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Pro-Democracy Convention Bellwether for Justice

Four hundred activists converged in Philadelphia last month to attend the Pro-Democracy Convention. Sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Rights and a host of other organizations, including the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) in New York, the event and issues discussed there have serious ramifications for Asian Americans. Topic No. 1: the denial of voting rights in Florida last November.

The conference started with a town hall meeting on June 29, where 18 speakers described the denial of votes in Florida and around the nation, the efforts of various groups to bring democracy back to our electoral system, and ongoing efforts to advance a Voter’s Bill of Rights.

The following day started with a plenary session featuring voting rights historians and activists. Alex Keyssar of Duke University, and author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, described a history of

Alex Keyssar. Courtesy duke.edu.

rights that have expanded in some ways and contracted in others. Because of differing voting traditions in the original 13 states, the Founding Fathers were cautious on pressing for a federal right to vote in 1789. Ironically, that now means that our right to bear arms has a better Constitutional basis than our right to vote.

Keyssar detailed how the right to vote has been restricted over the years based on gender, race, property ownership, religion and literacy tests. In fact, based on his research, his thesis contends that there have always been opponents of democracy in the United States, so “democracy is an ongoing project in which we all must participate,” he said.

GENDER

Eleanor Smeal. Courtesy feminist.org.

Eleanor Smeal of the National Organization for Women (www.now.org) and the Feminist Majority (www.feminist.org) reminded attendees that “people don’t vote because they have few real choices. We should stop saying that they are apathetic.”

Among the innovative proposals made by Smeal were to add “gender” as a protected class when the Voting Rights Act is extended, double the size of the United State Senate by allowing each state to send two men and two women as Senators, eliminate single-member districts (which always lead to fewer women and minorities), and use proportional representation in all legislative elections.

RACE

Manning Marable. Courtesy manningmarable.net.

Manning Marable, who teaches at Columbia University and works with the Black Radical Congress (www.blackradicalcongress.org), sees a return to Jim Crow-type democracy in this country (referring to the anti-black laws in the late 19th Century South). For example, 19,000 votes were not counted in Palm Beach County, Florida, and 27,000 votes were not counted in Duval County last November. Those Duval votes were from four precincts where blacks make up 90 percent of the voters. An estimated 30 percent of black males were excluded from voting because of felony convictions, and many people were unjustly removed from the voting rolls because their names were similar to those of convicted felons.

Professor Marable pointed out that in New York State alone, the number of incarcerated people has gone from 12,500 in 1971 to 74,000 in 2001. Most of those are black and Latino, with the majority being non-violent offenders. Worst of all, from the vantage point of representative democracy, prison districts are gerrymandered so that prisoners count as adult citizens for purposes of legislative reapportionment. But they cannot vote. Therefore, their presence adds to the power of conservative, mostly white rural Republican politicians who support the growth of the prison industry.

INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS

David Gespass, an international elections expert from the National Lawyer’s Guild (www.nlg.org), explained that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other documents say that elections must be free, fair, and transparent. In other words, they must be free of intimidation, honest and credible, and open to public scrutiny at every stage except the casting of the ballot itself. Gespass and others at the conference questioned whether the intimidation of black voters, the intervention of the Supreme Court, and other irregularities proved that our last national election did not meet the standards of international voting rights conventions.

VOTER'S BILL OF RIGHTS

Throughout the rest of the weekend, workshops focused on the issues raised by the Voter’s Bill of Rights (www.ippn.org). Among the important points made:

— It would cost less to publicly finance campaigns than to pay for the tax breaks and give-aways we currently see in the pork-barrel politics of Washington and the state legislatures.

— Individuals such as New Jersey Asian American Steve Ma are walking for reform (www.walkforreform.com) to point out how, in the case of New Jersey, two-thirds of the money raised in the last state election came from only 67 sources. By going door-to-door, Steve is following in the footsteps of the voting rights activists of the 1950s and 60s.

— Groups like the Fannie Lou Hamer Project (www.flhp.org), named for the courageous 1960s voting rights activist from Mississippi, remind us that campaign finance reform is a civil rights issue because 95 percent of reported federal campaign donations are made by whites. Politicians respond more to cash constituents than electoral constituents.

For more information, call 212-614-6452, visit www.pro-democracy.com or email demconv@hotmail.com.