Who Owns Our Elections? The Struggle to Reclaim Our Vote and Our Democracy
Jan 20 2008A Talk given by John Bonifaz on Martin Luther King Jr. Day for the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst:
I’m honored to be with all of you today, on this day that we honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His words remain ever present for us today. His spirit remains ever with us, and the struggle that he and so many others waged for democracy, for justice, for the right to vote in this country remains ever current to this day.
I am going to talk today about the question of who owns our elections. When I began my work in voting rights, 15 years ago as an attorney starting in this field, I focused on this question of the power of moneyed interests in our political process, and I remain focused on that today:
the question of how we finance our political campaigns and how that controls who is able to run, what the debate is on the social and economic issues of our day, and who gets to win and govern as a result of that moneyed influence.
And then in 2004, in November 2004, I was awakened to a new dimension of this moneyed influence. It was the question of how we control the way we conduct elections on election day itself. I received a phone call the day after the November 2004 election, one hour after Sen. Kerry conceded, from an attorney friend of mine who had gone to Columbus, Ohio, to volunteer for election protection efforts there.
He was calling everyone he knew in the voting rights field to sound the alarm. And he called me and said, “I have to tell you: from where I’m sitting, this does not smell right.” And he began to go through that litany of reports that we now know to be true—people standing in line for ten hours or more in order to vote, people being harassed and intimidated from voting, people showing up at the precinct where they had voted all their lives and not appearing on the voting rolls. And then he told me about the jumping-screen problem, and I said, “What’s the jumpingscreen problem?”
And he said, “You’re really going to have to talk to voters in Youngstown, OH, where we got many of these kinds of complaints and where they were using electronic voting machines for the first time.
So I began to investigate this question the day after the election. He helped put me in touch with voters who had called in to that election hotline. And I’ll never forget I had a phonecall conversation with a woman named Jeanne White, an elderly voter in Youngstown, OH, who voted all her life at this one precinct. And she told me what happened to her on election day 2004.
