Csamuels's Blog

One More Day to Hope - Acceptance Speech Redux

2008-11-03T06:04:16Z

I kept coming back to this post as I thought about what might - what I hoped would - happen on Tuesday. It's a nice way to hope.

August 27, 2008

MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY

I was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod. All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay's summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O'Neill and the Provincetown Players. Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.

Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch. On the air: the March on Washington and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. I was transfixed. Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn't really paid much attention. Until that moment. It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life. As I watched, I knew that I belonged there - where there was purpose - in the middle of history. It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music. When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren't there already.

How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. I heard Rep. John Lewis, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tell an interviewer that he wasn't sure he could make it through his own speech -- that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he'd watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy. Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview with our own Erin Kotckei Vest, struggled to contain her own tears. This is important.

And not just to African Americans. Many people my age spent years working for civil rights while at home, in college, and out in the world. Three civil rights workers our age, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, two white and one black, were murdered by racists in Mississippi. Dozens our age, white and black, were beaten, arrested and terrorized on Freedom Rides.

Now the Democratic Party will be headed by an African-American man who was a tiny child when John Lewis faced police beatings on that bridge.

Now a black presidential nominee and a white VP nominee can hug - and hug one another's wives, on a public platform and evoke no comment. And there will be no comment because it's no big deal. It brought me to tears though - because I can remember when it would have been a VERY big deal indeed.

Our country has changed, and grown, since that day I stood, thrilled, in Provincetown. Younger Americans have grown up in or in neighborhoods that include biracial households, are more and more "post-racial" and expect the same attitudes in their leaders.

Think about it. We've been in such a feverish day-to-day battle that we've forgotten what an amazing thing this is. I'm accused of being romantic, idealistic, optimistic - all those "ics" but it's pretty tough to argue with this: this is a very special moment in our history. (And yes, I know we still have so so much to do - I'm hopeful, not a moron.) But if America is as ready as the Democratic party, we are on a path toward a different country and, as census reports demonstrate, not a moment too soon.

Remember that line of Dr. King's: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Could it be that parts of that dream may actually now have the potential to come true? If we can get this far, perhaps we're ready to go the rest of the way.

VOTER SUPPRESSION: A REAL WAY TO HELP -- TWITTER AND ALLIES FIND A WAY

2008-10-30T14:43:16Z

When votes are mangled on election day, when people are turned away, or misled, or intimidated; when names have been purged without notice or challenged illegally, it's very tough to protect the outcome because it's so hard to get to the site of the violation in time to fix it before voters give up. At least it's always been that way. And because older machines go to poor, minority precincts, and because mean-spirited efforts to defraud less sophisticated voters often affect Democrats disproportionately, as reported in Rolling Stone, any effort that gets help where it needs to be faster and more effectively can make a big difference not only for for Obama but also for down-ballot races.

A crew of some of the coolest nerds on the Web have come together to harness Twitter and other tools to help. It's really simple; you can tweet (or text) violations, line lengths and other info, and use "hash tags" (these #) so that people following the issue will receive the message on their Twitter readers and send help. If you don't want to bother with Twitter, text to 66937 and start your message with "#votereport." (That's a "hash tag" -- see how simple?) Bloggers like Nancy Walzman at PoliticsWest, who is based in Colorado where there's much at stake, and Nancy Scola and Alison Fine at TechPresident can give you more details. Our vigilance can really make a difference.

Just for fun, here's a diagram of how it works. Basically though, you just text or Tweet this the same way you do anything else. And you should. I also want to renew my plea (easy for me to say since I'm not a lawyer) for you to make yourself available on election day to protect the process, every committed voter, and, as far as I'm concerned, our country.

EMERGENCY! REPUBLICAN VOTER TAMPERING: COULD BARACK OBAMA SEE MCCAIN and PALIN STEAL THE ELECTION ? OH - AND A CHANCE FOR LAWYERS TO DO SOMETHING REALLY GOOD

2008-10-23T14:10:36Z

Could a vast network of voter challenges (here's help), especially toward young, newly registered and African-American voters (purges of voter rolls, craven voter challenges and other tough-to-prove but disruptive tactics) reduce votes for Barack Obama and endanger a fair election? Despite their efforts to tar Obama-related registration efforts, it appears that the truly dangerous activities -- and those most likely to tip this election away from what appears to be the public will -- are emerging from Republican operations. For example, on Super Tuesday in Las Vegas, "nearly 20% of the county's voters were absent from the rolls." As one voting rights expert declared:

"I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

There are several "games" and they're tough to control because they come from so many different points of origin. Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, describe in horrifying detail (and no this is not hyperbole... it really is horrifying), how these vulnerabilities could play out. You can check on violations in your state here. Their account of the basics from across the U.S.:

Obstructing voter registration drives: stringent and unreasonable state laws have intimidated many registration efforts, including those of the non-partisan League of Women Voters. Oh - and in Florida they've ignored the law that food stamp recipients be offered registration opportunities when they apply for benefits. Those registrations, 120,000 during Clinton, are just 10,000 today.
"Perfect matches" Suppose I signed my voter registration form "Cynthia K. Samuels" and my driver's license "Cynthia Samuels." That's not a perfect match and in some states I could be disqualified.
Purging legitimate voters from the rolls: "All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. Colorado holds the record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican secretary of state, and her GOP successor oversaw the elimination of nearly one of every six of their state's voters." The toughest thing about this one is that you don't find out you've been purged until you get to the polling place, and then it's tough to get help. It is wise for voters to check their status with their local election officials in advance of election day,
Requiring "unnecessary" voter IDs: Young and minority voters (more often Obama voters), according to Kennedy and Palast, often do not have either driver's licenses or state-issued IDs. Without them, their legitimacy is often questioned.
"Spoiled" ballots: Blank spaces, tears that make the ballot tough for voting machines to count, or weird little extra marks can disqualify a voter. Since minority and less-affluent neighborhoods get the crumbiest, oldest voting machines, they are disproportionately affected by this factor.
Problems with provisional ballots: If our voter gets to the polls, and is challenged, federal law requires that, rather than being turned away, the challenged voter be given a "provisional" ballot - one that is supposed to be counted once the voter has been determined to be legitimate. HOWEVER there's no way to track them - or to be sure they ever entered the vote count. In 2004, according to Rolling Stone, a third of all provisional ballots - maybe as many as a million - were thrown out.

In addition to the Rolling Stone piece, take a look at Salon's review of hot spots. For example:

"Voter suppression can be difficult to prove. Suppression tactics -- anything from purging voter rolls under suspicious circumstances to using various justifications to question the eligibility of potential voters -- are often the product of legal gray areas being exploited at the hands of local partisan officials. To date, no one has presented evidence of any nationally organized effort by the Republican Party to suppress Democratic votes. But there is little doubt that at local and regional levels -- in some potentially critical states on the electoral map -- there has been dubious activity that could result in the disenfranchisement of voters who would likely punch the ballot for Barack Obama.

This has happened before - and in many ways the Federal law passed in response to the 2000 election debacle makes it easier. Despite the new commitment in both the young and minority communities, local officials can challenge and prevent election day votes that may never be recovered. The young, the black and the poor are most likely to be affected - and that, of course, means, largely, potential Democratic voters, usually challenged in ways very difficult to recover. There is, however, a group called Election Protection providing resources all over the country. Not much we civilians can do - but if you are an attorney or law student or paralegal, please sign up to help . Your help on election day could count at least as much as -- and in battleground states maybe more than -- your vote.

Cynthia Samuels also blogs at her personal blog Don't Gel Too Soon, where this piece first appeared.