are more than 4 million American citizens living in the federal territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands who have no right to vote for president and no voting representation in Congress, even though they are citizens, can be drafted and serve in the armed forces. My favorite congressman, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., has proposed a constitutional amendment to create a national right to vote. The RainbowPush Coalition is going to organize across the country to educate people about the reality, and push for the amendment.

This should not be a partisan issue. Right-wing Republicans now want to amend the Constitution to allow a foreign-born person to be elected president. First, they should have the decency to support an amendment guaranteeing all Americans the right to vote and the right to have their vote counted.