http://www.sfbg.com/39/15/news_boxer.htmlBoxer's rebellion
How activists and a senator from the Bay Area forced Congress to discuss voting rights
By Rachel Brahinsky
Speaking about his boss's move to force a congressional debate over the November election, David Sandretti wasn't just serving up the usual politico spin. "We made history last week," Sandretti, spokesperson for Sen. Barbara Boxer, told the Bay Guardian. "Voting rights haven't gotten this much attention since the 1960s."
Boxer was savaged by Republicans and some journalists for her Jan. 6 decision to join members of the U.S. House of Representatives in challenging the certification of Ohio's Electoral College vote. They called it pointless and politically divisive. But to her supporters, it seemed to be just a matter of common sense: reporters and congressional investigators had found major problems with the election, and those problems needed to be discussed before it was certified.
Yet Boxer was the only senator willing to step forward and bring about a kind of debate that has occurred only once before in the past century. Four years ago, members of the House tried to mount a similar challenge to the electoral vote count. Their effort was documented in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 in a chilling scene in which, one by one, black members of Congress walked to the podium and demanded a debate on the legitimacy of Florida's balloting. They needed one senator – just one – to join the protest. But none would join, the debate never happened, and most Americans never knew that anyone even tried to make it happen until the film came out last year.
Since then, as more information emerged about voter disenfranchisement in the Sunshine State in 2000, activists slowly began to wake up. This time they didn't leave it up to chance and generated thousands of phone calls to senators around the country. The intense lobbying effort, which included hundreds of Bay Area activists, must have given Boxer the backing she needed to follow Ohio representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones's lead in calling for the vote challenge, which forced a two-hour debate in both houses on the irregularities in Ohio. (Since the debate, Boxer's office has reported receiving thousands more phone calls thanking her.)
In the days leading up to the challenge, local interest in the effort was high. About 500 people showed up for the Jan. 4 "Rally for the Republic" in San Francisco to raise awareness – and funds – for it. The reports circulating (mainly on the Internet) of voting problems in November seem to have spawned a small but growing movement. The rally attendees ranged from nonpartisan voting wonks interested in reforming election policy to those who truly believe George W. Bush has stolen another election.
Diane Hume, a teacher at Golden Gate University, told us she firmly believes an accurate vote count would have produced a victory for John Kerry. She rattled off a litany of widely told stories of voting problems, including voter suppression and malfunctioning (or, she thought, rigged) voting machines.
Indeed, researchers have turned up dozens of troubling incidences, many of them documented in Rep. John Conyers's Jan. 5 investigation that found "massive and unprecedented" problems in Ohio's balloting. The report accused Ohio secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell (who also chaired Bush's campaign effort in that state) of presiding over "intentional misconduct and illegal behavior."
Conyers's report – which lists numerous violations, including a shortage of voting equipment in key districts, Blackwell's limiting of voter registration and provisional ballots, and Republican voter-suppression tactics that targeted minority voters – calls for further hearings and new federal election standards.
Ultimately both houses certified the electoral vote by a large margin. And by most accounts (including the Conyers report) the headline-grabbing story – that Bush stole the election – can't be written, at least not with the evidence we have so far. Instead, Boxer's decision has raised the profile of a movement to reform the nation's voting system.
Just as with the notion that discussing voting problems might be a commonsense idea, most of the reforms seem equally obvious. In the coming months, we'll probably see bills requiring that all voting machines produce a paper trail so votes can be verified, and legislation to bar secretaries of state from working on political campaigns.
E-mail Rachel Brahinsky: Rachel@sfbg.com
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