Why the Vote Count Challenge Matters
By Steve Cobble, PDA, ILCA Associate Member

At 1 P.M. on January 6, 2005 Representative John Conyers will object to the certification of Ohio's 2004 presidential election electoral votes. Conyers will focus on the massive violations of civil rights and voting rights that were instigated and tolerated by partisan election authorities in Ohio. (The compelling House Judiciary Report on Ohio voting irregularities is available for download at http://www.pdamerica.org on the front page. Over 100 pages of damning evidence!) In a vast improvement over the situation 4 years ago, PDA believes that at least one Senate member, as well as House colleagues, will join Conyers in his objection.

We may be wrong. Perhaps there are no Senators with enough fortitude to stand up against right-wing intimidation, in which case we will repeat the embarrassment of 2000 that Michael Moore showed us on film. I personally hope though, that there is at least one Senator who realizes that democracy is not just for the Ukraine, that the suppression of African American voters has got to stop, and that even one Senator standing up to object would become a hero or heroine to millions of attentive Americans.

When and if that first Senator steps forward, America will be treated to a 2-hour debate on voting rights. Forty years after the Selma march that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that national teach-in is badly needed.

We live in a nation where the president- assumed office after losing, in a biased election. Where African American votes were at least 3 times as likely to be thrown out as white votes. Where the Chief Supreme Court Justice, who as a young man personally engaged in voter suppression tactics against Latino voters in Arizona, cast one of the 5 votes that stopped the vote count in Florida in 2000. Where the House and Senate leadership are dominated by Southern Republicans, whose rise to power flowed directly from the switch of segregationist whites in the solid South from solid Democrats to solid Republicans-a switch that came about when African Americans won the right to vote. As Reverend Jesse Jackson says, "The segregationist team changed parties; but they didn't change their tactics. Voter suppression of African Americans is still a basic play in their election playbook."

We saw that play repeated thousands of times in Florida in 2000, more than enough to alter the outcome. We saw the same basic voter suppression play again in Ohio in 2004. Partisan election authorities enacted discriminatory rules; votes were thrown out on trivialities; voting machines using proprietary codes created by private corporations headed by partisan CEOs were un-auditable; old punch card machines were used in poorer, urban areas, leading to more than 90,000 "spoiled" ballots; voting machinery was misallocated, with African American precincts not given enough machines to avoid incredibly long lines; African American voters suffered higher rates of tossed-out provisional ballots even when they were in the correct precincts.

We saw the Republican Party creating "caging lists", training thousands and thousands of "challengers", and sending armies of lawyers from out-of-state into urban Ohio precincts to do what they could to deny the vote to African Americans who were not their neighbors. They succeeded in barring many voters from the polls. They succeeded in making thousands and thousands of others cast provisional ballots, many of which were later thrown out. They succeeded in slowing down the voting lines to a crawl, forcing working people and parents with children and elderly citizens to choose between standing in line in the November rain for 2, 4, 8 hours, just to cast a vote-or to give up in despair and go home. These were conscious tactics. Shame on them.

But we also saw the Democratic Party shrug its shoulders, conceding and abandoning their most loyal voting base, and accepting the pundits' mantra, that if you can't "prove" that enough votes were suppressed or stolen to change the outcome, then the voter suppression apparently doesn't matter. More shame.

At PDA, we believe all of this is morally wrong. The right to vote is the foundation of our democracy, and it's wrong to actively suppress the vote, which the Republican Party clearly did. And cheating is wrong, whether or not others can prove it. Indeed, voter suppression based on race strikes is just about the most disgusting form of cheating imaginable.

Look, if athletes fail their drug tests at the Olympics, do the judges also have to prove that the drugs made the difference between the gold medal and the silver? No, they just take away their gold medals.

If a student cheats on his or her final exam, do school officials have to prove that he or she couldn't have scored that high anyway? No, they just flunk.

If a person engages in insider trading, don't they go to jail even if they are famous and didn't really need the money? (Trick question: the answer is yes for Martha Stewart, no for George W. Bush.)

Only when it comes to suppression of African American votes is it apparently necessary to prove that the authorities not only wrongfully kept you from voting, but that your vote would have made the difference between winning and losing. At least that's the mantra about Ohio in 2004. (It did not apply in Florida in 2000, where we actually did demonstrate both immoral behavior and enough votes to change the outcome, though it still didn't matter.)

The Republican Party has consciously and actively suppressed African American voters in election after election for 4 decades now, since the days when Chief Justice Rehnquist was just an aggressive young lawyer. They do it as a strategy. They do it because more than 9 out of 10 African Americans vote Democratic in Presidential elections. They will continue to do it until the Democratic Party makes it hurt.

That's why the challenge that Rep. Conyers is making on January 6th matters -because it's time to "brand" the Republican Party as the one that work so hard to make sure African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and young people do not get to vote. The vote challenge tomorrow is not about John Kerry winning-it's about Selma and Dr. King and Robert Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer.

The vote challenge tomorrow is bottom up, because this fight started with a bunch of brave, tenacious grassroots folks in Ohio and around the country who refused to let voter suppression go unchallenged, who refused to accept wrongs that the media called acceptable, who refused to "get over it" just because everyone else said to.

The vote challenge tomorrow is not just about the election of 2004 - it's about the elections still to come, and people's right to vote without impediment, their right to have their votes counted without chicanery, their right to participate in elections without partisan tricks and racial manipulation.

The vote challenge tomorrow is about the next step in the story of America, the story of our right to vote, a right won through struggle and marching and the blood of martyrs. In two-and-a-quarter centuries America's right to vote has slowly grown from only white males owning property to a far broader, much fairer, more democratic slice of our people. A lot of powerful people don't like that broader democracy - but that's America's best face, our best hope for the future.

Martin Luther King, Jr., taught that the right to vote is the right that guarantees all other rights. On January 6th, our finest Representatives and Senators (we hope) will stand up with the grassroots, alongside Rev. Jackson and Rep. Conyers, and affirm Dr. King's words, by standing tall against voter suppression.

And since PDA was among those who asked them to take that risk on behalf of the right to vote, we'll be watching closely. If no Senators step forward, we're going to have a very hard time getting over it. But for those with the honor to step forward, we'll be waiting to say thank you.