Struggle continues for Black voting rights
By Monica Moorehead
It's finally over. In a campaign that cost them over $2
billion, George W. Bush has won reelection to the U.S.
presidency, outpolling Sen. John Kerry by a margin of about 3.5
million votes, as of Nov. 3.
How will this election be remembered? Some say this was the
most important election ever. What that means exactly has never
been explained.
The question is, how SHOULD this election be remembered?
Many will surely remember how undemocratic it was, due to the
attempted and outright suppression of voters, especially in the
oppressed communities.
Ron Gould is the former assistant chief electoral officer
for Elections Canada. He has been involved in 90 election
missions in 70 countries. After observing the voting process in
Miami-Dade County on Nov. 2, he said: "Unlike almost every
other country in the world, there is not one national election
today. The decentralized system means that rules vary widely
county by county, so there are actually more than 13,000
elections today." (International Herald Tribune, Nov. 3)
It was very unusual for the U.S. government to allow
international monitors to critique the voting process here.
Repub lican strategists, especially, were not happy with such
scrutiny, but conceded in light of their tainted reputation
from the 2000 presidential elections.
This, however, did not stop them in their efforts to
intimidate, disqualify and demonize voters who traditionally
vote for the Democratic Party. This time their tactics were
generally more sophisticated, but, in some instances, more
brazen.
If added up, those who vote Democratic are mostly women
and/or people of color, the youth and low-wage workers as well
as those who are pro-union, pro-choice and pro-civil rights. In
recent times, African Americans have been more identified with
the Democratic Party than any other group. So it comes as no
surprise that the Republican Party did everything possible to
suppress the Black vote, legally and illegally, to gain the
upper hand.
It took over a month for Bush to be selected as president in
2000, based on the outright theft by the Republicans of the
heavily pro-Democratic Black vote in Florida. Even though Bush
won the Florida vote this time, the state was a main
battleground over voter disenfranchisement.
Intimidation before the vote
The following accounts are from a recent AFL-CIO Working
Families e-Activist list released before Nov. 2:
"In Pennsylvania, Republican House Speaker and Bush-Cheney
'04 State Regional Campaign Chair John Perzel acknowledged his
job is to suppress the largely minority Philadelphia vote. 'The
Kerry campaign needs to come out with humongous numbers here in
Phila del phia,' Perzel told U.S. News & World Report.
'It's important for me to keep that number down.'
"In Ohio, Bush supporters filed 35,000 voter eligibility
challenges and were preparing to send challengers to 8,000
polling places on Election Day to suppress more votes,
according to The Washington Post. A judge had to step in to
block their efforts."
That judge was overruled in federal court, but the
Republicans, perhaps fearing real confrontations, pulled back
on actually challenging voters at the polls in this crucial
swing state.
They did push for a court review of about 14,000
registrations in the Cleve land area, but a judge turned down
their request on Nov. 1. Acorn, a nonprofit group that
conducted voter registration in poor neighborhoods, asserts
that 46 percent of the Republican challenges in Cuyahoga
County, which includes Cleve land, were against Black people,
who represent only 27 percent of the county's population. The
city of Cleveland is over 50-percent Black.
Republican lawyers armed with the photos of 1,700 "felons"
and their "criminal records" were positioned in various Black
polling places in Florida in case they tried to vote. Under
Florida law, any "felon" not granted clemency cannot vote.
The racist criminal justice system in the U.S. guarantees
that African Americans make up a disproportionate number of
those considered "felons." Earlier this year, former felons
granted clemency could not find their names reinstated on the
voting rosters. A class action lawsuit was filed on their
behalf.
Documents prepared for top National Convention and Bush
campaign operatives listed voters in predominantly Black areas
of Jackson ville, Fla., whose votes Bush supporters likely
would challenge (Lead ership Conference on Civil Rights).
This past summer, Black senior voters in Orlando were
visited in their homes by police openly wearing guns who said
they were "investigating voter fraud."
There have been reports about 60,000 "missing" absentee
ballots in Florida that the U.S. postal service could not seem
to find.
Struggle is the answer, not elections
There is no class distinction between the leaderships of the
Democratic and Republican parties--these predominantly white
leaders are tied, to one degree or another, to the interests of
the ruling class. While Bush initiated the war on Iraq, Kerry
made it clear during his campaign that he would not only keep
U.S. troops in Iraq but would seek to expand that war.
There are, however, tactical and social differences between
the Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic Party leadership
relies heavily on a mass base that includes a vast majority of
organized labor and oppressed people.
The intimidation and suppression of the vote shows that
racism and national oppression played a strategic role in the
outcome of this election. The right to vote is a hard-won
bourgeois democratic right that is still being denied to tens
of millions of oppressed people, including immigrant workers
who toil in the fields, restaurants and factories of the
U.S.
To forge class unity among workers of all nationalities,
concrete support for the most marginalized and oppressed people
must be mounted, including defending their right to vote, no
matter who they vote for. The struggle for the right to vote is
a continuation of earlier struggles to break the monopoly on
the political process exercised by rich, white men of
property.
Now that the 2004 elections are history, the progressive
movement, including those fighting for a socialist future, must
take heart by regrouping and rededicating itself to grow
stronger and more confident. This positive attitude is
necessary in order to fight for independence from the
stranglehold of the big business parties and rid the planet of
racism, poverty and capitalist exploitation once and for
all.
Reprinted from the Nov. 11, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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