Hip Hop the Vote

Remember, years before Sex in the City, when Sarah Jessica Parker adopted voting as her personal cause, and it was so dorky? Times have changed. Last week in Detroit, soon after white Republican State Representative John Pappageorge emphasized the strategic importance of "suppressing the Detroit vote," more than 6,000 young people attended a "Vote or Die" rally at Wayne State University featuring P. Diddy, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mary J. Blige.

The excitement isn't just about the celebrities, though they add to the fun. All over the country, students, especially African-Americans, are for the first time in years, deeply invested in the electoral process. "Puffy, Russell Simmons, they tapped into something that was already there. Our jobs are deteriorating, and then there's the war. People are worried about getting drafted," says Steven Waddy, 22-year-old coordinator of Georgia Black Youth Vote. "They're angry, too, about the 2000 election," he adds. "We want to make sure our votes are counted."

Many students are being trained to serve as election monitors. Even campus groups usually regarded as apolitical, like black fraternities and sororities, have mobilized their members, registering voters and screening Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

In Atlanta's Fulton County, where polls have been open for early voting since Monday, students from Morehouse, Spelman, and other local colleges have been standing in line for as long as two to three hours. The process isn't exactly efficient: There aren't enough open polling stations, election workers or machines. Amazingly, though, says Waddy as he ferries yet another busload of students to the polls, the voters are "staying in line; they're not leaving. It's beautiful."

What's scary is that this kind of mass civic participation isn't supposed to happen, and no one is prepared for it. Says Hans Riemer, political director of Rock the Vote, "It looks like the electoral system isn't made to handle so many voters." The newly registered, he says, are most at risk of being deprived of their voting rights, and most of them are young people.

Students especially have been singled out. Officials in Missouri and elsewhere insist that students must vote where their parents live, not in their college towns, while other states have taken the opposite point of view. When Margeaux Randolph, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tried to vote by absentee ballot in Louisiana, her home state, she was told that first-time voters aren't allowed to vote by absentee ballot. By the time Randolph found out about this obscure law, it was too late for her to register in Massachusetts. Four other states have similar absentee ballot laws on the books.

Still, early voting goes on. "You see people excited to vote in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and it's very powerful," exults Waddy, explaining that young African-Americans voting this year feel similarly defiant. Of Citizen Puffy's ubiquitous 'Vote or Die' slogan, he says, "It really is that serious."

Liza Featherstone

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