[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 11975]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           ON THE ONGOING DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF BLACK VOTERS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Marchant). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. McKinney) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, on the eve of the reauthorization of the 
Voting Rights Act, I come to the floor to say to that the dream of full 
participation by all Americans has yet to be fulfilled. And, in fact, 
even at the dawn of a new century, black voters are still confronted 
with a concerted effort to deny their right to vote when it is 
politically necessary and expedient to do so.
  We can start with the fiasco that brought the current administration 
to power, the Florida vote of 2000. First of all, in testimony from 
African American voters in Florida, outright voter intimidation is 
documented in dozens of cases.
  You know, the passage of time is a wonderful thing. It makes wine 
taste better; it makes women look better; it makes us long for the days 
of good music, however we define ``good music.'' The older songs always 
just seem the best.
  So, too, it is with information. But with the passage of time, truth 
crushed to the Earth, rises. The ashes of the Phoenix rise.
  As a result of a town hall meeting that I organized in Georgia, 
bringing in the vice president of ChoicePoint, the company hired by the 
Florida Board of Elections under the control of the then Secretary of 
State Katherine Harris, we now know that ChoicePoint was asked to 
provide an incorrect list of supposed convicted felons who would be 
denied the right to vote in Florida. The only thing is that the list 
compiled by ChoicePoint imported data from several States; Ohio, New 
Jersey and Texas.
  Now, it just so happens that the Governor of Texas is now our 
President, and the interesting thing about the list that was given from 
Texas to Katherine Harris in Florida is that it was not a list of 
convicted felons. The Texas list was a list of those convicted of 
misdemeanors, thereby enlarging the number of entrants on the 
ChoicePoint list destined for Florida.
  Now, why is this important? Because the method of disenfranchisement 
in Florida was to deny people the right to vote based on fictitious 
felony conviction records. And since Katherine Harris had told 
ChoicePoint that she only wanted an 80 percent match, an example is 
that John Smythe, who had committed a misdemeanor in Texas, say, for 
example, became John Smith, a convicted felon in Florida. The list was 
labeled by race, so that the folks down in Florida knew who would be 
denied the right to vote before the voting even started.
  As a result, ChoicePoint presented a list of about 90,000 so-called 
convicted felons, whose only crime was being registered to vote in a 
battleground State whose leaders were willing to commit crimes in order 
to deny people the right to vote. And I am sorry that the Democrats 
didn't fight this gross travesty of justice carried out against black 
voters.
  Now, there will be folks who will say that we don't need a Voting 
Rights Act any more. If you ask George Wallace or George Maddox or, for 
that matter, even Strom Thurmond back then, I am sure they would have 
said you didn't need a Voting Rights Act then too. I am sure they would 
have said no.
  But if this gross disenfranchisement scheme could happen in 2000, it 
means that the right to vote and the right to representation are still 
precious, so precious that we have to have laws in place to protect 
those who will not respect the rights of their fellow Americans.
  Then in 2002 we learned that crossover voting can be used as 
effectively as the all-white primaries were to deny African American 
voters their right to choose their representatives.
  I am glad to know that Bennie Thompson from Mississippi, our 
colleague, has filed a lawsuit against Mississippi's open primary 
statute. We need to rid the South of open primaries, because, as in my 
State, they were enacted in the days when the lips of staunch 
segregationists dripped with the words of nullification and 
interposition.
  The advent of the electronic voting machines offers another peril to 
the voting rights of all Americans who use them. In my own district, 
those machines broke down, burned out, froze screens and cast votes for 
the candidate not intended by the voter.
  In Georgia, our machines are also equipped with a wireless 
capability. That means that somebody who has got a Treo that is 
properly outfitted can come in and change the outcome of an election 
just by entering the signal space of a voting machine. Since no action 
has been taken by the Federal Government to prevent any of these 
abuses, we can expect more of the same.
  And speaking of voting machines, the allocation of those machines is 
also done to manipulate the outcome. Who wants to wait 5 hours in line 
in the rain to vote? Thousands of voters in Ohio had to do that and it 
just so happened that they were black. Scholars and researchers have 
done the math. Voting machines were allocated not by the number of 
registered voters by precinct, but by some other calculation. How could 
majority black precincts in Columbus, OH have 3, 4, or 5 machines and 
have over 1,000 voters in their precincts, and mostly Republican 
precincts in say, Dublin, OH had the same number of machines for one 
third the number of voters?
  This pattern of devaluing and marginalizing the black vote was seen 
again in the recent Mayoral election in New Orleans. Here it was not 
Republicans, but a conservative Democratic Governor who blocked efforts 
to provide electronic polling stations to enable hundreds of thousands 
of mostly Black Katrina survivors the chance to vote. It was among the 
largest instance of African-American voter disfranchisement since the 
enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
  Since no action has been taken by the Federal Government to prevent 
any of these abuses, we can expect more of the same. In addition, in 
the coming Fall election we will see the introduction of electronic 
poll-books, which are untested and non-transparent. Governor Ehrlich of 
Maryland, a Republican, has deemed this new addition to the voting 
experience to be unreliable.
  So, Mr. Speaker, who cares? We care. And that is why we need a Voting 
Rights Act. Not to tarry in the days of the past, but to protect us 
from encroachments on the right to vote that occur today and that might 
be tried tomorrow.

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