Warriors for voting rights keep up fight
40 years after Selma, a new call for vigilance

By BOB KEMPER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/05/05

BIRMINGHAM ? Amid the settings of the civil rights movement that fought for voting rights 40 years ago, members of a congressional delegation said Friday the struggle continues and could escalate during the next two years in Washington.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act ? enacted after a violent confrontation between nonviolent marchers and white policemen at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. ? is coming up for reauthorization in Congress at a time when African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities say they once again face intimidation and suppression at polling places.

  
"We know in America [today] that voting rights are not assured for every American, that's what this pilgrimage is all about," Rep. Steney Hoyer (D-Md.) told nearly 150 VIPs who began a three-day tour of civil rights landmarks Friday in Alabama.

Numbering among its members 37 representatives and senators, Democrats and Republicans, the group is led by U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Atlanta). As head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was a leader of the 1965 Selma march and nearly died from the beating he suffered at the hands of police and state troopers there.

On Sunday, Lewis will lead a commemorative march across the Pettus bridge, as he does almost every year. No one expects the current dispute over voting rights to boil over into the kind of violence he experienced there 40 years ago, nor the church bombing and water-cannon assaults that occurred in downtown Birmingham in the early 1960s. But lawmakers and advocates say today's battleground for equal rights is not limited to the South.

Instead of Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, they are talking about taking the fight to Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, where, in recent elections, voters complained their ballots were not counted or that officials tried to keep them from voting.

Uncounted votes

Several post-election analyses of the November 2004 elections showed that generally a white voter's ballot was more likely to be counted than a black voter's. That was in part because of technological problems ? many black precincts had older, less reliable voting machines, fewer poll workers and less funding to upgrade their systems.

But Republicans and Democrats also blamed each other, accusing their political foes of purposely miscounting or suppressing some of the vote.

Last year in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which favored Democrat John Kerry over President Bush, nearly 13,000 ballots were not counted.

In New Mexico, counties dominated by Native American and Hispanic voters had more uncounted ballots than counties that have majority white populations.

In Washington state, where last year's race for governor see-sawed back and forth with each counting of the ballots until Democrats finally captured the election, Republicans complained that some counties with larger minority populations were overcounted.

And Florida became a national symbol for questionable voting practices in the 2000 presidential election. A lengthy, contentious fight over which ballots to count and recount resulted in a divided U.S. Supreme Court deciding the election in favor of George W. Bush.

Another area of contention is the right of convicted felons to vote. Voting rights advocates claim laws that make it difficult for felons to regain the right to vote are disproportionately denying the vote to minorities, particularly African-Americans.

"We need to make sure these laws are strengthened so those who came before us and those who are still us know that in fact that their legacy continues and these injustices will never come back," said Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich).

The Rev. Jesse Jackson announced Friday he is launching a petition drive to collect a million signatures to renew the Voting Rights Act, which struck down Jim Crow-era barriers to minority voting and requires federal approval of redistricting and voting procedure changes in the affected states.

Not all sweetness, light

Republicans and Democrats on the pilgrimage Friday agreed the act will be reauthorized in 2007, following debates over its provisions this year and in 2006.

Still, persistent suspicions between Republicans and Democrats were obvious even as the delegation toured Birmingham civil rights sites, including the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park, hinting at arguments to come.

Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said with the federal government spending billions of dollars to upgrade the nation's voting system, it would be a relatively simple matter to establish a national system for counting so-called provisional ballots. Currently, the ballots ? used by voters who may have gone to the wrong polling place or whose registration cannot be immediately confirmed ? are processed under a quilt of varying systems set up by state and local officials, which Hoyer and other critics contend could make manipulating them easier.

"Unfortunately, in today's America we still have some who would prefer that others do not vote," Hoyer said. "That's why it's so important that we recommit ourselves not only the right to vote but that that every vote is counted."