http://www.civilrights.org/issues/voting/details.cfm?id=5827Why Election Reform Can't Wait!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Good morning. I’m Wade Henderson, Executive Director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights coalition. I’m joined today by leaders of national organizations working urgently in support of federal election reform. We represent a cross section of the American people, including those here on behalf of African Americans and Latinos, organized labor, persons with disabilities, civil rights and civil liberties groups, major religious denominations, and those whose organizations specialize in non-partisan voter participation.
Our message today, which is directed to Congress and President Bush, is simple – voting is the language of democracy; and yet right now, in any election almost anywhere in the country, the voices of the American people aren’t guaranteed to be heard. Over the past year, since our last national election,
our country has been forced to come to terms with a very painful reality, which is that we are a first world power, but we have a third world election system. The Federal government guarantees every American’s right to vote, but it is state governments that bear the responsibility for overseeing the structural aspects of voting; and our election system is broken, and we all know it.<snip>
And it’s up to President Bush to express his support, that both a bill this year and money needed to pay for it as a way of encouraging the start of important congressional negotiations.
In the aftermath of the September 11 tragedy the attention of most Americans was rightly turned to important questions of national security and homeland defense. Election reform was knocked off track. And only recently, in the face of mounting job losses and the down-turn in the economy, have we permitted ourselves the necessary task of thinking about the other important policy questions that compete for our attention.
But America’s national security interests encompass far more than even the important tasks of protecting our citizens and our property from attack.
Protecting American democracy from the corrosive effect of a vote improperly denied is another important element of our homeland defense, and it is no less urgent simply because its impact is less visible. A report on election reform released by the Advancement Project, a national civil rights research and advocacy organization, characterized
the problem I’m referring to with our election system as “structural disenfranchisement”, which was likened to the modern equivalent of the now-outlawed poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests—quietly invidious, but equally destructive to the bedrock of our democracy.
The cumulative effect of multiple problems and breakdowns in election systems, structural disenfranchisement results in millions of Americans being denied their right to vote. However, unlike with exclusionary voter barriers of the past, there is
no one guilty actor or smoking- gun evidence of discriminatory motive. Instead, inequality is built into the system, encompassing conspicuous failures to comply with the motor voter law and legislative gridlock over desperately needed funding for ailing election systems.
Structural disenfranchisement also includes the bureaucratic blunders, indifference, and flagrant disregard for voting rights that produced and will continue to produce election day nightmares like we saw in Florida and elsewhere last year.
The patchwork electoral system, both in Florida and elsewhere was especially hard on Minority voters, voters who speak languages other than English, elderly voters and voters with disabilities. A recently complete
review by the New York Times and other national newspapers of Florida state voting patterns in law year’s election determined that
predominately black precincts had more than three times as many rejected votes as white precincts, even after accounting for differences in income, education and voting technology. Similar patterns were found in Hispanic precincts and places with older populations. ...
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