Maslow's Peak: Reports From the Left
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How's It Gonna Be?

9/28/2012

3 Comments

 
Picture
Voters at the Voting Booth, 1945, NAACP Collection, LOC
How will Republican Party officials feel in later years, looking back on this time?  A time when they tried to win elections by keeping voters away from the polls.  A time when they coldly dismissed the complaints of their fellow citizens, fellow voters, who they forced to jump through unexpected and untenable hoops, before permitting them to exercise the most critical right held in a democracy. 

How will it be for these officials, when a grandson or granddaughter says,
"Today in class we compared and contrasted the Jim Crow years with the Voting Wars of 2012?  What did you do during that time?  Did you help the people?"




They will have to explain to their progeny that far from helping the people, they helped create and impose such laws. 

That they purposely - in the name of a phantom crisis - placed an unforgivable burden on registered, eligible voters.  That they used dirty tricks, excluding people whose names no longer matched those on their birth certificates, due to adoption or marriage.  Barricading voters by virtue of requiring long hours away from work that they cannot manage.  Usurping the constitutional rights of rural voters who are unable to leave their own precincts and travel on a weekday 200 miles to a county with a DMV office.  Sending hundreds of thousands of people into a panic just before Election Day as they - determined to vote  - scramble to find the right documents.  Hoping to pass the subjective inspection of a clerk in a driver’s license center.

How will Republicans feel when they see themselves in hindsight, demanding of old women that they produce papers they don’t have, papers they’d never needed before, before allowing them to help select their President?  How will they reflect on having told enthusiastic college boys that their state university ID won't cut it?  On having tossed thousands of names off voter rolls just weeks before Election Day, sending out letters saying, “Dear voter, it appears you are dead.  If you are not dead, please call us and prove it by November 6th.”  On curtailing poll hours during the busiest times of day and week, times during which the lines have grown longer each year?

How will they describe their own legacy as a public servant?  How will they defend the way they let their own fear of a particular outcome lead them to prey on others’ fears - of the specter of thugs lurking at polls, plotting to cast fraudulent votes? Do they ever worry that history may cast them as the thugs?
Because time marches on.  9/11 is now a chapter in a middle-school Social Studies book.  The inauguration date of the first black President is a question on a quiz in ninth grade Civics.  A report on the death of bin Laden is assigned to senior US History students.

School kids are going to study these hurried changes to election law one day.  Class discussions will explore the context: Who was in office at the time?  Who benefited?  How was democracy affected? 

What will be clear is that this year, it was harder to vote. 

What is less clear is how that will feel, after years of reflection, to this adamant Republican leadership - their aggressive, unyielding push for so-called voter integrity laws; their unrepentant effort to bring hardship on fellow voters.
Picture
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  • Students will learn how in Florida, just before a federal election, officials made reckless purges of voter rolls, even though voter-list maintenance is the responsibility of practiced election officials year round, normally done month-by-month, to prevent sudden unnecessary removals. 
  • Textbooks will include sections on how in Ohio, officials slashed early-voting hours during times that overlapped with those used mostly by black voters.  Students can draw their own conclusions about that for extra credit. 
  • Teachers will lecture on how in New Hampshire, for the first time in 2012, officials tried to ban college students from using their dormitory addresses to register.
  • High school students will learn how in Pennsylvania, Texas, and South Carolina, officials wrote Voter ID laws that bore an eerie similarity to Jim Crow laws.  Class reports will be written on how in both eras, practices were designed to wear down and discourage voters.  How in both eras, systems allowed for capricious judgments by government clerks and poll-workers to determine who got to vote.  How in both eras, self-appointed citizen “poll-watchers” were allowed to stand inside polling places, appraising voters in line and challenging the eligibility of anyone they decided looked unscrupulous. 

How’s that gonna be; justifying these inexcusable laws to a young person standing before them one day? 

How will the leaders of today’s Republican Party explain,
in the coming years, that once upon a time
they sought powerful positions in a democracy
by obstructing the right to vote?

“Nothing is so necessary to liberty as the freedom to vote without bans or barriers.”  President Lyndon B. Johnson

3 Comments
Toni Carter
9/29/2012 12:33:53 am

This was a awesome compilation of what is going on during this time! Well done mom!!! Everyone needs to read this. It could not have been put better!

Reply
J. Harris (The Lofty Left)
9/29/2012 01:14:10 am

This is an excellent post, and you raise great questions. Sadly, I think we already know the answer. I think the vast majority of them will pretend it didn't happen, ignore the ramifications of their actions, and bristle when the issue is even raised. Look at how we talk about American slavery, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. Look at how white southerners, particularly conservative white southerners deal with these issues. They are not to be discussed, rehashed or really talked about, and when those issues do come up, the person who brought them are is "playing the race card," "wallowing in victimization," or just "stuck in the past." I won't even begin on the fact that current white southern Republicans are trying to take credit for the legislative victories of Civil Rights era Republicans (and too many in media let them get away with it), when all one would need to do is ask them what party they (if they're old enough themselves) or their parents and grandparents belonged to between 1945 and 1972. If they're honest, Republican will not be the answer.

So, I don't think that these questions will be answered. I think that ultimately, they will be ignored or mocked. History is my back up here., sadly.

Reply
Julie link
9/29/2012 06:24:52 am

Thank you Toni!!

J., you put it so eloquently, and I knew you would be way ahead of me on the comparison of the two eras. It is chilling to hear what people are having to go through to vote, and sometimes I can't understand why everyone is sort of "letting" it happen. I guess they aren't - and I think the DOJ will step up in PA.

Yes, the revisionism about the two parties is driving me crazy too. The parties have redefined themselves drastically in many ways over the decades. Unschooled Republicans who want to take credit for the Voting Rights Act should explain why they are trying to demolish it now.

I was horrified yesterday just before I wrote this. I had read pages of testimony by witnesses at the hearing in Harrisburg, describing taking trips on public transportation over two-day periods, , waiting in lines at PennDOT for hours, sometimes having to leave because their doors were closing; having their information lost, being told different things by different staff, being charged for ID that is supposed to be free, being sent away with no ID, or having to drop out of the process due to missed work or problems at home.

After listening to two days of these stories, of registered, eligible voters who have heard recently they will need this new ID, and have gotten it together to get that done, and have run into one roadblock after another, Tom Corbett's attorney Alicia Hickok had the nerve to say to the press that the plaintiffs' witnesses were merely "resentful" about the process of getting IDs. "But frustration," she said, "is a part of everyday life."

That takes my breath away. I pulled up her picture - this attorney - and stared at it, thinking,"Do you have kids? Nieces and nephews? Anybody young that you care about? What will you say to them?" That's when I wrote the post. But you're probably right about the answer...

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