No voting accommodations for New Orleans refugees who fled state
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by Bruce Eggler,
New Orleans Times-Picayune
Feb. 25, 2006
A federal judge refused Friday to order Louisiana officials to provide out-of-state satellite polling places for displaced voters or to take other steps that could have forced a delay of the New Orleans primary election scheduled for April 22.
U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle's action pleased groups that have been pushing to have the already-postponed election held as soon as possible, but it disappointed those who say that not enough has been done to give the mostly black residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina an equal chance at participating in one of the most important elections in the city's history.
It is widely thought that the city's electorate today has a significantly higher percentage of white voters than before the storm. New Orleans has not had a white mayor since 1978, but of about a dozen announced candidates in the current race, only three, including incumbent Ray Nagin, are black.
According to testimony presented during a Thursday hearing by groups such as the NAACP and ACORN, most of the hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians still living outside the city are black, and the black evacuees tend to be considerably poorer and to be living farther away from New Orleans than white evacuees, making it less likely they will be able to get back to New Orleans to vote in person.
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Commentary by Helen & Harry Highwater:
Remember when the US was running Iraq's elections, and anyone with a quarter-ounce of Iraqi blood could vote conveniently in nearby cities? Iraqis, including many who'd never been to Iraq, queued up to vote in Los Angeles, in Washington DC, in Chicago ...
Funny how we can do anything, everything to make it easy for Iraqis vote, but we can't do diddlysquat to reduce the rigmarole that everyone knows will prevent many thousands of displaced black Americans from voting.
H&HH
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Black evacuees tend to be considerably poorer and to be living farther away from New Orleans than white evacuees, making it less likely they will be able to get back to New Orleans to vote in person.
Further, the groups said, such evacuees are unlikely to take advantage of the complicated procedures that would let them vote by mailed absentee ballots.
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Further, the groups said, such evacuees are unlikely to take advantage of the complicated procedures that would let them vote by mailed absentee ballots.
But Lemelle suggested more than once that the high level of anger among many voters displaced by the hurricane might make them determined to vote "come hell or high water," as evacuee Carl Galmon, now living in Atlanta, put it in his testimony.
At its special session this month, the Legislature adopted Secretary of State Al Ater's plan to set up satellite polling places throughout the state but rebuffed suggestions they should also be provided in cities such as Atlanta and Houston.
Displaced residents who were registered to vote in New Orleans before Katrina will be allowed to cast absentee ballots in person April 10-15 at the office of the registrar of voters in the state's 10 other most populous parishes: Caddo, Calcasieu, East Baton Rouge, Jefferson, Ouachita, Rapides, St. Tammany, Lafayette, Tangipahoa and Terrebonne.
Those favoring satellite voting sites in other states said it would take most people living in Texas, Mississippi or Georgia hours of driving to get to one of the additional Louisiana sites, much less to New Orleans.
A lawsuit filed two weeks ago by a group of Lower 9th Ward leaders and the community group ACORN did not specifically seek to delay the elections for mayor, City Council and other offices, which originally were set for Feb. 4 and March 4 and now are scheduled for April 22 and May 20.
Instead, it called for actions such as setting up satellite polling places in other states and mailing unsolicited absentee ballots to all displaced residents with known addresses, rather than waiting for them to request ballots. But a spokeswoman for the Advancement Project, a Washington, D.C, civil rights group involved in filing the suit, said making the requested changes might require a delay in the elections.
The suit said most white Orleans Parish residents "will have access to the polls to vote in person," whereas most displaced black residents would have to rely on absentee voting by mail, which it called "an unduly cumbersome and possibly unreliable option."
Meanwhile, leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People threatened to file a lawsuit seeking to block the elections unless they were delayed.
Under the federal Voting Rights Act, the U.S. Department of Justice must review all changes in electoral procedures in Louisiana and other Southern states to ensure they do not discriminate against black voters. The department has not completed its review of the state's plans for the delayed New Orleans elections, but Ater has said he expects the plans to win approval.
The Advancement Project said Friday that Lemelle's ruling "gave too much credit to the meager steps" Ater's office has taken "to address the significant barriers that will certainly exist for displaced voters. The effect of this adverse ruling means that more than 100,000 people, predominantly people of color, will have to use absentee ballots, when historically less than 5 percent of Louisiana's registered voters used them under the best of conditions. With evacuees being forced to move from location to location, the likelihood that an absentee ballot will even reach them is dramatically reduced."
But Lemelle, who had earlier pressured state officials to make sure the election was held by the end of April, apparently agreed with local residents and the American Civil Liberties Union, who had previously filed suits saying any unnecessary delay in an election is an unconstitutional assault on the basic principles of democracy.
Under the City Charter, the newly elected mayor and council were supposed to have taken office May 1, nearly three weeks before the scheduled runoff.
Tracie Washington, one of the lawyers seeking to either delay the election or force the state to take further steps to help displaced voters, was uncertain Friday whether Lemelle's decision would be appealed.
As originally published
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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Did you wonder why FEMA disallowed bottled water, and cut the local emergency communications?
Why, even before the hurricane hit, FEMA told first-responders not to respond?
Did you wonder why FEMA wouldn't let hundreds of eager airboat skippers search for survivors?
Why Homeland Security kept the Red Cross out of New Orleans, while people were starving, drowning, dying of thirst?
Have you tried to understand why, as people were still drowning and unfed, firefighters were ordered to undergo an all-day seminar in Atlanta, before being sent to New Orleans ... to hand out fliers?
How come day after day after day, FEMA couldn't or wouldn't airdrop food and drinking water into New Orleans, but the U.S. military was there for "combat operations"?
I'm not an expert on search and rescue or military operations, but it just seems to me, people who haven't had food and water for five or six days could be quelled with food and water, instead of "combat operations."
Excerpted from"Mission accomplished" for FEMA
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