Election Reform: Going Anywhere?

By Wendy S. Johnson

Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 p. 3

The thirty-five days following the 2000 presidential election stunned a watchful and anxious nation as we learned about the severe ineptness and unreadiness of an election process that could not handle a closely-called election. Our attention riveted on the panhandle state as the challenge to recount the presidential race in key Florida counties moved from the elections board to the courts. Under a national magnifying glass, a pattern of severe voter neglect began to emerge, not as the exception, but the rule. Florida citizens’ anxiety turned to distress and anger when the news registered that many of their votes had not been counted, had been thrown into doubt, or just thrown out due to a host of inadequate record-keeping oversights and voting machine failures. Nationally, the Cal Tech/MIT Voting Technology Project, in a study released July 2001, estimated that “between four and six million presidential votes were lost in the 2000 election” due to problems with voter registration, polling place practices, and ballot flaws. The final blow to voter confidence was wielded by the U.S. Supreme Court with its politicized decision to cease all recounts because of a lack of agreed upon standards.

In January as our new Supreme Court-declared President George W. Bush changed zip codes, legislatures across the nation began their sessions with high expectations toward changing election reform procedures and recapturing voter confidence.

In the ten months since the November 2000 election, a count of another sort has emerged: some 1,500 election bills were introduced by lawmakers across the country. Good. Change is imminent. But wait. When you look more closely at the few bills that actually passed and start asking questions about when implementation will take place and what will be done, the responses are as weak as the bills themselves.

This edition of Southern Changes delves into the status of election reform in twelve states in the American South. This review comes at a time when the South is on the cusp of yet another political transition. A time when two of the staunchest symbols of Southern conservatism, Jessie Helms and Strom Thurmond will not run for re-election. A time when voting districts are being realigned due to the new Census counts with new seats gained and old seats lost. Just as Congress has mandated that population counts are made every ten years so that necessary corrections are made to our voting districts, the November 2000 event demands multi-level mandates that will provide extensive correction to our elections process.

Finger-pointing and excuse-making leave voters in many states with nothing new to look forward to in November 2001 and potentially 2002. Lisa Rab’s “Budget Woes and Partisan Politics Block Major Changes to Election Law,” assesses election reform bills in twelve Southern states.

Catherine Wall’s essay, “Elections Reform Needs Prompt Federal Action,” calls for leadership to enact immediate and effective election standards. As federal intervention runs up against states’ rights, the fate of election reform is in the air.

“The Florida and Georgia Experience” article examines the strengths and limitations of two of the most comprehensive election reform bills passed by Southern legislatures.

Many legislatures have claimed a preoccupation with redistricting and too much red ink as obstacles to any immediate and significant change. But a cycle of opportunity has been squandered. Legislative uncertainty and lack of will to make extensive corrections to our voting process is unacceptable. The unfettered right to vote, a keystone of our democracy, demands a higher respect and accountability.

A “political ordeal unlike any in living memory,” wrote the Ford-Carter Electoral Reform Commission about the 2000 election. Doing nothing or not enough provides more reasons for citizens not to vote, thereby deepening the public’s alienation from the electoral process. As states prepare for the November 2001 local and state elections, many of the same questions and issues brought to light some ten months ago will again confront voters.

This issue of Southern Changes benefited from the investigative, research, and writing skills of two outstanding interns, Lisa Rab and Catherine Wall. Rab is in her last year as a journalism student at Emory University and Wall is a second year law student at the University of Texas. Feature articles by Rab and Wall yield a comprehensive overview of the status of election reform, real and proposed, across the American South.

Wendy S. Johnson is executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

The Mockery of Democracy

By René Redwood and Bernie Horn

Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 pp. 4-5

As summer turn to autumn, so why should you care about hanging chads and butterfly ballots? Why should you care whether or not rich and poor precincts in the same county have identical voting equipment? Does it really matter to most Americans that in Florida’s majority black voting precincts, the residents were four times more likely to have their 2000 presidential election ballots disqualified than voters in majority white precincts?

Who care about provisional ballots for cases when there are disputes over the registration rolls? Why do we need voting rights posted at each polling place? Why should you be concerned that a firm scrubbed the Florida voter list so clean that it took away the right to vote from regular folks?

We should all care about voting reform. One day when you have just moved across town or to another state, your vote may also be in jeopardy.

Too many of yesterday’s disfranchised are still disfranchised today. Though election reform has been an important issue for decades, it occupies a different status because of the 2000 election.

We would like to believe that we can fix these new problems by implementing solutions to enfranchise the same population that has been historically disfranchised–the poor, new immigrants, the less educated, seniors, people with disabilities, and racial and ethnic minorities.

Given the paucity of legislation passed during the 2001 legislative sessions, however, we have to wonder about our will to right the wrongs of an elections that was an embarrassment to us all, and a denial of democracy for too many. It has been estimated that more than fifteen hundred election reform bills were introduced in the states this year. That figure is misleading. Less than 3 percent of those bills were designed to remedy the biggest mistakes of the 2000 election. As of early summer (May 2001), governors from fifteen states signed into law thirty-two bills passed by their legislatures.

Last year people around the world watched as Florida provided a textbook example of how not to run an election. Sadly, the methods employed in Florida are commonplace across the U.S. We have the same inaccurate voting machines in rural and urban areas, from Atlanta to Chicago to Los Angeles. Even former President Jimmy Carter, who oversees elections worldwide, could not intervene on behalf of the American people. His official group can only be involved in countries that have national voting standards, the U.S does not, Haiti does.

The National Commission on Federal Election Reform headed by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford recently issued a report calling for fixes to the election system that can be done in the states without federal government intervention, reforms such as uniform statewide standards for counting ballots, provisional voting, and restoration of voting rights to ex-felons–to name a few. The down side of this blue-ribbon panel’s effort is that the report merely offers recommendations with no authority to implement the changes it calls for. The Commission report omits mandatory required actions by the federal government even in federal elections; and opts for a voluntary role by state and federal governments for correct the deficiencies in the electoral system.

At every step in the election process, states discriminated against groups of voters, usually people of color. In some cases this bias was intentional, in other cases it was the product of gross negligence. In either case it is worth a brief recap to prevent that déjà vu experience in 2002.

The best-known obstacle to voters involves the various types of voting machines used in different counties. Last year, Florida counties used five different voting systems. Study after study has found that the worst systems were used in counties with a high percentage of minority voters.

Election officials have known for years that punch card ballots–the type used in most of Florida’s urban areas–count the vote inaccurately. In fact, the National Bureau of Standards recommended abandoning their use because of the “hanging chad” problem as early as 1988. In Miami-Dade County, where punch cards were used, one in twelve ballots had no vote for President counted.

Brevard County, Florida, provided a good example of the unequal quality of voting systems. When the county used punch cards in 1996, 2.6 percent of ballots for President were invalidated; after the county changed to high-tech optical scan equipment in 2000, only 0.27 percent of Presidential ballots were invalidated.

Even among the counties that used optical scan technology there were differences in quality. The only majority black county in the state, Gadsden County, used an unreliable type of optical scan equipment. As a result, Gadsden had the largest percentage of invalidated ballots in the state–one in eight voters had their presidential ballots disqualified.

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Many states need to eliminate obsolete voting machines. But repairing our nation’s democratic infrastructure will require more then just modernizing the ballot box. According to an assessment by The National Association of Secretary of States, the dilemmas present in the last election were not new and only three of the twenty-seven problem areas were technology or equipment.

Recount procedures–including those that the U.S. Supreme Court allowed in Florida–were unevenly used and unfair. Some counties never did the mandatory recount; instead of examining the ballots many counties only rechecked the counters on their machines. Nassau County (a Republican stronghold), on the other hand, did a real recount and then certified the original tally instead of the recounted numbers.

At the behest of the Florida Secretary of State (Republican Katherine Harris), many counties used an inaccurate database to “scrub” the names of felons from the voter rolls. But hundreds or thousands of innocent citizens were removed from the list of registered voters in the process. And when they went to vote, election officials turned them away. There was no process to contest election officials, no way to file a “provisional” ballot.

There was also no way for voters to know their rights at the polling place. In many cases, when voters made a mistake on their ballots and asked for a fresh one (which is their right), election officials turned them down.

After the election the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in Florida and found that people of color were turned away from voting; evidence of intimidation was gathered throughout the state.

In short, the election made a mockery of democracy. Unfortunately, the methods employed in Florida are commonplace across America. In fact, more than two million Americans who went to the polls last November did not have their Presidential ballots counted because of faulty equipment, confusing ballots, and inaccurate registration lists. Another 3.9 million Americans were denied the right to vote because of a felony conviction. We have the same issues of fairness, the same charges of voter intimidation.

Both the Congress and state legislatures need to take action immediately.

Chadless elections. Old volting equipment has got ot go. The punch card, invented in 1890, should be banned as ballots. States should mandate the use of modern optical scan or electronic voting systems. From now on, every vote must count.

Uniform voting standards. rich and poor counties must be treated alike when it comes to the quality of voitng equipment and election procedures. States should require and finance uniform voting standards across all juridictions.

Uniform ballot designs. No more butterfly ballots. States should require statewide election officials to review and approve all baoolt designs to ensure clarity and uniformity.

Guaranteed provisional ballots. No one should be turned away from the polls because of a dispute over the registration rolls. States should offer provisional ballots for individuals who are not listed on the precinct’s voter registration list; these votes are kept in a way that eligibility to vote can be checked and each legal ballot counted.

Guaranteed replacement of spoiled ballots. Voters make legitimate mistakes. States should ensure that any voter who makes a mistake before casting a ballot is provided a replacement ballot.

Voters’ Bill of Rights. Empower votes with knowledge of their rights at the polls. States should post a Voters’ Bill of Rights at every polling place to explain the rights of voters, including right to register, vote, obtain replacements for spoiled ballots, use provisional ballots, and seek assistance.

Stop wrongful voter purging. No registered voter should be turned away because of sloppy list maintenance procedures. States should place strict statewide controls on manipulations of the voting rolls, and purging should be done through procedures that are fully open for inspection by the public.

End the patronage system of election administration. No more special favors for one political party. States should ensure that all state and local election boards are either bipartisan or nonpartisan.

Clear rules for recounts. Fair and precise procedures. States should review and reform their procedures for vote recounts.

Additionally, we need to repair the cracks in our democracy by making voter registration and voting easier; restoring voting rights to felons who have served their time; overhauling the campaign finance system; and training poll workers to ensure full knowledge of and compliance with applicable laws and policies.

Tomorrow’s election is determined by today’s action. Our failure to act will allow history to repeat itself. The flawed election of 2000 is not just a lesson from the past but a challenge for the future to assert the dignity of the people through the vote. We can choose a new course.

René Redwood is Senior Fellow of the Democracy and Technology Program at the Center for Policy Alternatives in Washington, D.C. Bernie Horn is Policy Director at the Center for Policy Alternatives.

Budget Woes and Partisan Politics Block Election Reform

By Lisa Rab

Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 pp. 6-13

Despite the initial scramble to introduce legislation responding to the election chaos in Florida, very few Southern states passed comprehensive election reform measures in 2001.

Stymied by budget constraints and partisan wrangling, well-intended legislation was consistently dropped, voted down, or left languishing in committees. Expecting the federal government to foot at least part of the bill, many states either delayed passing legislation or only passed bills that did not require extra funds.

Those states that did pass comprehensive laws did not allocate enough state funds to fully cover equipment upgrades and voter education, relying instead on county or federal contributions to make up the difference. Measures that have been dubbed the most progressive–like those passed in Georgia and Florida–hinge on funding that has yet to materialize. A state-by-state analysis illustrates how funding and partisan politics, among other factors, prevented most substantive reforms from being passed in the Southern states.

Alabama: Bipartisan Effort to Broaden Franchise and Combat Voter Fraud Fails

Voter identification and the voting rights of ex-felons, the two most important election reform issues for Alabama Republicans and Democrats, respectively, were addressed by two bills that moved jointly through the General Assembly. Both bills, however, died in the Senate on the last day of the legislative session.

Representative Jim Carnes sponsored the Republican bill that would have required voters to show some form of identification at the polls. Representative Yvonne Kennedy sponsored the Democratic bill that would have restored the voting rights of felons who had completed their sentences. The two bills moved jointly through the Alabama House of Delegates in order to garner bipartisan support, but neither bill was brought to a vote in the Senate.

For several years the Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC) and other advocates representing the African-American population of Alabama have introduced legislation to restore the voting rights of felons . Currently, people convicted of a felony in Alabama are disfranchised for life unless they apply to have their voting rights reinstated and submit to a DNA test. In 1998 over 31 percent of black males in Alabama were disfranchised by felony convictions, according to the independent criminal justice policy group The Sentencing Project (Southern Changes, Fall 2000).

In the 2001 legislative session, Secretary of State Jim Bennett was primarily concerned with the expansion of absentee voting and anti-fraud measures, such as voter identification at the polls. Chuck Grainger, general counsel for Bennett, explained that Bennett is waiting for the federal government to set requirements for election equipment before making changes to Alabama’s election machines. “It would be foolish on our part, particularly having the lowest taxes in the country, to spend money on [updating election] systems before the federal government spends money on it themselves,” Grainger said.

Considering the overall political climate in the General Assembly, Jerome Gray, state field director of the ADC, is skeptical that real election reform legislation will pass in the next session. “I think it’s going to be tough to get something through,” he said. The ADC supports measures that will standardize voting equipment throughout the state.

Arkansas: New Laws Make Slight Improvements in Election Procedures

At the urging of Secretary of State Sharon Priest, Arkansas created a commission to study the state’s election system and made several minor changes to its election laws in the last session.

The Arkansas legislature adopted laws that will require two poll workers to be trained in every precinct before the 2002 election, all overseas military absentee ballots to be counted, and each county board of commissioners to tally the number of over-votes and under-votes in its precincts and report its findings to the state board of elections.

Democrats in the House of Representatives also introduced another new law that would require felons to provide the county clerk with evidence that they have

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completed their probation (as well as their sentence) and paid all their fees before they can register to vote. Previously, felons automatically had their rights restored after completing their sentence.

According to Priest, there was no organized opposition to election reform in the General Assembly, but there are some “fiscal issues” that may cause conflict if the election study commission makes funding recommendations as well as policy ones. Priest hopes the federal government will help pay for necessary improvements to the election system. “I think Congress will ultimately have some funding available,” she said.

The Secretary of State also emphasized the importance of expanding the number of early voting sites and their hours of operation. “I’m sick and tired of having to say, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you, but only from 8:00 to 4:30,'” she said.

Florida: Reform Package Falls Short of Funding Equipment Upgrades

Florida’s election reform package–lauded by some as a comprehensive overhaul of the system that broke down last November–is being sharply criticized by others for its failure to fully fund equipment upgrades.

The new law requires that all of Florida’s counties begin using electronic voting equipment by 2002. Precinct-based optical scanners are the only machines that the Secretary of State has certified for that purpose. To install the new scanners, the legislature allocated $7,500 to counties with populations under 75,000, and $3,750 to more populous counties.

Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County and a Democrat, says the legislation “is sort of biased against urban counties,” and does not believe $3,750 will be enough to cover the cost. Florida State Senator Bill Posey, a Republican co-sponsor of the election reform bill, explained that his committee decided to give twice as much money to the rural counties because it is more difficult for them to raise revenue. Posey said that some smaller counties have reached the state’s limit on property taxes, and therefore cannot raise taxes to generate funds for election reform. The larger counties have not reached the tax limit, and could raise taxes if they needed to. “[But] they really don’t have to,” he said. “It’s just a matter of priorities. You know, do you want to have new garbage trucks or do you want to have new voting equipment?”

Dan Hendrickson, an advocate with Florida’s Clean Elections Campaign, Sierra Club Florida Chapter, Florida Consumer Action Network, and Florida League of Conservation Voters, disagrees. “For [legislators] to say that they were funding the program is inappropriate,” he said. “They just threw some money at the problem because they had to.” County commissions have held a series of meetings on plans to raise additional revenue, he added.

Clay Roberts, Director of the Elections Division for Florida’s Secretary of State, said that when the legislation was being drafted, the election equipment vendors told him that the optical scan equipment would cost $7,500 per county. Now, however, he says the equipment vendors have increased their estimate of the costs “because there is money to be made.”

Several equipment firms are competing to be the suppliers of Florida’s new voting machines, and are looking to curry favor with the county boards of commissioners who will purchase the equipment. Election Systems Software (ESS), a voting equipment vender, recently agreed to pay the Florida Association of Counties half a percent of the total sales that ESS makes to counties provided the Association endorses the company and its equipment. Some have questioned this agreement. “The state association of election supervisors believes that the contract is unethical,” Sancho said. He explained that election supervisors are responsible for making recommendations to the board of county commissioners about what equipment should be purchased. In Sancho’s eyes, the deal between the Association of Counties and ESS creates a conflict of interest. He says he does not want the commissioners to make decisions to buy election equipment based on whether or not they are going to make a profit. To complicate the matter further, former Florida Secretary of State Sandra Mortham lobbies for both the Association of Counties and ESS.

Georgia: Overhaul of Voting Equipment Will Depend on Federal Funding

Georgia’s election reform package, heralded as one of the first in the country to require statewide uniform electronic voting equipment, may be a false promise unless federal funding becomes available to pay for the new equipment.

Secretary of State Cathy Cox has been pushing for reforms to improve the state’s voting systems for years. Kara Sinkule, a spokesperson for Cox, says that the fact that Georgia’s 94,681-ballot under-vote was higher than Florida’s in the 2000 election gave her a lobbying platform to get legislation passed this session. In addition,

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the Secretary of State’s office is the subject of an on-going lawsuit alleging that Georgia’s “fatally flawed” voting system disproportionately undercounts the votes of African Americans. In fact, a recent Southern Regional Council study found that 46 percent of black registered voters in Georgia live in counties that use punch card ballots, the least reliable voting system, while only 25 percent of white voters live in punch card counties. (Southern Changes, Spring 2001).

Senate Bill 213, enacted in the 2001 legislative session, was crafted by Secretary Cox and sponsored by Senator Jack Hill. The bill creates the Twenty-First Century Voting Commission; sets up a pilot project to test different electronic voting machines; and authorizes the Secretary of State to remove deceased voters from the rolls. It also conditionally requires uniform equipment across the state by 2004 if the General Assembly supplies the funding. The bill, however, fails to appropriate any money beyond $200,000 to fund the pilot project this fall.

This failure to provide funding has drawn sharp criticism from voting rights advocates. “[The bill] essentially made no commitment to do anything,” Neil Bradley, a lawyer with Southern Regional ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said. “The legislators didn’t promise to appropriate any money so everything is essentially unresolved.”

Sinkule says that during the next legislative session Cox will make an initial request of $5 million to begin studying the results of the project and making equipment changes. Depending on whether the Voting Commission decides to buy or lease the machines, Sinkule estimates that “anywhere from $30 to $100 million” will be needed to provide new equipment for the entire state. Cox is “very confident” that the state will contribute some of that amount, Sinkule says, but is counting on the federal government to make up the difference in matching funds. Since President Bush has not approved any federal funding for election reform though, Bradley doubts that Congress will give Georgia enough funds to cover the equipment costs. “I suspect they won’t get nearly the amount of money that will be needed to purchase a good system,” he said.

Kentucky: Short Session, Tight Budget, and Local Resistance Block Reform

A short legislative session, budget concerns, and strong resistance from local election officials blocked the passage of major election reform legislation in Kentucky, but a new law was passed to simplify the application process for ex-felons trying to regain their voting rights.

The Kentucky constitution provides that an ex-felon’s voting rights can be restored only by gubernatorial action. The process of applying for a gubernatorial pardon is, however, a complicated one. The new law, sponsored by Representative Jesse Crenshaw, is intended to make the process easier. “There certainly are glitches in that process,” bill-supporter Senator Gerald Neal said. “So this is to streamline it.”

Neal says that the rest of the election reform legislation did not pass because it was introduced during a short session (thirty days rather then sixty), and because “there was a tremendous amount of political wrangling that was going on” between the Republican Senate and the Democratic House. The major election reform bill that was proposed by the Secretary of State did not win the backing of the House and Senate leadership.

“During this legislative session, Kentucky was looking at a severe budget shortfall,” said Secretary of State John Brown, whose failed omnibus election bill would have replaced the state’s lever voting machines with electronic ones. “It was decided that no new projects would be funded outside of the areas of education and healthcare.”

Brown also noted that the extremely powerful county clerk lobby opposed the election reform bill, because the clerks in the state’s eight counties with lever machines did not want to upgrade their systems. “They’re comfortable with what they have,” Brown said. Lever machines are still used primarily in small, rural, poorer counties.

Brown believes that legislation he proposed to combat absentee ballot voter fraud will win more support in the next session than other reform proposals because it does not require funding. “Legislation like that has a much better chance of passing in 2002 than the purchase of voting equipment, unless there’s going to be federal money available for that,” he said.

Louisiana: Attempts to Broaden Franchise Stall in Legislature

Although Louisiana passed an omnibus bill making minor changes to its already uniform statewide system of elections, no significant election reform measures passed this session. Attempts were made, however, to enfranchise ex-felons and increase opportunities for absentee voting.

Representative Elcie Guillory and Senator Cleo Fields, both

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Democrats and members of the Legislative Black Caucus, introduced two bills that would have enhanced the voting rights of ex-felons. Guillory’s proposal would have allowed people on probation for a first-time drug offense to vote. Fields’s proposal would have required that felons who had finished serving their prison time be notified in writing that they could register to vote again. Neither bill advanced out of the House.

Meanwhile, Republican Representative Kay Kellogg Katz introduced a bill that would have removed the eligibility requirements for absentee voting and added two more days to the absentee voting period, but would have slightly reduced polling hours on election day. Currently, Louisiana polls are open for fourteen hours on Election Day. The bill would have reduced the number of hours to twelve. Dan Garrett, counsel for the Louisiana House Governmental Affairs Committee, said the extension of no-excuse absentee voting days was the Committee’s way of allowing early voting and compensating for the decrease in polling hours. “We have more hours than anyone,” Garrett said, “And that was creating problems with poll workers.”

That bill, which the state ACLU supported because of the absentee clause but opposed the reduced polling hours provision, came close to passing. According to Michael Malec of the Louisiana ACLU, it died on the Senate floor “because they ran out of time.”

Louisiana has electronic or mechanical voting machines in every district, so upgrading machinery was not a priority for legislators in the last session. “The only thing we currently use paper [punch card ballots] for is absentee ballots and they are being phased out,” Garrett said.

According to Malec, Louisiana has “probably one of the most sophisticated and expensive voting systems in the U.S.,” thanks to Former Election Commissioner Jerry Fowler, who was sent to jail last year for inflating the price of voting machines.

Mississippi: Task Force Plans Reforms Next Session

The Mississippi legislature did not enact any major election reforms during the 2001 session. In late June, Mississippi Secretary of State Eric Clark convened an election reform task force that will make recommendations for changes to the election code. It is intended that the Commission will make recommendations for legislation to be introduced in next year’s General Assembly.

The Task Force on Elections, Procedure, and Technology will look at issues relating to voting machines, voter roll maintenance, ballot design, and the reporting of election returns. “We hope to move toward a more uniform [election] system,” David Blount, the Secretary of State’s Communications Director, said. The Task Force will make its recommendations to the legislature by December 1, 2001.

More than sixty election bills representing Republican and Democratic agendas were introduced in the 2001 session, including a requirement for proof of voter identification at the polls, a ban on punch card ballots, and a proposal for no-excuse absentee voting. All of the substantive bills died in committee and only six of the most modest bills passed.

“Basically you have…a legislature that does not lend itself to much change,” said Representative David Gibbs, a Democrat whose bills allowing no-excuse absentee voting and requiring absentee ballots to be mailed automatically to voters over sixty-five both died in House committees. Blount said more substantive legislation was not proposed or passed because the legislative session began in January, barely a month after the Florida election results were finalized. He says this did not give legislators enough time to draft legislation on the complex issues involved in election reform. While most other states in the South convened their legislative sessions in January as well, Mississippi legislators have only two weeks in which to prepare bills (known as pre-filing), compared to the one to two months of pre-filing in other states.

Of the laws that did pass the General Assembly, the most significant one changes the way county election commissioners are paid and is intended to address the issue of inaccurate voter rolls. “We do have a serious problem in Mississippi with inflated and inaccurate voter rolls,” Blount said. “We’ve got many counties in which there are more registered voters than there are people over the age of eighteen.”

County election commissioners are responsible for maintaining voter registration records. Under previous Mississippi law, commissioners were paid based on the number of names on the voter rolls, which may have been an incentive to inflate the rolls. Under the new law, they will be paid based on the population of their county.

Another new law puts an “Election Integrity Assurance” committee in each congressional district to help ensure that local party executive committees conduct party primaries properly. A bill was also enacted that is designed to enhance voting opportunities for high school

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students by sending registrars to schools and providing students with mail-in voter registration forms.

While the state did not even consider legislation funding new voting equipment, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports that DeSoto County is currently seeking U.S. Justice Department approval for a $250,000 optical scanner voting system that officials hope will replace their punch card system by June 2002.

North Carolina: Lack of Funding Weakens Reform

The primary roadblock to significant election reform in North Carolina was the state’s enormous budget deficit, which left the Board of Elections severely under-funded. “Our number one problem is lack of money to update our election system,” Board of Elections General Counsel Don Wright said.

The General Assembly passed a bill, proposed by Democrat G. Wayne Goodwin, outlawing the use of butterfly and punch-card ballots. However, according to Chris Heagarty of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education, North Carolina does not currently use butterfly ballots, and only eight counties use punch card ballots.

Heagarty doubts that those counties will be able to eliminate punch card ballots without financial assistance. “The big issue here,” he said, “was that some of the counties that use them don’t have the funds to switch to updated machinery.”

Since the General Assembly did not want to take responsibility for the cost of new equipment, they wrote a loophole into the bill they passed. “It does outlaw the punch card ballot, except in those counties that currently use them,” added Heagarty.

A bill sponsored by Democratic Representative Marvin Lucas and passed late in the legislative session will require ballot instructions to be printed in Spanish as well as English in counties with a Hispanic population of more than 6 percent.

Senate Republican Robert Rucho proposed the “Fair Election Act” that would shorten the early voting period and require voters to present identification for early voting. This bill was referred to committee and did not come up for a vote. Democrat Wib Gulley introduced two “Election Rewrite” bills that would help standardize election procedures such as recounts, protests, ballot content, and certification. Both bills stalled in committee. Heagarty believes, however, that even if enacted, none of these bills will achieve much systematic reform.

South Carolina: No Major Reforms Pass; New Laws Encourage Participation

The South Carolina General Assembly failed to pass any significant reform of the state’s election laws. The General Assembly did, however, enact laws in the 2001 session that will improve absentee voting methods and allow high school students to assist poll workers. None of these reforms require the state to provide extra funding for equipment or training, but are intended to encourage voter participation.

Absentee balloting is a growing concern for voters in South Carolina, according to John Rouff of the consumer organization South Carolina Fair Share. In some counties, he said, 10 percent of voters are voting absentee, particularly in places where the majority of the population works far away from home. Democratic Senators Robert Ford and Luke Rankin proposed a no-excuse absentee voting bill in the last session that would have removed all restrictions regarding who is allowed to vote using absentee ballots. Currently, there is a list of acceptable legal reasons for why a voter cannot vote at the assigned poll on election day. The bill did not pass and those restrictions on who can vote absentee remain.

While the limitations on who may cast an absentee ballot were not changed, the methods by which such a ballot may be cast were broadened. Republican Senator Larry Martin proposed a successful bill that will allow walk-in absentee voters to use voting machines instead of paper ballots. “We’re hoping that it’ll make voting a little faster,” Deputy Director of the South Carolina Election Commission Donna Royson said. Republicans control both houses of the South Carolina General Assembly.

Other important legislation introduced during the 2001 legislative session would have repealed the voting rights of convicted felons and required them to wait fifteen years after completing their sentence to appeal for a restoration of voting rights. Currently, felons in South Carolina can have their voting rights restored upon completing their sentence. The bill, sponsored by Republicans John Graham Altman, III, and Ronald Fleming, passed the House but has not been adopted by the Senate. According to Rouff, the failed bill could have had devastating effects on minority power and should be watched closely. Although it will not pass into the next session, it may be attached to future bills.

Another piece of legislation that failed to pass would have enacted laws to combine all off-year elections into one general election and set guidelines for hand counts

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of ballots in the case of voting machinery malfunctions. It also would punish losing candidates who protested an election on any ground other than the disparity between the number of ballots cast and the number of votes counted if the board hearing the protest determines that the protest is frivolous and without merit.

Tennessee: Budget Crisis Takes Precedence Over Election Reform

After a budget crisis led to “one of the longest legislative sessions in recent history,” the Tennessee legislature came close to passing a bill that would have set standards for counting punch card ballots and required the state election commission to approve the purchase of all voting machines.

The Democratic election reform bill passed the Senate in May in a vote strictly divided along partisan lines, and was amended and accepted by the Democrat-controlled House, but the Senate did not approve the House amendments before the session ended July 12.

“I don’t think there was any real hesitation to pass the amendments in the Senate that passed the House…it just didn’t get done,” State Coordinator of Elections Brook Thompson said. “I expect that it will pass in January.”

Twenty-one counties in Tennessee use punch card ballots, Thompson said, consequently the legislature did not seriously consider proposals to ban the ballots completely because the state did not have enough money to replace them with new voting systems. The “2000 Presidential Election Debacle Reform Bill of 2001” would have established standards for manual recounts of ballots with hanging chads, but did not outlaw punch card ballots. Legislators were busy trying to reach an agreement on how to solve the state’s budget crisis, and could not afford to consider legislation that would have required additional funding. “We’re having severe budgetary problems in Tennessee so there was not a lot of money floating around for things like voting machines,” Thompson said.

The budget that the General Assembly finally passed “puts lawmakers more than $200 million in the red” for next year, according to the Nashville newspaper, the Tennessean. “Tennessee has almost complete reliance on sales tax for revenue,” explained Erik Cole, Executive Director of the consumer and environmental watchdog group Tennessee Citizen Action (TCA). “We don’t have an income tax. So the last three years have seen a severe budget crisis every year because revenues have not kept up with expenditures.”

TCA was particularly concerned about the “Motor Voter” program, which is the process by which people can register to vote when they apply for a driver’s license. When applicants checked off a box on their driver’s license form indicating they wanted to register to vote, they were supposed to receive a registration form that they could take home and mail in later. Many voters, however, thought they were registering to vote when they checked off the box, and either never received or never mailed in their voter registration form.

According to Cole, at least two-thousand people reported to the state that they thought they had registered through motor voter but were not allowed to vote when they went to the polls. Many voter registration forms were lost and Cole thinks the Department of Safety may have been responsible for not passing the paperwork on to the elections commission. But Thompson and the Safety Department disagree. “I do not think that was the cause of the problems we had last November,” Thompson said.

After holding hearings in the fall, the Safety Department has decided to have voters fill out their registration forms in the driver’s license station. “They’ll be no opportunity for the voter to take that form home with them, so it won’t get lost in the shuffle,” Thompson said. Some registration information will also be transmitted electronically to the election commission.

Another source of voter confusion was polling place, especially for voters who had recently moved to a new precinct. “People would show up at one place,” Cole said “and be told ‘No, you’re supposed to go to another one,’ without good advance notice.”

TCA also received telephone calls from voters in majority-minority districts who said they were asked to show multiple forms of identification at the polls, in violation of state law. Thompson was not aware of those reports. Although Thompson admits that there were problems with the “Motor Voter” program and voters were confused about which precinct they should vote in, no legislation was introduced this session to address those issues. Cole says TCA did not push for it either, because they were concentrating on other issues, but he has “a whole plateful” of things that he is planning to propose next year. “My guess,” Thompson said, “is we will continue to talk about that and see what can be done [in the] next legislative session.”

Texas: New Laws Phase Out Punch Cards, Evenly Distribute New Voting Machines

In the 2001 legislative session, Texas agreed to phase out punch card ballots, distribute new voting equipment equitably among its counties, and update its voter registration rolls more frequently.

According to Will Harrell, Executive Director of the Texas ACLU, Texans were “genuinely humiliated” by

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what happened in Florida, and more substantial legislation may have been passed had election reform not become a partisan issue. “It was so clear that it was a Democratic agenda,” he said. “To accept these reforms in Texas is to admit that there was a problem in Florida, which the [Republican] party did not want to do.”

One of the more positive bills in Harrell’s eyes insures the even distribution of new voting equipment among affluent white districts and poorer communities of color. Currently, Texas has the same equipment disparities that were a problem in Florida, with punch card ballots mainly in poorer counties. According to Secretary of State Henry Cueller’s office, punch card counties had the highest over- and under-votes in the state in the November election.

To fully remedy the problem, Harrell recommends an “equitable distribution of resources at polling places, not just with regards to equipment use but also with regards to the professionalism and training of the people who staff those places.” Harrell was disappointed that punch card ballots were not outlawed as had been originally proposed in Representative Dale Tillery’s bill . Harrell said Tillery withdrew his bill because Tillery thought other legislators would never agree to shoulder the costs associated with the elimination and replacement of the machines. The new law simply states that no new punch card ballot machines may be purchased.

Secretary of State Henry Cueller says his office conservatively estimated that it would cost at least $25 million to eliminate punch card machines. Cueller spoke with legislators about grants and other ways of funding the ban, but “Since money was tight, the legislature decided not to put any money [in]to getting rid of the punch cards.”

Cueller was happy with the bills that passed. “The legislature was pretty responsive to what we wanted here,” he said. The Secretary was primarily concerned with updating the process of maintaining accurate voter registration lists. His office proposed a new law that passed this session requiring the Secretary’s office to be in weekly contact with the counties who are compiling the lists, in order to weed out duplicate voters, deceased voters, and possible felons. Another new law requires the Secretary to verify the voter registration lists that are compiled by private companies.

Virginia: Budget Impasse and Lack of Political Incentive Prevent Reform

A tight budget, an unwilling legislature, and a State Board of Elections reluctant to admit there are flaws in the system combined forces to prevent Virginia from reforming its election system this year.

Thirty-six laws regarding voting and elections were enacted by the General Assembly this year, but the laws dealt primarily with procedures for absentee voting and only a few created notable changes in the election system. The only significant expansion of voting opportunities that the legislature approved this session applies to voters who work long hours and cannot make it to the polls. Virginia law has a provision that allows voters to use an absentee ballot if they work eleven of the thirteen hours that the polls are open. Republican Delegate Michele McQuigg proposed a bill that expanded that provision to include commuting time in the eleven hours of work, thus enabling more voters to qualify for an absentee ballot.

Lawmakers also created a subcommittee to study the state’s election process and voting technology; enacted a law requiring the State Board of Elections to recommend standards for recount procedures by December 1, 2001;

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and outlined standards for recounting only those punch card ballots that are rejected by counting machines. Under the new laws, electronic voting machines are required, if possible, to tabulate under- and over-votes. The law provides that only the ballots on which the voter chose too few or too many candidates may be examined in a recount and, when performing a recount, at least two corners of the chad must be dislodged from the card for the vote to count. Currently, seven of Virginia’s largest voting localities–out of a total of 135 localities–use punch card ballots.

The General Assembly also passed a law stating that presidential electors are now “required” rather than “expected” to vote for the candidates of the political party or petitioners that selected them. Proposals to require uniform voting equipment throughout the state and to simplify the process of restoring voting rights to ex-felons, however, did not even garner enough support to be brought to a floor vote.

“There’s not a significant constituency in the Virginia General Assembly that cares about registration and voting of low-income people and minorities,” Kent Willis, Executive Director of the ACLU of Virginia, said. “Because of that, Virginia is not going to be a leader in election reform law.”

Rosanna Bencoach, Policy Manager for the State Board of Elections, is not advocating major reform. “I don’t think the election system in Virginia needs overhauling,” she said. “I think it works pretty well.”

One of the reasons that legislation requiring state funding to update election equipment did not pass was a budget disagreement between the Senate and Governor James S. Gilmore, III. Gilmore campaigned in 1997 on a promise to repeal Virginia’s car tax, but this year the Senate did not want to continue phasing out the tax, and could not reach an agreement with Gilmore, or the House members that supported him. After what the Washington Post called “an unprecedented budget impasse,” no amendments were made to the budget this year, Bencoach said. “It ended up with a lot of things getting cut in the budget in order for the governor to continue his phase-out,” Willis said.

Lisa Rab is a journalism student at Emory University in Atlanta. This article contains information contributed by Catherine Wall.

A Closer Look: The Florida and Georgia Experiences

By Catherine Wall

Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 pp. 14-17

The 2001 state legislative sessions witnessed very little progress towards comprehensive election reform. Only two southern states–Florida and Georgia–passed meaningful legislation to repair the disfranchising, antiquated, and undemocratic electoral flaws that were made glaringly apparent by the 2000 election. Maryland is the only non-southern state to pass comprehensive reform.

Many of the laws and procedures that disfranchise voters disproportionately impact minority voters. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act occurred in Florida’s election. Its study found that 14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected while only 1.6 percent of Florida’s white voters’ ballots were rejected. In Georgia, an SRC study found racial disparities in the state’s voting system. The punch card system, in which 4.67 percent of ballots cast were discounted, was the least effective voting machinery used in the state. Optical scan was the most effective but still only 2.72 percent of those ballots went uncounted. The study found that Georgia’s black voters were almost two times more likely than white voters to live in counties using punch cards.

The following is a more detailed analysis of what Florida and Georgia’s election reform laws will achieve and the work that remains.

Florida

Florida became ground zero for a nightmarish election process this past November, so it was incumbent on the state to take the lead in state election reform. The reform was embodied in Senate Bill 1118, sponsored by Senator Bill Posey (R-Rockledge).

Journalists have praised Florida’s legislation as a swift and impressive handling of a disastrous situation, and many Florida lawmakers believe the new law will cure the state’s election law problems. Senator Posey, a member of the Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, maintains that the measure accomplishes his committee’s “two top priorities: number one was to make sure every vote counted, and the second was to have a process that would instill confidence in every voter that their vote would be counted.”

While Florida’s election reform bill did allocate $24 million in state funds for standardized ballot recount provisions, provided for voter and poll worker education, and overhauled the voter registration system, the bill left many important issues unresolved. The bill failed to provide for the full funding of election reforms, failed to address the issue of voter disfranchisement resulting from problems in the Motor Voter registration system, failed to address ex-felon disenfranchisement, and did not address problems associated with the partisan affiliation of election officials.

On April 26, 2001, the Florida Consumer Action Network, the Florida League of Conservation Voters, the Florida Chapter Sierra Club, and the Florida Clean Elections Coalition published a list of the deficiencies of the new legislation. The groups pointed to many important omissions that they contend amount to the legislature’s skirting of crucial issues, resulting in a negative impact on voter enfranchisement. Susie Caplow, an environmental and consumer advocate who lobbies for the Sierra Club, believes that the law did not address the problem of the undercounting of votes cast by poor and minority voters. Caplaw stated that in order to solve that problem an election law must adequately address voter education, the voting rights of felons who have completed their sentences, and must provide for multi-lingual ballots. The statute failed to comprehensively address any of these matters.

A closer look at the Florida law reveals the issues to be revisited.

. The law establishes comprehensive recount measures that provide for an automatic, standardized statewide recount to be conducted of undervotes and overvotes if the winning vote margin is within one quarter of 1 percent. This provision significantly changes the former law, which gave counties wide discretion to establish their own recount procedures.

Provisional Ballots. The new legislation authorizes the use of provisional ballots in elections to allow voters who were wrongly left off of registration rolls to vote. The vote cast on a provisional ballot will be counted once it is established that the voter should have been on the registration rolls provided that the vote was cast at the correct voting precinct. According to Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, voters who guess their precinct

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correctly are ensured of their enfranchisement, but “if they guess wrong, they don’t get their right to vote.”

Voter and Poll Worker Education. The measure sets minimum standards for voter education efforts and poll worker training and recruitment and allocates almost $6 million in funding to implement these standards. The Department of State must adopt rules prescribing minimum standards for nonpartisan voter education, including voter registration, balloting procedures, absentee and polling locations, voter rights and responsibilities, distribution of sample ballots, and public service announcements. The Department of State will also prepare a polling place procedures manual to be placed in each precinct. Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, believes that these new minimum standards are a major accomplishment of the statute. “To me one of the key things is voter education,” she said, maintaining that while continuing improvement will be necessary, the law is “a step in the right direction.” Yet according to Caplow, the amount of money allocated will not cover actual voter education costs.

Standard Ballots. The legislation ensures statewide ballot clarity by means of a standardized and unambiguous ballot design to be approved by the Department of State. While this will ensure a level of equality for all English speaking voters, the bill does not require multi-lingual ballots in precincts with high numbers of non-English speaking voters, leaving a large obstacle between those voters and fair representation.

Electronic Voting Systems. The law requires counties to use electronic tabulation voting systems, provides funding for upgrading voting systems ($7,500 per precinct for counties of 75,000 or fewer, and $3,750 per precinct for the rest of the counties), and bans punch card voting systems. Nevertheless, the amount of funding provided is not enough to cover the statewide costs of replacing punch card machines. Sancho maintains that while smaller counties may be able to purchase machines with their allotted amount, “the legislation is biased against urban counties,” in that the densely populated counties will have to come up with supplemental funds to purchase the new equipment.

Voting Rolls. The new statute sets up a statewide voter registration database and provides $2 million in funding for the database.

Absentee Voting. The measure establishes no-excuse absentee voting which would end the requirement that a voter offer a legally acceptable reason for being unable to vote at the assigned precinct on voting day in order to obtain an absentee ballot. It also creates more reasonable regulations regarding overseas absentee voting. Early voting provisions which enable a voter to cast his/her ballot at a designated location prior to election day were not provided for in Florida.(According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, few states actually passed comprehensive early voting laws. New Mexico is a notable exception, with early voting on electronic machines allowed until 5 p.m. the Saturday prior to election day)

Polling Hours. The statute creates a study to determine the merits of uniform poll opening and closing but does not extend polling place hours.

Secondary Primaries. The law eliminates secondary primaries in 2002, streamlining the election process by abolishing a run-off between the top two candidates if no one captures 50 percent of the vote in the first primary. The statute eliminates secondary primaries only in the 2002 elections though, and there has been speculation that this change was a partisan maneuver by the Republican-controlled legisture to assist Governor Jeb Bush with his reelection. In addition, the Florida bill does not consider “instant runoff” voting that would allow voters to

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elect candidates by a plurality rather than a majority.

Voting Rights. The measure requires polling places to post a Voter’s Bill of Rights, stating that each voter has the right: to vote and have that vote accurately counted; to cast a vote if in line when the polls close; to ask for and receive assistance in voting; to receive up to two replacement ballots if a mistake is made prior to casting the ballot; to receive an explanation if his/her registration is in question; to be given a provisional ballot if registration is in question; to prove identification by signing an affidavit; to be given written instructions to use when voting or oral instructions from an elections officer; to vote free from coercion or intimidation; and to vote on a voting system that is in working condition and that allows votes to be accurately cast. The Florida law, however, weakens this requirement by failing to provide sanctions for the failure to do so. Further, the statute requires a list of Voter’s Responsibilities to be posted with the Bill of Rights, which could confuse or intimidate new voters. The Voter’s Bill of Responsibilities requires each voter: to study and know candidates and issues; to keep voter address current; to know precinct location and hours of operation; to bring proper identification to the polling station; to know how to operate voting equipment properly; to treat precinct workers with courtesy; to respect the privacy of other voters; to report problems or violations of election law; ask questions when confused; and to check completed ballot for accuracy. Although there are no sanctions attached to these responsibilities, voters could be intimidated and/or confused by the contradiction between the Voter’s Bill of Rights and the Voter’s Bill of Responsibility. For example, the Voter’s Bill of Rights providers the right to sign an affidavid in lieu of proper identification, while the Voter’s Bill of Responsibility requires voters to provide proper identification.

Internet Voting. The law begins internet access for voters, but only for those overseas. Overseas voters will be emailed a list of candidates thirty days prior to the election and, if state officials are able to negotiate the technical hurdles, overseas voters will be able to request an absentee ballot via email or fax.

The new law failed to address a number of problems with Florida’s electoral system:

Motor Voter Registration. The statute does not directly deal with Motor Voter problems that caused the disfranchisement of thousands of Florida voters in 2000. Many Florida residents took advantage of Motor Voter provisions which allowed them to use their license application as a voter registration form in order to register to vote as they received their driver’s license. State law required that the form be signed by the registering voter and returned to the Secretary of State by the Department of Highway Safety and Moter Vehicles. In many cases, however, the voter was not asked to sign the registration form and the form was not transferred to the Secretary of State. Sancho estimates that 3 to 7 percent of these voters were turned away at the polls. “It’s a training issue as far as I can see,” Sancho said. The employees at the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles “do not approach [voter registration] with the seriousness and dedication that they need to.”

Felon Disfranchisement. The law does not address re-enfranchising felons who have served their time.

Same Day Registration. The law does not allow for the convenience of same day voter registration.

Non-Partisan Elections Officials. the new measure does not require election officials to be non-partisan. According to Sancho, “the failure to establish an indepen-

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dent, nonpartisan state elections administration was a major omission in the bill.” He maintains that an earlier Senate version of SB 1118 stipulated that election officials should be nonpartisan, but the House wanted “all references to nonpartisanship to be stricken from the bill.” This omission could have far reaching affects on the fairness of future elections.

Georgia: Underfunded Reform

The election crisis of November 2000 was not confined to Florida. Most states need to reform their election laws and procedures in order to prevent widespread disenfranchisement. In fact, Georgia–with 94,681 presidential votes uncounted–had a higher undervote rate than Florida. Alarmed by the high number of undervotes, Cox and the Georgia General Assembly took immediate action and passed the first comprehensive election reform law in the nation, even before Florida’s new statute was enacted.

This principal election reform measure has earned Secretary of State Cathy Cox praise for stepping up to the forefront of election reform and mandating a statewide election system to cure her state’s poor error rate in 2000. According to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, however, the Georgia law falls far short of what Cox’s press releases would have voters believe. In fact, it is clear that the substantive changes contained in the law are contingent on funding. Article 8.1 of the statute begins with the statement: “Provided that the General Assembly specifically appropriates funding.” Considering that Cox estimates that up to $100 million may be needed to implement the legislation, the securing of funding is indeed a significant condition to the success of the law. Neil Bradley of the Southern Regional ACLU’s Voting Rights Project said in relation to solving problems with minority enfranchisement, “it’s a first step in the right direction,” but the law “doesn’t really accomplish anything” because of the lack of funds.

Delving into Georgia’s new law exposes several pressing issues that were left unresolved:

Statewide System. The Georgia law creates a statewide election system to be implemented by 2004. This standardization, however, is dependent on state and federal funding that may not surface and the bill ignores problems that will likely be encountered in 2002.

Electronic Voting Systems. It instigates a pilot project to test different electronic voting machines for which $200,000 has been set aside, but the individual participating counties must foot the costs for voter education regarding the new machines.

Voter Rolls. The Georgia measure formulates a new accuracy check on voter rolls that requires the Secretary of State’s approval before deceased voters are removed from lists, but the information is still gathered by local officials.

Non-Partisan Primaries. The law ends non-partisan primaries, but, like Florida, does not present “instant run-offs,” allowing candidates to be elected by a plurality rather than a majority of the vote, as a solution to unnecessary extra time at the polls.

Ballot Clarity. The law provides for statewide usage of a “short title” on ballots, drafted by the Constitutional Amendments Publication Board, to identify proposed amendments to the state constitution. Voters were confused and frustrated by the often lengthy and complicated legislative language that comprised the proposed amendments. The short title was instituted to give a short, simple summary of the proposals. The short title will ensure clarity and ease for citizens voting on constitutional amendments, but the statute does not mandate a statewide uniform ballot.

Absentee Ballots. The new law creates stricter requirements for the handling of absentee ballots and provides for slightly harsher penalties for those pollworkers who break their oath of secrecy.

Election procedure areas that are completely ignored in the new statute include: comprehensive provisions for recount implementation; provisional ballots; no-excuse absentee voting; same-day voter registration; overseas voter policies; substantive voter education; poll worker training; and, uniform polling place hours. Further, both an early voting plan and a proposal to change ballot access requirements were specifically stricken from the law in order to get the bill passed.

While Florida and Georgia and Maryland have succeeded in enacting laws that call for statewide voting systems in the near future, much work remains to be done in order to avoid repeating last year’s catastrophe of widespread disefranchisement, especially of minority groups. Many hope that the Congress will take the lead in election reform by establishing a nationwide policy that includes financial grants for the states to implement election reform. Yet, Congress may not pass comprehensive federal election reform that will ensure nationwide standardization. State legislatures need to take an honest look at all of the issues that arose out of the Florida election debacle and be prepared to pass legislation that leaves no vote uncounted.

Felon Disfranchisement Bars Many from Voting

By Lisa Rab

Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 pp. 22-25

More than 200,000 people could not vote in Florida’s presidential election last year because of laws barring ex-felons from voting. Similar laws across the country prevented 1.4 million people from casting their ballots, according to data compiled by the Sentencing Project, an independent criminal justice policy group.

Every state in the South prohibits people currently imprisoned for a felony from voting, and all except for Louisiana disfranchise people on probation and parole. Most states make it nearly impossible for felons to regain their voting rights after they have served their time; in Alabama, Florida, and Kentucky they are disfranchised for life unless they receive a pardon from the governor.

Because of the racial make-up of the convicted felon population in the U.S., these laws disproportionately disfranchise African Americans. The result, according to the Sentencing Project, is that 17.5 percent of black males in the South did not have the right to vote in 1998.

Florida has more disfranchised ex-felons than any state in the nation. But activists were concerned about the voting rights of felons long before the November election exposed the disfranchisement of thousands of Floridians. In 1998, the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch published a report together on “The Impact of Felony Disfranchisement Laws in the United States.” In September 2000, two months before the election, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a suit in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida challenging the constitutionality of laws that disfranchise ex-felons.

Florida’s haphazard purging of the voter registration rolls–which disfranchised many people who were listed incorrectly as felons–attracted national media attention to the issue. Taking advantage of the heightened public awareness, legislators all over the South introduced a flurry of bills to restore the voting rights of felons. But their efforts were rarely successful. The bills that did pass achieved only minor procedural changes to the complex process of applying for a restoration of voting rights.

A Complex Process

The process for regaining voting rights varies from state to state, but it is always complicated and seldom explained to former felons. In Florida, for example, ex-felons must apply to the Office of Executive Clemency, which then makes a recommendation to the governor and the partisan cabinet. It is a high level process involving a lot of paperwork that takes “at least six months, if you’re persistent,” according Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho.

Florida, like many other states, requires that ex-felons be informed about this application process, but “that’s simply not the case” in reality, Sancho says. Felons are allowed to apply for the restoration of their rights immediately upon completion of their sentence, and the Department of Corrections is supposed to provide them with the necessary paperwork to begin the process, but Sancho says the Department does not do that. The ACLU recently filed a suit contending that the Florida Department of Corrections is not fulfilling its obligation under current law to aid ex-felons in seeking clemency.

Slight Progress

Since the ban on voting rights for ex-felons is written in the constitution of many states, it is a difficult law for legislators to change. Instead of trying to amend the constitution to automatically restore voting rights, they often choose to make smaller changes to the election code that will make the restoration process easier.

Of the Southern states in the last session, only Kentucky passed legislation that is intended to facilitate the process ex-felons go through when applying to have their voting rights restored.

Kentucky’s constitution dictates that felons can only regain their voting rights through gubernatorial action. The General Assembly, however, passed a law this year that is intended to simplify and streamline the process of applying for a gubernatorial pardon.

“It made it easier to get to the governor’s desk so the governor can act,” says State Senator Gerald Neal.

The Arkansas constitution allows felons to regain their voting rights upon completion of their sentence (including jail time, probation, and parole). The legislature, however, passed a law this year that requires applicants to provide the county clerk with evidence that they have completed their sentence, their probation, and paid all their fees before they can register to vote.

Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina currently restore the voting rights of felons after they have completed their sentences, without requiring a waiting period. Of the remaining Southern states, four introduced progressive legislation this session that failed to pass. Three states, including South Carolina, introduced legislation that would have further restricted felons’ rights.

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Tennessee did not introduce any legislation in 2001 regarding the voting rights of felons.

Strategies for Restoration

For years without success, African-American activist groups and sympathetic legislators in Alabama have been introducing legislation to help restore the voting rights of felons, . Currently, ex-felons must apply to have their rights restored by the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, and are required to provide a DNA sample to the state Department of Forensics as part of the application process. According to the Sentencing Project, 31 percent of black males in Alabama were disfranchised by felony convictions in 1998.

This year, voting rights advocates developed a different strategy for pushing ex-felon enfranchisement legislation through the Alabama General Assembly. They introduced a bill that would have restored the voting rights of felons who had completed their sentence, and moved it through the House with a Republican bill that would have required voters to show some form of identification at the polls. The two bills moved together in order to gain bipartisan support for two issues that usually split legislators along party lines. Both bills passed the House, but died because the Senate did not act on them before the session ended.

In Virginia, Democrats introduced three bills that would have simplified what Kent Willis, Executive Director of the ACLU of Virginia calls, “One of the most, if not the most, difficult procedures for restoration of voting rights in the nation.”

Virginia, like Kentucky, has a constitutional provision that gives the governor the final say in restoring voting rights. For the last five or six years, Willis says, legislators have been introducing bills to make the process of obtaining the governor’s approval easier, but none of them were given serious consideration until last year. In 2000, the General Assembly passed a law allowing certain ex-felons to apply to the circuit court for the restoration of their voting rights five years after completing their sentence; felony drug offenders must wait seven years to apply. The circuit court option is an alternative for those who would rather go through the courts than the governor’s office, but all court decisions are still subject to the governor’s approval.

That procedural reform indicated an important change in the largely conservative General Assembly’s attitude toward the issue of ex-felons voting. “The fact that last

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year there was a bill that passed was very good news,” says Willis.

Legislators introduced three bills this year that would have further simplified the restoration process, and although none of them passed, they did win substantial support. “Compared to four or five years ago,” observes Willis, “when these bills would get passed by…people are talking about the issue and the bills are garnering some votes.”

Rosanna Bencoach, policy manager for the Virginia State Board of Elections, explains that the process of getting voting rights restored is time consuming. After waiting a certain number of years before applying, the ex-felon must then provide letters of recommendation, a letter from the probation officer, and a copy of the court record to the governor. “But it’s not a difficult process if you understand it.”

Willis, however, says the process is so complicated he does not understand it himself. He thinks the only way to really simplify the process is to restore voting rights automatically, without gubernatorial approval. “The big hump will be when legislators are willing to address the constitutional issue. When that happens there’s a chance for dramatic reform–but that’s probably many years down the road.”

Moving Backwards

Some Southern states considered legislation in the last session that would have worsened the situation for ex-felons.

One of the most extreme examples was in Mississippi, where legislators introduced House and Senate bills that would have denied all felons the right to vote unconditionally for the rest of their lives. Neither bill made it out of committee. In 1998, the Sentencing Project found that 28.6 percent of black males in Mississippi were disfranchised by laws that prohibit anyone ever convicted of crimes such as theft, murder, forgery, and rape from voting. Currently, people who commit those crimes can petition the legislature to have their voting rights restored after they’ve served their time.

A similar bill that would have disfranchised felons for life was introduced in Texas, but stalled in a House subcommittee. Since 1997, Texas law has restored the voting rights of felons after completion of their sentence. Prior to that time, they were required to wait five years after completing their sentence before applying to have their rights restored.

In South Carolina, felons currently regain their voting rights after sentence completion, but a bill was introduced this year that would require them to wait fifteen years after completing their sentence to regain the vote, unless they were pardoned. According to Donna Royson, deputy director of the South Carolina Election Commission, candidates who are ex-felons have to wait fifteen years before they can run for political office. The bill passed the House and was on the contested calendar in the Senate when the session ended.

Political Resistance

According to the Brennan Center, 4.6 percent of Florida’s voting age population cannot vote because of the felon disfranchisement law, and at least one in four black men is unable to vote due to a current or past conviction.

The voting ban for ex-felons is part of Florida’s constitution, as it is in Kentucky and Virginia. In the 2001 session, two separate bills were proposed in the Florida legislature regarding felons’ voting rights. One bill was an amendment to take the ban out of the constitution and allow statutes to be passed restoring the voting rights of felons. The other bill was the actual statute that would have restored the voting rights of felons who had served their time.

A provision that would have restored voting rights

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to felons was also originally included in the Senate version of the major election reform bill that the Florida legislature passed in May. Senator Bill Posey, a Republican sponsor of that bill, explained that the provision could not have been implemented if the constitutional amendment bill failed to pass, because it was only a statute. So, when he saw that the constitutional amendment was not going to pass the House, he saw no reason keep the provision in his bill. It was dropped in conference committee negotiations with the House.

To Sancho, a Democrat, the reason that amendment and the other felon bills did not pass the Florida General Assembly this year is simple. “The Republicans don’t want to broaden the franchise.”

Since nine out of ten African-American voters chose the Democratic candidate on the ballot last November, Sancho thinks Republican resistance to restoring the voting rights of felons is “probably political more than anything else.” Florida’s House, Senate, and Governor’s office are all Republican-controlled.

Florida’s prohibition of voting rights for ex-felons was adopted three years after the Civil War, the Brennan Center says, as “one of many Reconstruction-era tactics to undermine the political power of ex-slaves.” This was the case in other states as well. Mississippi’s provision regarding the voting rights of criminals, from its 1890 Constitution, was intended to discriminate against black felons, as was Alabama’s provision from 1901.

In their lawsuit, the Brennan Center argues that because of its discriminatory intent and effect, Florida’s law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourtheenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.

“As much as we want to believe that institutionalized racial discrimination is in our past, that’s not true,” Nancy Northrup, Director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, says. “More work must be done to ensure full democratic rights for all our citizens.

Lisa Rab is a journalism student at Emory University in Atlanta.

Many Birminghams: Taking Segregationists Seriously

Reviewed by David J. Garrow

Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 pp. 26-32

REVIEWS

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home, Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Charles Marsh, The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South, Basic Books, 2001.

S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Jack E. Davis, Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Birmingham, Alabama, has symbolized the violent intensity of southern white segregationist opposition to the Black freedom struggle ever since city Public Safety Director Eugene “Bull” Connor used snarling police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses against Black demonstrators in April and May, 1963. When four young girls were killed in a Ku Klux Klan terror bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church just four months later, the city’s reputation was sealed for decades to come. But Birmingham in the 1960s was far less unique than many people nowadays imagine, and a quartet of new books reveals that Birmingham was far more representative of the white South than most people would care to remember.

Southern recalcitrance at desegregating bus seats, lunch counters, and public facilities ranging from restrooms to golf courses was virtually region-wide until congressional passage of the public accommodations provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally resolved such issues once and for all.1 But even in the midst of a region-wide revolt against Black activism and federal authority, contemporary news coverage presented Birmingham as the southern archetype for both barbarous law enforcement and unrestrained Klansmen.

Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home brings an intensely personal perspective to Birmingham’s year of infamy. As a ten-year-old white girl who had been born into one of the city’s most privileged families, “I knew nothing of what was happening downtown.” Even five years later, despite the fact that her ne’er-do-well father presented himself to his family as an active Klan sympathizer, “I was more worried that he was going to bring social shame on the family than I was worried about the morality of what he was doing.”2

Only in her late twenties did McWhorter develop an active interest in what had transpired in her hometown two decades earlier, and in part her interest grew out of her fear that her father’s professed friendship with Birmingham’s most notorious Klansman, Robert E. “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, might mean that her father had been personally involved in the city’s most heinous crime. “I know Chambliss didn’t bomb the church because I was with him that day” in September 1963, Martin McWhorter told his daughter in 1982.

But McWhorter’s family linkages extended not only downward into the Klan, but also upwards into the board rooms of Birmingham’s dominant corporations. Her two generations-older cousin Sidney Smyer, once an extreme segregationist, was the top white power broker who negotiated the interracial compromise that brought the May 1963 mass demonstrations to an end. McWhorter’s paternal grandfather, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was a political intimate of the city’s dominant mid-century segregationist politician, state senator James A. Simpson, whose grandson was one of McWhorter’s private grade-school playmates but whose most important descendant was his working-class political protegé Eugene “Bull” Connor, whom Simpson vaulted into city office.3

McWhorter is unduly tempted to argue that “My family was simply a metaphor for the city around it,” but her larger argument, that Birmingham’s upper-class leadership knowingly spawned and then for many years supportively condoned both Bull Connor and Bob Chambliss, rightly pinpoints the core moral truth of why Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was successfully bombed.

“Dynamite Bob’s” career as a bomber of Black homes in previously all-white neighborhoods began in 1947 under the active sponsorship of Bull Connor and within a decade expanded to include the residences and churches of Black activists such as attorney Arthur D. Shores and the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. The city’s new nickname of “Bombingham” was the most visible evidence both of Chambliss’s success and of his seeming immunity from criminal prosecution. McWhorter does a commend-

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able job of describing how the Birmingham Klan’s “vigilante spirit” was a direct outgrowth of the similar tactics that the city’s industrialists had employed against union organizers in previous decades, but the heavy-handed editing that was deployed to trim Carry Me Home to its present length has created some gaping holes in McWhorter’s narrative; between her first and second chapters her story simply jumps from 1938 to 1948, with the intervening years apparently discarded on some editor’s floor.

McWhorter’s history jumps back and forth between Birmingham’s Black activists and their Klan and law enforcement opponents. Her Civil Rights Movement segments are largely derivative of previously published accounts, and her desire both to appropriately elevate the importance of Fred Shuttlesworth and to unnecessarily denigrate the role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is rather passé in light of several other recent books on Birmingham’s civil rights history, although these books were released rather late in the process of McWhorter’s writing.4

Carry Me Home‘s detailed treatment of Birmingham’s murderous Klansmen is more fresh and original, and is drawn from local and federal law enforcement files that have long been available at the Birmingham Public Library Archives and from McWhorter’s own interviews. But a reader of these sections of McWhorter’s book must remain at least somewhat wary, as Carry Me Home makes too many readily visible factual or interpretive errors for one to be able to accept McWhorter’s accounts of less well known events with complete faith. Future U. S. Attorney General Griffin B. Bell was not “Georgia’s Attorney General-elect” in 1958, as McWhorter tells her readers; indeed an atrocious racist, Eugene Cook, held the job on a non-stop basis from 1945 to 1965. And anyone knowledgeable about the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955-56 will be surprised to learn from McWhorter that New York-based civil rights activist Bayard Rustin “took charge of the boycott” “[a]s soon as he arrived in Montgomery” in February 1956.

Relying on an FBI account of a 1963 interview with a Klansman regarding Governor George C. Wallace’s hope that desegregation of the University of Alabama could be further postponed, McWhorter naively asserts that “An estimated 50,000 Klansmen were on standby to storm the university” if Wallace called for assistance. Even in 1963, total Klan membership in Alabama and surrounding states fell way short of that highly exaggerated figure. And, like others before her, McWhorter gullibly repeats the utterly fallacious claim that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a “taste for makeup and women’s clothing.”5

McWhorter’s worst error of judgment by far occurs when she quotes the elderly Birmingham civil rights attorney Arthur Shores as telling her in 1991 in what McWhorter terms an “unguarded moment” that Bull Connor was “a good close friend of mine.” The statement is absurdly erroneous on its face, but only in an endnote does McWhorter report and then breezily dismiss the fact that Shores’s daughter had warned her that her father “was suffering from Alzheimer’s.” McWhorter’s portrayal of Shores, whose home was bombed twice in the fall of 1963, as a secret “Uncle Tom” is inexcusable, and her ignorance of how well known was Shores’s battle with Alzheimer’s is reportorially embarrassing.6

But McWhorter does enrich our understanding of Bob Chambliss’s Klan network and of law enforcement efforts to gather evidence against him, especially from informants within his own family. In 1977, when Chambliss was finally tried and convicted for masterminding the fatal bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the decisive surprise prosecution witness against him was his niece Elizabeth “Libby” Hood Cobbs, who testified how both the day before the bombing, and six days after it, Chambliss in her presence had uttered remarks that explicitly incriminated himself in the crime.

Six years after that trial, in a pioneering article in the New York Times Magazine, Howell Raines revealed how

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Cobbs, who first spoke to the FBI a month after the bombing, had not been the only member of Chambliss’s family cooperating with law enforcement.7 Indeed, as Raines disclosed, Chambliss’s own wife, Flora “Tee” Chambliss, who died in 1980, had also indirectly begun assisting the investigators soon after the bombing. Tee’s information was passed along by yet another female family member, “Dale Tarrant,” who had been working with law enforcement prior to the bombing and who in the wake of it had also persuaded Libby Hood to talk to the FBI.

But Raines employed only the law enforcement pseudonym for “Dale Tarrant,” not her real name, a practice which Elizabeth Hood Cobbs also followed in her important and emotionally powerful but unfortunately little-known 1994 autobiography, Long Time Coming.8 In that book Libby Cobbs foreshadowed a significant portion of Diane McWhorter’s own analysis by contending that Chambliss was “not a singular enigma” nor “a freak of society” but instead was “a vigilante” who for “many years . . . was applauded by those in power who could have, but did not, stop him.”9

McWhorter, however, has gone beyond both Raines and Cobb by explicitly identifying “Dale Tarrant” as Mary Frances Cunningham, one of Tee Chambliss’s sisters. Behind-the-scenes controversy over Cunningham’s 1963 relationship with the law enforcement officer to whom she was passing information, and over how Cunningham on one occasion told investigators a spurious story, apparently in a bungled effort to falsely attest to something that Tee Chambliss herself may have witnessed, has kept Cunningham from ever testifying publicly about the 1963 tragedy. Today Cunningham lives quietly in Birmingham and refuses to speak with journalists or historians.

McWhorter’s Carry Me Home is thus in the end a valuable book, but her attempt to tell Birmingham’s racial story through the prism of her own family is unsuccessful. In large part it fails because McWhorter eventually and rather reluctantly concludes that her father’s claims of friendship with Chambliss and his cohorts were simply braggadocio. McWhorter nonetheless wants to believe that her father was doing something political during those years, that he “was not simply looking for a noble excuse to get away from his family at night,” but readers may well conclude that her daddy was actually engaged in far more prosaic pursuits.

McWhorter’s effort to come to terms with her memories of her father are mirrored in Charles Marsh’s The Last Days, an intimately personal memoir of a young white boy’s life in the Klan stronghold of Laurel, Mississippi, during the late 1960s. Marsh’s father Bob was named pastor of Laurel’s First Baptist Church in mid-1967, just a few months before the federal criminal trial of eighteen white men charged with conspiring to kill civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County in the summer of 1964 got underway in nearby Meridian. Perhaps the most notable of the defendants was Mississippi Klan commander Sam Bowers, a Laurel resident who had ordered the killings and who also had orchestrated other mayhem and bombings in and around Laurel. Bowers’s regular hangout was the Admiral Benbow Coffee Shop, and on Sunday evenings, Marsh relates, Marsh’s father would take the family to the Admiral Benbow for dinner, where he would see Bowers sitting with his cohorts at the counter. “I didn’t know much at the time about what it meant to be in the Klan, since my parents never said anything about it.”

The day Bowers’s trial commenced, Marsh’s father delivered a civic club luncheon speech without feeling any need to mention what was a national, front page story; as Marsh confesses, “the Neshoba murders and the trials were the furthest thing from his mind.” A month later, soon after Bowers and six other defendants were found guilty, the home of one of Laurel’s most prominent Black ministers, the Reverend Allen Johnson, was bombed, and Marsh’s father joined with other local white clergy in a public statement condemning the terrorism.

One evening in early 1968, however, Reverend Marsh presented the Jaycee Man of the Year Award to a local

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citizen named Clifford Wilson and heartily extolled Wilson’s civic virtues. Just one hour later Wilson was arrested as one of a dozen of Bowers’s Klansmen who had carried out a murderous January, 1966 firebombing assault on the home of Hattiesburg NAACP activist Vernon Dahmer, who was fatally burned in the attack.

The public ignominy of having honored Wilson just moments before he was taken into custody for an infamous crime (for which he later was convicted) was more than the Reverend Marsh could bear. An attempt to offer his apologies to a Black Laurel minister resulted only in Reverend Marsh being told he was a cowardly hypocrite, and following that experience, Marsh writes, “My father lost his nerve. He despaired, broke down.”

A reader of The Last Days expects the story to culminate with the Reverend Marsh becoming an explicit supporter of the Black freedom struggle, but no such transformation ensues. That absence, coupled with Marsh’s own inability to criticize his father’s failure, leaves The Last Days as a rather unsatisfying book indeed. Four years ago, when Marsh’s first book, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights,10 was published, an unusually personal “Charles Marsh Biography” enclosed with review copies characterized Marsh’s father as “a Southern Baptist preacher who was instrumental in desegregating the church in the South.” In the wake of The Last Days, that assertion appears to be based more on wishful thinking than on fact.

Yet Marsh’s childhood in Laurel was inescapably a searing experience. Five years ago Marsh authored a stunningly superb magazine portrait of Klan leader Bowers after successfully pursuing an interview with him,11 and a year later Marsh devoted a full one-fifth of God’s Long Summer to an erudite but oddly even-handed treatment of Bowers’s worldview.12 The following year Bowers, who had served only six years in prison for his Chaney-Schwerner-Goodman conviction, was found guilty of orchestrating Vernon Dahmer’s assassination and sentenced to life imprisonment.13

Thinking back to his family’s self-cloistered world at Laurel’s First Baptist Church, Marsh accurately confesses that the Klan’s bombs “exploded in a separate world” from that of white clergymen like Marsh’s father. And Marsh’s conclusion of course applies not only to Laurel but to Birmingham as well, as a new study of the eight white city clergymen whose public criticism of the Black community’s April 1963 demonstrations led Martin Luther King, Jr., to reply to them with his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” tellingly demonstrates.

Anyone puzzled as to whether the Birmingham of 1963 described in Jonathan Bass’s Blessed Are the Peacemakers is actually the same city as the one portrayed in Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home should be forgiven, for “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss is mentioned only once by Bass, just as four of the eight white clergy upon whom Bass focuses are entirely absent from McWhorter’s copious narrative. Bass rues how the eight clergymen have been “written out of history and deemed irrelevant figures” who are remembered only as “misguided opponents of Martin Luther King,” but he is most eager to rebut how “many misinformed northern liberals concluded that the eight were reactionary spokesmen of the segregated South.”

Bass is willing to acknowledge that Birmingham’s white clergy, like Charles Marsh’s father in Laurel, were utterly typical of southern white churchmen’s silent failure to acknowledge the moral justice of the Black freedom struggle. But Bass’s most serious problem lies in how at least two of his eight Birmingham clergymen do indeed seem to have been reactionary advocates of racial segregation. Alabama Episcopal Bishop Charles C. J. Carpenter “denounced the 1954 Brown decision” and condemned the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march as “a foolish business and sad waste of time.” In

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1965 an Episcopal clergy supporter of the movement called Carpenter a “chaplain to the dying order of the Confederacy,” and even Bass calls Carpenter “hypocritical” and laments his “failure to comprehend racial injustice.”

Bass also acknowledges that Methodist Bishop Nolan B. Harmon’s “position on segregation never evolved,” but Bass is more outspoken in recognizing what he terms Harmon’s “outstanding contribution to Methodism” and in repeatedly decrying the “crusading mentality and sense of moral superiority of many white northerners.” Regional pride and defensiveness appear to inhibit the otherwise obvious and undeniable conclusion that on the issue of racial justice, the “crusading” white northerners who came South to support the movement simply were at that time more morally perspicacious than their southern brethren.14

While Bass, like McWhorter, wrongly seeks to dismiss the transformative impact of Martin Luther King’s involvement in Birmingham,15 the best sections of Blessed Are the Peacemakers are those that describe how being among the recipients of King’s famous “Letter” did have a reformative if not transformative effect upon some of the more moderate of the eight clergymen. When Bass asked Methodist Bishop Paul Hardin, Jr., about King’s Letter in 1992, Hardin replied that “I think most of his arguments were right. White ministers should have taken a more active role.” And far and away the most powerful and moving section of Bass’s book is his treatment of Baptist Reverend Earl Stallings, who welcomed Black worshippers into his First Baptist Church at the height of the 1963 protest and who “publicly blamed Birmingham’s white churches for much of the climate of unrest in the city.” Bass’s account makes one think that Earl Stallings was exactly the sort of southern Baptist minister that Charles Marsh wishes Bob Marsh could have been.

The extent to which Birmingham’s Klansmen were in reality no more unique than Birmingham’s ministers is brought home by an especially impressive and insightful study of Natchez, Mississippi, a small city whose bloody civil rights history traditionally has received no more than a few pages’ worth of attention in even the most comprehensive accounts of the Mississippi movement.16 Jack E. Davis’s Race Against Time recounts how a new generation of Black activism emerged in Natchez between 1963 and 1965, led not by ministers or professional people but by two working-class employees of the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Co., George Metcalfe and Wharlest Jackson. In mid-August of 1965 Metcalfe presented a petition calling for school desegregation to the local school board, and eight days later a KKK bomb exploded in his automobile, breaking two limbs and permanently damaging one eye but otherwise remarkably leaving Metcalfe alive. Membership in the local NAACP branch “increased tenfold” in the wake of the attack, but local white officials remained as unresponsive as Bull Connor had been in Birmingham. Eighteen months later, in early 1967, a car bomb targeted Metcalfe’s fellow activist, Wharlest Jackson, and this time the results were fatal.

Over the intervening three decades, millions of people have remembered the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, but outside of Natchez few people other than family members and a handful of historians have ever heard of Wharlest Jackson. Davis notes how “no one has ever been arrested for the Metcalfe and Jackson bombings,” but Davis’s conclusions about why white Natchez was no more concerned about its less-heralded string of Klan terror bombings than was white Birmingham echo the themes that pervade McWhorter’s and Bass’s books. In Natchez, whites of all classes were responsible “for creating an environment ripe for Klan terrorism,” Davis writes. “When the black churches burned, when the beatings escalated, and when the murders recurred, silence dropped over the white community. . . . Perhaps

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most whites were too ‘busy with their lives, trying to make a living,’ as one white recalled, to pay much attention.”

And just as in both Laurel and Birmingham, the white clergy was missing in action. In 1963 two Natchez churchmen, Elton Brown and Summer Walters, had joined two dozen other white ministers from across the state in publicly declaring that Christianity “permits no discrimination because of race, color, or creed,” but that modest number of signatories left the courageous few so easily targetable that two-thirds of them were driven from their churches. The bottom line in Natchez, as in Birmingham and Laurel, was that local Klansmen proved to be more civically influential than local churchmen. “White southern Protestantism was unable to serve as a unifying bridge between the races,” Davis rightly concludes, “and in some cases perpetuated rather than prevented racial violence.”

Birmingham was unique only in its notoriety, not in the murderousness of its Klansmen or the pusillanimity of its preachers. And Davis’s Race Against Time probes more deeply than McWhorter, Marsh, or Bass as to why that was so. What both energized southern Klansmen and immobilized white clergy was a “fundamental fear of cultural commingling” between the two races based upon a deep-seated white loathing of Black culture. “Associating race with culture made the idea of race more real. The very idea of race took sustenance from those everyday things considered the very stuff of culture.” Davis tellingly concludes that, to whites of all classes and in all cities, “segregation was imperative, for in a fully open, commingling world, whites feared that they themselves could descend into blackness.” Race Against Time does not discuss whether whites’ expectation that desegregation would allow aspects of Black culture to be absorbed into white life indeed turned out to be quite correct, although not with all of the doleful effects that whites had imagined. Only a region-wide African-American uprising would show both the Klan and the clergy that racial equality would enrich and liberate the white South, not harm it.

Endnotes

Remembering and Forgetting

Reviewed by Bland Whitley

Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 pp. 32-34

David W. Bright, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Boston, Harvard University Press, 2001

As recent debates over the continued use of the Confederate battle flag have demonstrated, the legacy of the Civil War remains a prominent feature in the political landscape of the South. In Mississippi and South Carolina the conflict between pro- and anti-flag, forces ignited the kind of impassioned activism that issues such as education, economic development, and electoral reform rarely seem capable of inspiring. Georgia may have avoided these passions by inaugurating a new flag in the smoky corridors of the legislature with little prior warning (although backed by years of proposals), but this remains to be seen. Already, there are rumbles that white rural voters may take their anger out on the legislators who supported changing the state flag as well as on Democratic Governor Roy Barnes. Some observers are even citing the flag issue as the political wedge that Republicans have been seeking in their efforts to seize majorities in the legislature. After all this time the Civil War persists as a vessel into which different constituencies pour their political wishes and frustrations. Why do so many people, particularly conservative white southerners, cling to the war as a defining element in their identities?

David Blight’s masterful work does not set out to answer this question, but it is essential reading for anyone who might wish to wrestle with the issues raised by the war and why they continue to resonate in contemporary America. Covering the fifty years following Appomattox, Blight analyzes how different groups constructed their memories of the Civil War and how these memories took root in the national consciousness or faded into the background. Blight outlines three main forms of Civil War memory, all of which fostered their own master narratives: emancipationist, mainly characteristic of African Americans and their allies; reconciliationist, a largely white northern affair, and white supremacist, the stance of most white southerners. The main thrust of Blight’s account details how reconciliationism accommodated itself to the white supremacist narrative, thereby marginalizing the emancipationist vision. In this regard Civil War memory (and forgetting) paved the way for the marginalization of African Ameri-

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cans in other walks of life. By rejecting the more politically charged emancipationist interpretation and by choosing sectional healing over racial justice, northern whites helped helped signal their abdication of southern affairs to their former enemies.

Remembrance of the war began even before the conflict had ended. The Gettysburg Address announced one path that Americans’ collective memory might trod. By reflecting on the causes of the war and on the sacrifices of the soldier, Americans might fashion a new, if familiar, American creed that would finally live up to the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution. Despite, and in some respects because of, white southern intransigence, this ideologically charged interpretation did exert a powerful influence over the public imagination in the immediate postwar era. It helped shore up radical Reconstruction, if only temporarily and fostered widespread resentment of the Confederate cause. The narrative of a reborn nation proved especially compelling for African Americans whose remembrance was spiked by public celebrations of emancipation and of the service of black soldiers. In fact, Blight has unearthed evidence which shows that Memorial Day saw its first incarnation among freed people and their white allies in Charleston shortly after the war’s close.

Yet at its moment of triumph, this emancipationist vision was yielding to the thirst for reconciliation. The central irony running through Blight’s account is the damage that the humane goal of overcoming sectional hatreds did to the possibility for a more egalitarian union. The problem with healing divisions was that it could only be accomplished by stripping war remembrance of any taint of ideology. Soldiers of either side might be honored for the virtues of courage and persistence they all shared, but if issues like war causation or African Americans’ claims on equal citizenship appeared, sectional heat grew too intense. The continued political well-being of blacks depended, in other words, on the enmity of northern and southern whites. As Frederick Douglass summed matters up, “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?” The reconciliationist impulse emerged first among southern patricians and northern conservatives, who urged Americans to put the war’s destruction behind them and come together for the common good. Initially a defensive posture that sought to overcome bitterness of radical Republicans and Confederate die-hards, reconciliation eventually provided a model for how white Americans would choose to remember the war. As Reconstruction collapsed under the weight of southern white violence and as Republicans began to devote themselves more exclusively to greasing the wheels of corporate industrialism, northern whites grew increasingly unwilling to examine the political dynamics of the war and its legacy. Sentimental paeans to soldiers and immersions in the minutiae of battle strategy replaced analyses of the agonizing issues that still confronted American society.

Southern whites were only too happy to participate in these apolitical remembrances. Yet stripping ideology from memory was never part of white southerners strategy. On the contrary, they asserted the righteousness of the Confederate cause, and while acknowledging that slavery’s end might have been a good thing, they discounted slavery as a source of the conflict. Thus was born the states’ rights explanation that continues to work such mischief in American politics and culture. As the attention of northern whites drifted away from the war, southern whites intensified their interest in the recent past. In the sentimental fiction of writers like Thomas Nelson Page, in the commemorative exercises of the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and in burgeoning historical societies, an uncompromising narrative emerged. This narrative subsumed the reconciliationist vision under a white supremacist package with several components: the comity exist-

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ing between master and slave in the Old South” the states right defense of secession, the Confederacy’s proud defeat as a result of the superior resources of the North; the suffering of white southerners under Negro and Carpetbagger rule during Reconstruction and the white South’s triumphant return to its rightful place of power. The South may have lost the war, but it had succeeded in preserving white supremacy, thereby providing a model for the North and the rest of the world.

Blight is perhaps not as clear as he needs to be on how and why northern whites came to accept most aspects of the pro-Confederate narrative, but accept it they did. Fascination with the Old South as well as their own racism appear to have been most decisive in this conversion. Equally important, as Blight asserts, was their apolitical sentimentality. The romance of sacrifice, of honoring all those miles of tombstones, and of listening to the sanitized war stories of grizzled veterans became a substitute for ideology. The national regeneration, which Lincoln had urged, became the dissolution of sectional resentments rather than the realization of America’s democratic promise. Thoroughly triangulated, African Americans could do little but fall back in on themselves. Some such as Booker T. Washington and his accomodationist followers, accepted the logic of sectional reconciliation. Other, more radical blacks rejected the emancipationist vision as useless in a society that had proved so unwilling to accept them as equal citizens; only emigration to Africa would allow their regeneration. Douglass’s more hopeful and forceful vision would persist but in virtual subterranean form until the Civil Rights Movement unleashed it back into the American consciousness.

Collective memories, Blight’s relevant work shows, are stubborn entities. They derive from fundamental events and transformations, and they plug into ongoing political debates. They also can become exhausting for those not thoroughly invested in the politics underlying them. In the flag debates the most politicized groups have once again been conservative whites and defenders of egalitarianism, primarily African Americans. By insisting that their particular visions receive widespread public recognition and symbolic display, they have demonstrated the importance of the past. As in the earlier period that Blight has so skillfully analyzed, a third group prefers to forget for the sake of progress. Through the din of the debate have emerged complaints that undue attention to history only distracts people from more important problems. Viewing ideological battles over the past as an obstacle to capital growth, these economic progressives have fought to sanitize public space of controversial symbols. However useful this ahistorical approach has been in the contemporary fight to remove the Confederate battle flag from public images, it can never be more than an unsteady supporter of egalitarian causes and often will work against them. Race and Reunion teaches us that in an earlier time, white supremacists exploited the political apathy of reconciliationists, who spoke a language similar to that of today’s economic progressives, to ensure that their vision of history would gain ascendence in the South’s political culture. The stakes may not be as high today, but the choices are similar. Which histories we choose to remember and honor will continue to shape our political landscape in ways that an ahistorical faith in capitalist progress cannot. Better that those memories help further the goals of democracy rather than prop up the specters of past and present racist agendas.

Bland Whitley is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Florida. He is currently studying historical narratives on Reconstruction in Mississippi.