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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 12/10/12

EI: "We've Only Just Begun" (as sung by Roberts and His Three Backups, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito)

By       (Page 1 of 2 pages)   2 comments, In Series: Election Integrity


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Today's headline in the Onion reports that the Supreme Court "s docket next year will include one deliberation over whether human beings deserve equal rights.

     It actually does. SCOTUS will debate the legitimacy of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed by LBJ to do away forever with the Jim Crow abuses that have so plagued all underprivileged classes for more than a century.

     Well, now that everything is hunky-dory and we all have equal rights in every area including voting rights, why not repeal the ruling that requires certain states, including all of the former Confederacy, to report all changes in election practices to the Department of Justice for approval, because in the past (certainly not today) they were guilty of the most racist practices in the country.

     And if that is true, then Jill Stein won the presidency and now occupies the oval office.

     Indeed, racist practices characterize most every state in the Union. Ohio's have been egregious, as reported over the preceding twelve years. In Nebraska, former ES&S CEO Chuck Hagel stepped down only to run for the Republican senatorial seat and miraculously swept all of the all-black neighborhoods that normally voted Democratic, to put it mildly.

     In Harlem in the 2008 election some precincts delivered zero Democratic votes and in others Clinton triumphed, which is a bit hard to believe. A black man who lived in New Jersey gave me a pathetic look when I asked him how it was to vote there.

    In Florida, only five counties require preclearance before changing electoral policies, where statewide in the 2000 presidential election at least 50,760 blacks were illegally labeled as felons and turned away from the polls. Other black high school graduates, excited about their first chance to vote, never got to. Roadblocks were set up, polls in black districts closed early, and so on. The situation in Ohio mirrored this miasma at least partly because J. Kenneth Blackwell worked as an election operative in the Sunshine State in 2000 before becoming secretary of state who presided over the 2004 presidential election there.

     But did you know, did you know, that Section 5 also applies to Arizona and Alaska, as well as some counties in California, New York, and South Dakota, as well as some townships in Michigan and . . . in New Hampshire?

     Fine with me. Racist anecdotes cover our country's entire map. For this reason, I suggest that the Supremes extend the preclearance provision nationwide instead of considering the inverse, to lift this cumbersome burden off the innocent shoulders of Yankee as well as Rebel states.

     The Pars pro Toto fallacy is actually valid here: if some of the nation is guilty, then we all are, and justifiably so. We must extend justice wherever it is needed. I'd guess racists inhabit all fifty states. Prove me wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

     There's another case to be argued by SCOTUS next year. Arizona v InterTribal Council of Arizona will question the rule that all Grand Canyon State citizens who wish to vote must first demonstrate proof of citizenship when registering.

     Native Americans having to prove citizenship? That's like requiring a cow to prove that it eats grass when herded to an appropriate meadow. The term Native American

is proof enough.

     Sometimes, when preaching to the choir, I say that Hispanic immigration signifies nothing more or less than other native Americans reclaiming land torn from them brutally--did Columbus discover America or ravish it blind?

     Today an article in the Nation by Aura Bogado and Voting Rights Watch 2012, and another by Greg Palast, exhort that just because Obama regained the White House we can't rest on our laurels, "we" meaning the Election Integrity movement.

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Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, (more...)
 

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