Officials Urged to Protect All Voters' Rights
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 10/26/2004
As candidates gear up for last-minute campaigning, civil rights advocates are working to ensure a fair and representative minority vote this year.Last week the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) wrote to R. Alexander Acosta, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, urging that he and the Department of Justice ensure the protection of minority voting rights and help mitigate potential voter intimidation and vote suppression.
"From the posting of armed police officers at polling places in Chesterfield County in southern Virginia to disputes over ID requirements in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico and changes in polling places in Florida, there is ample potential for the disenfranchisement of African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American voters," said Wade Henderson, LCCR executive director.
"We are asking the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to monitor and defend the right to vote, a right no less important in America than it is in Afghanistan," Henderson added.
In another letter, LCCR also called upon Terry McAuliffe and Ed Gillespie, chairmen of the Democratic and Republican National Committees, to ensure that partisan "poll challengers," who in some states can dispute the eligibility of individual voters at polling places, are not used to intimidate or disenfranchise eligible minority voters. Recent news reports have shown that the parties plan to conduct aggressive challenges to voters at some polling places on November 2.
LCCR said that aggressive vote challenging could impact minority voters more harshly than non-minority voters. The letter expressed concern that the presence of many partisan challengers, combined with new identification and provisional ballot procedures, could create chaotic conditions that rival the problematic 2000 election.
"We have worked too hard for too long to enfranchise racial and ethnic minority voters in this country," Henderson said. "We fought for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other laws to ensure that every American has a right to vote and has a right to have his or her vote counted."
