Locals sound the alarm… Black voters must turn out in record numbers to defeat election rigging tactics
26th August 2019 · 0 Comments
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
At a recent Civil Rights & Voting Lecture, local civil rights and voting rights advocates warned voters that the Republicans are pulling every trick in the book to rig upcoming elections to favor GOP candidates in both 2019 and 2020 races statewide and nationwide. The event was hosted by Charles J. Young, branch manager at Nora Navra Library in downtown New Orleans.
Louisiana voters will go to the polls and cast ballots for state offices and for governor in the October 12 primary and for the general election on November 16.
Among the lecturers sounding the alarm were Carl Galmon, long-time board member of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Ala., Ted Quant, former staff member of the Voter Education Project, Inc. and former director of the Twomey Center for Peace through Justice at Loyola University of New Orleans and Viola Francois Washington, executive director of the Welfare Rights Organization in New Orleans.
“Voting is a sacred right and moral obligation,” Galmon said, quoting the slogan of the National Voting Rights Museum. He recalled a radio debate he once had with white supremacist David Duke who said, “If we lose Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida, we lose the confederacy.”
Clearly, the famed southern strategy of white political domination is being threatened today. The browning of America is a fact that has white nationalists scared to death. In addition to 59 percent of Blacks residing in the South, non-white births accounted for a majority of newborns in the U.S., according to the 2010 Census, which predicted that non-Hispanic whites will become a minority of the total population after the 2014 Census, making up 48.5 percent by 2045.; down from 63 percent in 2010.
Rapid growth of the Hispanic and Asian populations has surged more than 40 percent since 2000 and the Black population has grown by 12.9 percent since 2000.
It’s no accident, then, that Donald J. Trump and the GOP are doing everything they can to stem the tide, from voter suppression programs, to hacking into voting machines, locking up Central Americans seeking citizenship in cages, rounding up undocumented immigrants, passing restrictive voting laws, throwing away absentee ballots, undercounting votes, gerrymandering and voting roll purges.
Galmon maintains that “Louisiana is the most gerrymandered state in the deep South.“ Galmon also talked about how in New Orleans, polling places were not put back to their original sites after Hurricane Katrina, making it difficult for the elderly and students in Gentilly and New Orleans East to vote. Galmon’s letters and calls to city officials, have fallen on deaf ears, primarily, except for Councilperson Cyndi Nguyen, who earlier this year said she would add polling sites to her district.
Viola Francios Washington spoke on the power of Black women. “We’re on the move and we should find ways to connect and reach out to each other,” said Washington. In an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, Washington told the story of how she was sitting in the hospital and a woman came over and told her the story of Ida B. Wells, while she was, coincidentally, reading a book about Ida B. Wells. The chance encounter motivated Washington to form a women’s group. “That’s why we have the women’s group that we have now, to gain back the support we once had as Black women. We are trying to deal with ourselves and the psychological effects of racism.
“Trump has white folk upset became he has pulled the cover off racism and all whites are exposed now. Trump is taking us to war and he’s attaching Black women and women of color. We must respond. Go back home, go back where you came from and his racist spiels, have motivated her to take action,” Washington said of Trump’s attack on Congress-women IIhan Omar, Rashida Talib, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. “We just can’t sit back and let it happen. We have been the backbone of the civil rights struggle. We must reclaim our place in the struggle not in the back of our men but on the side. The women’s group meets monthly. Women can call the WRO office at 827-5966 to get involved. We are dealing with registering women to vote and we will conduct a voter education drive before the November election.”
Dr. George Amedee, professor of Political Science at Southern University New Orleans, moderated the lecture. He told the audience that the only university that has polling booths on campus, that he is aware of, is the University of New Orleans. “There is no reason why Xavier, Dillard and SUNO should not have polling places on their campuses. That’s another part of their voter suppression tactic.”
Randolph Scott, a local aviator, businessman, and former city executive, suggested getting the secondline groups to come out and set up tables under the bridge with voter registration tables right at the site.
A young woman student from SUNO suggested that the group conduct a social media campaign to reach the youth.
“We got to do some serious organizing. The legal part is a good tactic, but that’s not good enough. New Orleans could be a model for the country in terms of getting out the vote. So many people have died for the vote. Young people must have a leadership role, too. We must get serious about it because voting rights and getting registered to vote connects all we have been working on. Education must go with it too. We’ve got to put some leverage on their behind,” says Ronald Chisom. “We’ve got to bring some hope to this country.”
The co-founder of The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and a senior fellow of Ashoka’s Global Academy, Chisom organized workers and poor people throughout the South for over thirty-five years. In the 1990s, he co-founded and was associate director of the Tremé Community Improvement Association, which won several significant Louisiana victories in New Orleans. His legal suit, Ronald Chisom v. Charles E. Roemer, Governor of Louisiana et al., challenged the Louisiana Supreme Court to achieve equal representation for the predominately Black city of New Orleans.
Galmon pointed out the tactics used to dilute the vote in Tangipahoa Parish, where elected officials run at-large. He spoke how legislators gerrymandered St. Helena Parish into Livingston Parish, to dilute the Black vote. Galmon has reported the gerrymandering incidents to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the NAACP-LDF, which are looking into the gerrymandering practices here in Louisiana.
Quant is in conversations with Natasha Brown, who worked on Stacey Abrams’ campaign to work with the new local Voting Rights Committee that Galmon, Quant, Washington and Chisom are putting together. They invited the lecture’s attendees to join the effort. The group plans to conduct voter registration drives, locally and statewide.
Kim Ford, a videographer and communications consultant live streamed the event at #WorldofKimTV on her Facebook page. She suggested that potential voters go to City Hall to register to vote to ensure that the registration is valid, as opposed to going to the DMV. Ford also cautioned the audience to be aware that the Secretary of State’s office is up for grabs.
Evidence of voter suppression tactics used against Black and brown voters is documented in “In the GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters,” published by Rolling Stone magazine in 2014, in which Greg Palast wrote about the Republicans’ effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. “The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have complied lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.” The lists are being complied under a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, started by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Yale educated former law professor.
Crosscheck tagged at least 7.2 million voters, who Kobach suspected of being registered to cast multiple ballots. Of those, only four people were charged with double voting or deliberate double registration. But Crosscheck is just a tracking system for purging voters, for any reason the data scrubbers can come up with. For example, in Virginia, more than a quarter of a million voters were listed as registered to vote in both Virginia and another state in 2014. And those flagged as inactive voters, nearly 50,000, were cancel from voter rolls, just before Election Day.
“Kobach’s Crosscheck purge machinery was in operation well before Trump arrived on the political scene and will continue for elections to come. Low voter turnout of any kind traditionally favors the GOP, and this is the party’s long game to keep the rolls free of young people, minorities and the poor,” Palast explains.
That was in 2014. Fast forward to 2018 and the voter suppression chicanery and tricks in both Georgia and Florida’s gubernatorial races can only be described as WTF?
Galmon stressed the need for a Black and brown coalition of voters and said that voters must turn out in overwhelming numbers to beat the GOP. “Consider this: In some elections as few as 30 percent of the people voted. That means it takes only 15 percent plus l vote to win an election. Racists are motivated voters. They get out the vote to build the wall across the border, to separate immigrant children from their desperate parents and put them in cages. They vote to deny climate change and vote to end regulations on polluting industries. They vote to oppose increasing the minimum wage and health care for all. They vote for voter suppression to steal elections as happened in Georgia and Florida.
“We must take the fight to the streets and to the ballot box. Everything is connected. So, no matter what the issue is, police brutality, environmental justice, immigrant rights, the solution is the same: to take power from the reactionary politicians that control this state… to vote them out of office. What the bigots fear the most, we must embrace the most – our unity and our vote. When we don’t vote, we give the racist minority the power to rule the rest,” Galmon said.
This article originally published in the August 26, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
