Articles

Real Election Chicanery on Other Foot

Opinion by Jim Wooten
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
August 9, 2005

The most vivid modern example of a conspiracy to discount the votes of a racially identifiable segment of the Georgia electorate is most assuredly not voter ID. It's a fair bet that conspirators included at least some of those who marched through downtown Atlanta Saturday urging renewal of "temporary" provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — temporary now for more than 40 years.

Barely three years ago, Georgia was in the final stages of the most bodacious power grab since 1876, when the county-unit system of tallying votes was adopted, guaranteeing that a country vote would count more than a city slicker's.

The black and white Democrats who ran Georgia vanished behind closed doors and concocted a modern version of the outlawed county-unit system that was designed to keep them in power for another decade.

It had two elements. Because federal courts had previously allowed a 5 percent population deviation in drawing new district boundaries after the 2000 census, black and white Democrats devised a scheme. Using computers and disregarding communities of interest, they cleverly packed Republican legislative districts by 4.9 percent over the ideal size, while drawing slower-growing Democratic districts 4.9 under — meaning that it took 100 Republicans to equal the voting clout of 90 Democrats. The effect was to negate votes, most grievously in rapidly growing counties such as Gwinnett, Forsyth and Cherokee.

The other votes-don't-count scheme was to create multimember state House districts, so that Democratic votes counted two or three times as much as Republican votes.

Where was the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department?

Where were the voices that spoke Saturday of injustices and disenfranchisement?

Where was the outrage that the most precious right accorded citizens in a democracy was being stolen?

Mute. All. Not one black Democrat, nor one white, nor the secretary of state — none of those who now represent photo ID for voting as an impossible hurdle — rose up to utter the slightest objection to a scheme that devalued votes based on geography.

Fortunately, the federal court did. Judges ordered votes to count equally. Whereupon the conspiracy collapsed, and with it 134 years of one-party rule.

Searching for an issue to regain power, and to make a case that discriminatory and punitive provisions of the Voting Rights Act should be extended another 25 years, activist Democrats have settled on voter ID as rouse-the-vote fodder.

On Saturday, locked arm-in-arm in protest were the Rev. Jesse Jackson and U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a tandem that could wipe out the Democratic Party in the South with a three-week Greyhound bus tour in election season.

Across town on Saturday, the commissioner of the Department of Drivers Services, Greg Dozier, joined the march while proposing a solution — if, indeed, marchers had solutions in mind.

Dozier announced a three-point remedy to the problem activists identify.

• A mobile licensing bus, capable of issuing up to 200 photo identification cards per day, will travel the state.
• Organizations, like the NAACP, the AARP, SCLC, nursing homes, churches, Rainbow/PUSH or others, can arrange the bus for specific sites.
• The department will begin a statewide public information campaign to educate Georgians on the best ways to get a photo ID card for voting.

With the initiatives Dozier announced, legitimate objections to the photo ID requirement should vanish. What's left are campaign complaints — voiced to pressure Congress to continue a provision set to expire in 2007 that requires a handful of states, including Georgia, to pre-clear any change in election laws and procedures with the Justice Department. It's vindictive and discriminatory.

If it's to be extended, it should apply to every state in the country.

Eliminate the conspiracy by black and white Democrats to deny citizens in some metro counties the equal-protection right to have their vote counted, and there's no evidence that any practice of the distant past to disenfranchise anybody still exists.

If preclearance is fair for Georgia, it's fair for Washington and Missouri and for every other state — and certainly for every state with more recent evidence of election shenanigans.

Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

Copyright 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more information, visit www.ajc.com.

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