DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF BLACK VOTERS CONTINUES LONG AFTER SELMA

Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly version Share this

 

By Miriam Raftery

March 8, 2015 (San Diego)--As the nation commemorates the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march in Selma, investigative reporter Greg Palast has published findings that show we still have a long way to go as a nation to achieve civil rights for all people.

A special investigation conducted by Palast found a massive, secret databased used by election officials in 28 states. Nearly all of those officials were Republicans and the scheme, called “Interstate Crosscheck” threatened to disqualify ballots of over a million voters, overwhelmingly citizens of color.

With help from Al Jazeera America, Palast obtained names of over 2 million of those 3.5 million citizens being threatened with disenfranchisement. Republican election officials claimed they had voted twice in the same election in two different states. If true, that would be a crime.  The officials said those mail-in ballots would be thrown away and the voters’ registrations voided.

Palast found the officials were disqualifying people who had similar names to people in other states. For instance an election official claimed Kevin Antonio Hayes in North Carolina and Kevin Thomas Hayes in Virginia were the same person, despite a lack of any evidence that Kevin Hayes in North Carolina had voted twice.  The only similarity between the two voters was their first and last names – but not their middle names.

North Carolina managed to disqualify enough voters of color, using this technique, to flip a U.S. Senate race into the “red” column last November, said Palast, who also questioned why none of these voters were arrested if authorities truly believed they had voted twice.

Martin Luther King III has asked why the preponderance of black voters in the South has not turned some states blue.  Despite high African-American populations, states like Missisiippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas still have solid Republican leadership.

Decades ago, bigots in the South relied on Jim Crow laws, lynchings and beatings to keep African-American voters from the polls. But today, Palast observes, “Jim Crow has traded in his white sheets for spreadsheets.”  Those electronic databases are reversing the gains made by the Voting Rights Act celebrating in the closing scenes of the movie, Selma.

It’s not only disenfranchisement of individual voters that’s a problem. One notorious election in 2002 saw an Alabama courthouse lock its doors to recount voters – barring the press and black Democrats. In the morning, white officials claimed they had found a “glitch” in the count that reversed the outcome – shifting over 6,000 votes away from a Democratic candidate favored by black voters.  There were no paper ballots and no way to verify this suspicious outcome.

Those are just two of nine methods Palast claims to have uncovered, being used today to disenfranchise an estimated 5.9 million black voters in modern-day America.

Moreover, in June 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court nullified key provisions of the Voting Rights Act—and the Republican controlled Congress has been unwilling to take actions to restore those lost rights. The high court threw out a provision which had required states with a pattern of racial discrimination to get Congressional approval before changing voting laws.

Palast concludes that the march in Selma is not over, and that America collectively needs to “march over the bridge, again and again.”

Palast, whose parents formerly lived in La Mesa, has won international recognition for his reporting on voter discrimination and disenfranchisement.


Error message

Support community news in the public interest! As nonprofit news, we rely on donations from the public to fund our reporting -- not special interests. Please donate to sustain East County Magazine's local reporting and/or wildfire alerts at https://www.eastcountymedia.org/donate to help us keep people safe and informed across our region.