The battle for the ballot
29th October 2018 · 0 Comments
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
A review of America’s voting landscape shows Republican officials drawing from an arsenal of laws and policies to prevent non-whites from voting. The GOP use of gerrymandered districts, obstructive voter registration requirements, invalidating voter ballots, moving and removing polling places, voter purges and prohibiting ex-felons from voting, have become routine.
Multiple organizations are fighting for voters of color in courts and state legislatures. The NAACP-Legal Defense Fund, Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights, Southern Poverty Law Center, National Democratic Redistricting Committee, American Civil Liberties Union, Fair Elections Legal Network, VOTE, VAYLA New Orleans and others are battling Republican-led voter suppression efforts. Voting Rights advocates have filed lawsuits in Georgia, Maryland, Alabama, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, and Louisiana, among others.
As previously reported in The Louisiana Weekly, the Louisiana Advisory Committee for the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on Barriers to Voting in Louisiana in December 2017. The group conducted two hearings before offering a list of recommendations. The Commission reported on polling locations, early voting, accessibility, same day voter registration, voter ID requirements, provisional ballots, felon disenfranchisement and pre-trial felon disenfranchisement.
Carl Galmon, a civil rights and voting rights advocate, testified at the hearing. Galmon was recently honored for his civic work by Southern University in New Orleans’ African-American History Department. He led the movement to get New Orleans’ city government to divest its funds from South Africa, pushed successfully for the closure of the South African Embassy in New Orleans during the waning days of that country’s Apartheid regime, and led the movement to rename the Orleans Parish public schools, many of which were named for Confederate generals. He is a board member of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Alabama.
Since returning to New Orleans, post-Katrina, Galmon has continued to call out African-American City Council members for “relinquishing control over early voting and not providing accessible polling places for African-American residents in Gentilly Woods, Ponchartrain Park and eastern New Orleans. “The City Council has the legal authority over elections. Why do we need white people from Baton Rouge to come down here and run early elections?”
“Why haven’t they put the polling places where people without transportation can get to them? SUNO has 600 students and less than 20 percent have cars. And there are a lot of elderly people in those areas. They have to travel nearly two miles to vote,” he adds.
Galmon sees a racial disparity in the placement of polling sites.
“There are eight polling precincts at Ben Franklin High School on UNO’s campus and 10 at the Baptist Theological Seminary. There are none at Dillard University or SUNO. The Seminary was founded by southern Baptists, the same folk that started the KKK,” says Galmon. “The Catholic Church has 46 polling sites on its property; the Southern Baptists, 19, and Black Churches, 10. That’s ridiculous in a majority Black city. We have to hold those councilpersons accountable. I’ve written to every one of them about the polling sites and I’m still waiting to hear back.”
“Since the Shelby County decision, 61 percent of Louisiana parishes have closed a total of 103 polling places,” the Leadership Council on Civil & Human Rights affirmed.
The Louisiana Weekly queried Councilpersons Jason Williams, Jared Brossett, Helena Moreno and Cyndi Nguyen regarding the polling locations and voter access.
“As the Councilmember for District E, we are working to increase polling locations in the Lower 9. We have been working with community members and Arthur Morrell, Clerk of Court, to identify two additional voting locations. Our goal is to have them identified and verified by June 2019,” says Councilmember Nguyen, the only respondent. “I also support voter registration drives in my district.”
A Community Voice, a Lower Ninth Ward non-profit, is working to increase voting on Nov. 6 by offering rides to the polls. Voters can call 800-239-7379 or leave a message. The organization will help locate polling places and assist drivers in getting folks to the polls. Anyone who wants to drive voters to the poll may call and volunteer to drive voters for free to the polls.
Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections Sherrie Wharton Hadskey says the state does send election commissioners to Orleans Parish to assist with early voting. “The legislature has five legislatively mandated early voting sites; Ouachita, Washington, Calcasieu, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans Parishes.” She said the state began helping after Hurricane Katrina. “The Secretary of State’s Office works with the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters staff but we also support all parishes for early voting, if they need help.”
Hadskey admits that Louisiana does not have same day registration, as suggested by the Louisiana Advisory Committee. “We have a very high registration rate. 87 – 90 percent of eligible voters are registered,” Hadskey says. “Participation is the problem. We’ve sent out 66,018 ballots. We had requests for 36,000 from people over 65 but we only received 26,000 back. “People just don’t participate.”
Information on the most recent number of purged voters and inactive voters was not available, nor does the Secretary of State publish those numbers.
Louisiana’s naturalized citizens had to sue the state for their right to vote. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Fair Election Legal Network (FELN) filed a 2016 lawsuit, on behalf of Louisiana’s 72,250 naturalized citizens.
The VAYLA New Orleans v. Tom Schedler, complaint said Louisiana was discriminating against naturalized citizens by requiring them to provide citizenship documents when registering to vote – a requirement that was not asked of other potential voters who must simply swear they are U.S. citizens.
Less than a month after the filing, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed legislation repealing the law – effectively resolving the lawsuit. “The obstacles created by the requirement prevented many people from voting for decades and in the 2016 presidential primary.”
“Registering to vote is the culmination of a long and exciting road towards U.S. citizenship for many American immigrants,” said Carolina Hernandez, “by repealing this discriminatory requirement, Louisiana is no longer systematically blocking U.S. citizens from exercising their most fundamental right as citizens: voting.”
Ex-Felons also face difficulties in getting their right to vote. “VOTE (Voice of the Experienced) is a grassroots organization founded and run by formerly incarcerated people (FIP), our families and our allies,” according to the group’s website. The organization scored a voting rights victory for Louisiana’s ex-felons last May, when Edwards signed ACT 636 into law.
“LA Act 636 gives the right to vote back to people who have been on parole or probation for five years. If, however, in that five-year window a person’s parole or probation is revoked and they are incarcerated, the five-year clock will start over upon release.” The law goes into effect on March 1, 2019. More than 71,000 Louisiana citizens are on probation and parole. African Americans are 32 percent of the state population but make up 60 percent of everyone who has lost voting rights.
Pre-trial detainees in Louisiana, presumed innocent until proven guilty, are entitled to vote but barriers exist. Similar to the North Dakota case, where Native Americans don’t have street addresses, those awaiting trial would have to vote in their home precinct and not at the address of the jail. State Senator Karen Carter Peterson told the LAC-USCCR that polling places and voting machines are not fully available in jails, nor is the opportunity for absentee voting. Norris Henderson, a member of VOTE told the Committee that absentee voting is challenging for people in jail because the ballots must be certified by the sheriff, mailed to the Registrar of Voters in a timely manner, and many are not aware of their right to vote.
The National Council of State Legislatures outlined challenges to ex-felons’ voting rights, which vary according to state law:
• In 21 states (including Louisiana) felons lose their voting rights during incarceration and for a period of time after typically while on parole and/or probation. Voting rights are automatically restored after this time period. Former felons may also have to pay any outstanding fines, fees or restitution before their rights are restored.
• In 13 states, felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes, or require a governor’s pardon in order for voting rights to be restored, or face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) before voting rights can be restored.
Gerrymandered districts in Louisiana are also problematic. Each of Louisiana’s six United States Representatives is elected from political divisions called districts. United States Senators are elected at-large. District lines are redrawn every 10 years based on the United States Census. The federal government stipulates that districts must have nearly equal populations and must not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.
In Louisiana, all but one of the state’s Congressional seats is held by white men, all of whom are Republicans. The lone African-American, Rep. Cedric Richmond represents the 2nd Congressional District, which is considered one of the 10 most racially gerrymandered districts in the country. That may be because the majority of the state’s African-American voters are packed into it. Also of interest, is that Democrats are the majority of voters in every Congressional district, except one.
In June 2018, in Georgia, Ala-bama and Louisiana, local lawyers filed lawsuits in federal court against each state’s Secretary of State alleging the Republican efforts in 2011 to redraw congressional lines left many of the minority Black voters packed into one district and breaking up pockets of others.
In the Louisiana case, Johnson v. Ardoin, nine plaintiffs are suing the Secretary of State. “As evidenced by an array of factors, such as the history of racial discrimination in voting, the perpetuation of racial appeals in Louisiana elections, and the socio-economic effects of decades of discrimination against African Americans that hinder their ability to participate effectively in the political process, Louisiana’s failure to create a second majority-minority congressional district in its 2011 Congressional Plan has resulted in the dilution of African American voting strength in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” the complaint stated. Most recently, the state has filed a second Motion to Dismiss and the plaintiffs have answered it.
This article originally published in the October 22, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
