Election Day is rapidly approaching. The punditry is shouting about a seemingly imminent Democratic takeover in Congress. The politicians are spending to the last drop to snatch up every last voter on what may ultimately be a referendum on the Republican Party and their mismanagement of the so-called war on terrorism, the war in Iraq and a litany of domestic issues here on the home front. What people are not railing about is the need for a democratic (with a small "d") takeover of our broken voting rights system.
The day in which we extend the life of our republic will soon be upon us and almost all will have the opportunity to elect new leadership to take us out of the doldrums in which we seem to be mired. Unless you are a rehabilitated former felon, a working-class or poor voter in Arizona who is unable to attain a state-issued photo ID for purposes of voting, or a resident of the District of Columbia. As we cast our absentee ballots or march home to our districts to do our civic duty and participate in our great democratic experiment, let us not forget about those who are deprived of that right for the most unjust of reasons.
Civil rights organizations such as the NAACP have, for many years now, been calling for a reformation of the voting rights system in many states to allow ex-felony offenders (out of prison and working to contribute productively to society again) the right to vote. Several bills have been floated in Congress to give ex-felony offenders this right in federal elections, but irrational fears about who this group (disproportionately poor, people of color) might vote for if enfranchised have stamped out progress on the issue.
With reference to Arizona, the increasingly conservative Supreme Court upheld its voter ID requirement, arguably disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Arizona residents who do not have the ability, for any number of reasons, to obtain a state-issued photo ID. This, folks, is the modern day poll tax hidden behind the fa?ade of preventing "voter fraud." Can someone please explain to me how in a country where less than 50 percent of the populace votes in elections for our highest office, there is a real, tangible problem of people voting who are not legally allowed to do so? I just do not see it happening. It is absurd to argue that we have a significant enough amount of fraudulent voting to require such rigid restrictions on citizens' access to the ballot box when there are so few of us legitimately voting in the first place. Don't buy it.
Closer to home, there is the perpetual injustice of disenfranchisement being exacted upon the residents of the district in which we attend our university. Here we have American citizens, the same as you and I, denied representation in their own Congress. These citizens pay the second highest per capita federal taxes in the nation ($2 billion, behind Connecticut) but have no say as to how that money is spent. These residents have fought and died for America in every war from the Revolutionary War to the current war in Iraq, yet they remain without representation. Our capital is the only one among the world's democracies that denies its residents voting rights in the national legislature. Our country egregiously violates international law by not providing D.C. residents with equal voting rights in Congress. To put it into perspective, Wyoming, the home state of our hunting-rifle-misfiring vice president, has nearly 50,000 fewer residents than D.C., yet has two senators and one representative in the House.
We are too eager to spout off about the need for freedom, democracy and justice in every other corner of the world, when the people living right around the corner from our national leaders lack those fundamental elements of civilized society. Despite this miscarriage of electoral justice, the tide seems to be changing. The D.C. Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act, or D.C. Voting Rights Act (H.R. 5388), has received overwhelming bipartisan support and has advanced further than any bill of this nature to date. If passed, the law would raise the number of Representatives in the U.S. House from 435 to 437 by giving D.C. its first voting member of the House and giving Utah an additional member. Why Utah? For two good reasons: 1) Utah missed receiving another seat in the 2000 census because the U.S. Census Bureau failed to count some 14,000 Mormon missionaries temporarily abroad at the time. 2) Utah is historically Republican while D.C. is strongly Democratic, which would render the electoral consequences of the bill to be relatively politically neutral.
That said, support the D.C. Voting Rights Act. And as you cast your ballot this Nov. 7, remember that regardless of who is elected, everybody wins when everybody votes.
Paul Perry is a senior in the School of International Service
and a liberal columnist for The Eagle.
