Confusion in Ohio

At a rally in Washington a couple of Sundays ago called the Million Worker March, comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory joked, "We won the Voting Rights Act forty years ago, but it didn't say they have to count that vote. That's gonna have to be another bill and another march." In the run-up to the election, Ohio is putting its own special exclamation point on that statement.

Since the beginning of the year voter registration in the state has swelled by about 700,000 souls, to a record 7.8 million voters. It's estimated that about 60 percent of those new voters registered as Democrats. Meanwhile, like sportscasters filling the dead air between plays, pundits have been intoning for months that "No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio." All of which lays the table for what Republican operatives nationally have been quite frank to admit is an effort to suppress the vote, and--surprise, surprise--such plans especially target African-Americans.

To list just the most high-profile efforts, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a black former militant-turned-Carter-Democrat-turned-Republican-with-ambitions, ordered all county boards of elections to reject any registration forms that were not on 80-pound card stock. Cries of public outrage forced him to back off in September, but he did so without clarity, and it's unknown how many registrations may have been junked in the meantime.

On "provisional ballots"--the one tangible provision of the federal Help America Vote Act, which stipulates that anyone whose eligibility is in doubt may have a paper ballot on election day pending verification of registration--Blackwell has ordered that such ballots will be provided only to voters who show up at their proper precinct stations. If somehow someone casts a provisional ballot in the wrong precinct, the vote won't count.

Since many regular voters don't even remember their precincts until they go to the polls and see the familiar faces of the old-timers working the tables, this particularly targets new voters, also poor and young voters, who tend to move a lot. Blackwell's order was first overruled by one federal court, then upheld on appeal. The Ohio Voter Protection Coalition, a group of labor, civil rights and community organizations, has appealed Blackwell's directive for provisional ballots, though any further court action will apply only to future elections.

On Friday, October 29, with time running out, yet another Ohio court ruled that 23,000 new registrations, which the Republican Party had formally challenged, would not have to be verified in pre-election hearings, the prevailing argument being that the timing of the challenges was such that there was no way to guarantee people's due process rights. Republicans had created chaos for boards of elections throughout the state in late October by claiming that 35,000 new voters had been fraudulently registered. As a result of hearings or withdrawn challenges,12,000 of those names had been cleared, but as of this week 17,472 new voters just in Cuyahoga County, the state's biggest which includes Cleveland, were still on the list, with the county Board of Elections saying there wouldn't be time for hearings on them all.

According to the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition, 46 percent of those names on the Republicans' list belong to African-Americans--in a county where blacks represent only 27 percent of the population. From out of the Cleveland Central Labor Council, a key player in the coalition, Marcia McCoy, had been coordinating volunteers every day to knock on the doors of those challenged voters, offering rides to the Board of Elections, free legal help and, quite simply, notice that their rights were hanging in the balance.

Those voters could still be challenged directly at the polls on Election Day, pending another court decision. The Bush campaign has been recruiting paid challengers to stand inside polling places, eyeing voters, monitoring the use of provisional ballots and challenging the votes of individuals they deem suspect. The Kerry campaign has in turn recruited volunteers, they say, to challenge the challengers in Democratic districts. Secretary of State Blackwell ruled that this was perfectly legit, and that the parties could have one challenger per precinct. The nightmare scenario is that challenges and bickering between party operatives will slow the process, making long waits even longer and forcing people who have to get back to work, back to school, back to pick up the kids, to give up in disgust.

The Cleveland NAACP is aiming to have 500 lawyers monitoring the polls in minority neighborhoods; People for the American Way's Election Protection 2004 has mustered 700 lawyers and students throughout the state; the Ohio Voter Protection Coalition will have thousands of monitors statewide and be present outside 200 sites in Cleveland; labor will be on the streets, at the polls (it can be hoped that some large Teamsters and Steelworkers will be on the scene to intimidate potential intimidators); and international observers will be in the state, watching, for the first time in history.

Marcia McCoy at the labor council told me, "My voicemail holds sixty messages a day, and it's full every day" with people calling for information, calling to get involved, calling to make complaints: that they live on the East Side but were telephoned at home by someone who said their polling place had been changed to the West Side; that they were told "If you come to vote and you're behind on child support, you may be arrested"; that they got letters saying the election is on November 2 but you can still vote on November 3.

She played one of those messages for me. It came from a woman working at the Fairfax Nursing Home, saying people from the Board of Elections were taking absentee ballots from the residents that day and creating a ball of confusion, asking people their party affiliation and telling self-described Democrats that Bush was the Democratic candidate.

I called over there to speak with Ann Niles-Crumb, an LPN named in the message, to check it out. "This little shrimp of a bald-headed man named Lacey Brooks Jr. walked around here saying 'Vote for Bush! Vote for Bush! He's still going to give you your forty acres and a mule!'" she told me. "So I get infuriated. You don't talk to these patients this way. We were so angry, if we weren't at work we would've whupped this little man." Niles-Crumb, originally from Trinidad but in Cleveland since 1968, says "I'm from a Third World country, a black Third World country, you know what I'm saying? So I'm working for my patients; I'm working for everyone who can vote to do so, because I couldn't."

The Board of Elections confirmed that Lacey Brooks Jr. is a Republican nursing home inspector for absentee ballots, but no one returned calls for comment.

There should be no illusion that voter confusion and uncounted ballots are something new in Ohio or anywhere in America. As Jocelyn Travis, a Cleveland activist working with Election Protection, points out, "In the black community, yes, it is normal to have trouble at election time. We have dealt with this every election--people turned away because they're told they need ID, people given the wrong information, people intimidated."

In the 2000 presidential election, 94,000 votes in Ohio were never counted, and votes in black districts were overrepresented among those. It wasn't enough to change the outcome (Bush won the state), but it did galvanize people to take a look at the system.

Now an unprecedented coalition of forces has learned what black people always knew: the system stinks. In Cleveland, where progressives have often been as segregated as the city, Travis says, "if nothing else happens, I think people will work together as a team after this."

In addition, a lot of people who never thought they had a place in the electoral process--ex-felons, homeless people, young people, immigrants--have begun demanding it. At the moment, their desires and those of progressive forces align with Democratic Party opportunism, but it is not lost on people that both parties had four years to redress what one black activist calls "the fundamental fucked-up-titude" of election law, and neither did.

In the aftermath of this vote, whoever wins, the experiences in Ohio and elsewhere ought to spark that second Voting Rights movement that Dick Gregory alluded to, for uniform election standards, a federal right to vote and a mighty brake on a system where disdain for democracy at home spins on the same axle as war-making in its name abroad.

JoAnn Wypijewski

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