It Is The Year 2005, Please Spell Discrimination…

V-O-T-E-R F-R-A-U-D. Got it? Good. So whenever you hear someone say urgently, “We are deeply concerned about voter identification. Fraud is all around us!” Please approach the person, take out your weapon of choice – a red Sharpie – remove the safety (the marker cap), and without hesitation write on the culprit’s forehead: DEFT BIGOT. In big block letters, just like that

The above may or may not be a recurring dream of mine and writing “DEFT BIGOT” in block letters is not ironic, but the point is that talking about racism in 2005 is like talking about sex in 1955. It is taboo. I am told it does not occur all that often and that when it does, you are just better off looking the other way.

Social truths are social truths and it is simply easier today than it once was to avert your eyes from race-based discrimination. Why? Because 2005’s brand of racism is rarely overt; instead, it lives on, channeled through much less obtrusive avenues – avenues like the under funding of early childhood public education, increasingly complex notions of minority status and careful legal maneuvers intended to curtail needed rights-based support for minorities.

Just last week, this new generation of discrimination revealed itself in the controversy over a proposed Georgia voter identification program. The Washington Post, 11/17/05 (the only major paper to follow the story with consistency) explains that “the program requires voters to obtain one of six forms of photo identification before going to the polls, as opposed to 17 types of identification currently allowed.” Further mandated is that those without photo identification must buy a special digital voting identification card, costing $20 for five years. Who just said poll tax?

It seems that Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires Georgia and eight other states to submit any voting rule changes that might affect minority groups to the Justice Department for review, remains applicable with good reason. But there is more to it: these newly required digital voting cards will be available in only 59 of Georgia’s 159 counties. Georgians without identification are going to have to road trip to pay their poll tax.

Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it is the state’s burden to show that proposed election-related changes will not turn back the clock on minority rights. But according to an August 25 DOJ memo obtained by The Washington Post, Georgia lawmakers did little to research the possible racial impact of the proposed program.

Moreover, a unanimous 11th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion (on which two Republicans and one Democrat presided) have put a block on the provision on constitutional grounds. At this point, the odds are against the program, which awaits further review in federal court, but that the DOJ still supports the measure, in spite of the August 25 internal memo to the contrary, is curious.

It seems to be no coincidence that in fiscal year 2005 nearly 20 percent of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, including many veterans, have up and left in what is understood as a reaction to the Bush administration’s conservative views on civil rights. On top of this brain drain, prosecutions for racial and gender discrimination crimes handled by the Civil Rights Division have declined 40 percent over the past five years. It is apparently the hour of the political appointee at DOJ, but fear not! I have my red Sharpie at the ready.

Still, perhaps I am getting ahead of myself here. Perhaps eleven forms of the voter identification allowed prior to Georgia’s new measure were being counterfeited consistently and Georgians were voting two, three, even four times. Then I suppose such recourse would make sense.

In an August 30, 2005 op-ed in The Washington Post, Frank Strickland and Anne Lewis, former and current counsels to the Georgia Republican Party, cite a November 2000 Atlanta Journal-Constitution report that shows, according to their interpretation, just this: rampant V-O-T-E-R F-R-A-U-D (and you know what that is code for). According to the Journal-Constitution report, between 1980 and 2000, more than 5,000 people voted in Georgia after their deaths. After 20 years, through every race – national, statewide and local, there are 5,000 documented cases of dead people making it to the polls in Georgia.

The voting dead. Is this really the grave injustice Mr. Strickland and Ms. Lewis would have us believe? Well, consider this: in 2000 the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project found Georgia’s undervote rate (a common voting irregularity referring to the percentage of ballots registering “no choice” in the presidential race) was second worst in the nation at 3.5%, or about 115,000 undervotes. Substantial improvements to Georgia’s voting systems and technology were made in the lead up to the 2004 election. As a result, undervotes reached only 12,852 (at 0.39 %) – a massive improvement from 2000 and one considered a great triumph for the state’s voting system by pundits and lawmakers alike.

Now for the comparison: 12,852 irregularities in a single year. A triumph. 5,000 irregularities over twenty years. A tragedy? Context can be a harsh critic for ungrounded statistics.

It goes without saying that voting irregularities must be addressed and rectified in a democratic society, but the question the Georgia measure brings to the fore is about where the primary burden should lie in rectifying such irregularities with the citizen or the state? Yes, individual responsibility plays a definitive role in protecting voting rights in so far as honesty about one’s identity at the polls is a basic aspect of good democratic citizenship.

But the remainder of the burden must then fall back to the state and its responsibility to citizens in ensuring the integrity of voting rights. The opposite has just occurred in Georgia. It is the year 2005. Still, I am told the Civil Rights era is something I should be reading about in history books.