Unstuffing the Ballot Box

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Older gains must also be won again. Key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act-which require federal 'preclearance' for election changes by states and localities with a history of voting discrimination-must be renewed by August 2007. Mark Ritchie says there may not be a fierce fight from the right, mostly because the Bush-controlled Justice Department has been a neutered watchdog in recent years. Still, the act remains a powerful tool for future administrations committed to voting rights, and perpetually abusive states, counties, and cities can be added to the preclearance list.

On some level, it's disheartening to have to fight for the right to vote in 21st-century America. But as Ritchie notes, American history has demonstrated a constant, if wobbly, march forward. 'When the Constitution was enacted, 4 percent of the population could vote-white male property owners,' he says. 'We added all white men, then women, then nonwhites. I couldn't vote when I graduated from high school; today, 18-year-olds can vote. Yes, we're seeing some fairly organized rearguard actions, but history is on our side as long as we realize that election protection is not just about Election Day.'

David Brauer is a freelance journalist based in Minneapolis. He is the author of Nellie Stone Johnson: The Life of an Activist (Ruminator, 2000).

Election Watchdog with a Bite

Journalist Greg Palast is unafraid to claim that Republicans stole the 2004 election-and insists that they can do it again in 2008.

Greg Palast, the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Pluto, 2002) and the new Armed Madhouse (Dutton), is no crank: He earned election-protection acclaim in 2000, when he exposed Katherine Harris' brazen purge of Florida registration lists that swept thousands of legitimate voters, mostly black, off the rolls. And days before the 2004 election, working for the BBC, he unearthed Republican 'caging lists' designed to systematically challenge the Sunshine State's black voters-racial targeting that Palast writes is a crime under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In Armed Madhouse, Palast details how 3 million votes cast in 2004 went uncounted and how a 2008 repeat will go down. (The book also chronicles many other Bush-era foreign and domestic fiascoes.) Writer David Brauer asked Palast how we can fight back. Here's what he said:

Don't let them tell you nothing's wrong.

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that 3,600,380 ballots were cast and not counted in 2004. I can't make up something that crazy: The number is calculated from federal reports. These are ballots 'spoiled' and 'rejected' and other nonsense that prevents those ballots from counting. And not everyone's ballot spoils the same: If you're black, the chance that your ballot will spoil is 900 percent higher than if you're white-more than half the ballots tossed in the electoral vote Dumpster are cast by voters of color. And they don't vote Republican, if you haven't noticed. The presidential races in both 2000 and 2004 were coups d'état resulting from spoiled ballots.

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