Reply #16: The New Voting Rights Movement Begins Here Today [View All]

[dzika]

March 2, 2005

The New Voting Rights Movement Begins Here Today

by Steven Rosenfeld

As continuing investigations into the 2004 presidential election reveal yet more flaws in the nation’s election machinery, the call for meaningful election reform is growing across the country and in Washington, where members of Congress who opposed Ohio’s 2004 Electoral College vote have proposed sweeping reforms. It remains to be seen if a growing coalition of civil rights activists, election reformers and others can create a clamor for change that cannot be ignored – even by the Republican-dominated Congress.

This past weekend, civil rights activists, election reformers and peace groups held a series of teach-ins in California where they laid out a broad and deepening case for congressional action. The sessions featured emotional footage taken in Ohio this November. It featured updates from investigators who challenged the certified results in Ohio and New Mexico, including new findings that cast further doubt on the accuracy and reliability of the newest voting systems used and their related methods of counting the ‘certified’ vote. Academics who specialize in statistical analysis explained why exit polls projecting John Kerry the winner were probably correct – and why refutations by the polling firm that conducted the national exit poll did not hold up.

Meanwhile, as more than two dozen election reform bills have been introduced in Congress, the focus also included organizing strategies to urge meaningful congressional action in 2005. This weekend in Selma, Alabama, Rev. Jesse Jackson will lead a march at the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where 40 years ago Monday – March 7, 1965 - a protest that turned bloody caught the nation’s attention and launched the events that culminated in the passage and signing of the National Voting Rights Act the following summer. Many of those speaking at the California teach-ins said the GOP’s tactics in last year’s swing states – tilting the vote toward President Bush - were a return to the tactics commonly used in the country’s racist, Jim Crow past, before the 1965 Voting Rights Act ended electoral apartheid in America.

“Unless we get this right on voting, nothing else matters,” said Robert Fitrakis, one of four attorneys who filed Ohio’s Election Challenge lawsuit who first reported many of that state’s abuses in www.FreePress.org, where he is editor and publisher. “The facts are on our side. We want full transparency… The new voting rights movement begins here today.”

read more