Pearl River My vote was canceled. Yes, I know that’s not supposed to happen, but in the wake of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutting the voting act and greenlighting gerrymandering to protect party majorities, it’s on. Maybe not everywhere, but in red states where Republicans might not have already sewed up all of the Congressional districts, it’s definitely happening.
A lawsuit from Louisiana provided the excuse for the Robert’s court to further gut the Voting Rights Act. A second district had been added that allowed for the possibility of electing Black representative, given the significant percentage of African-Americans in the state. There had been one seat, largely around New Orleans, that has been held by a Black representative for decades except for one term when it was held by a Vietnamese. A second seat had been added to reflect similar demographics around Baton Rouge and Cleo Fields continues to occupy that seat until January. In the wake of the court’s decision, the Louisiana legislature rushed to redraw the boundaries to eliminate one or both seats. It wasn’t easy to disenfranchise so many people with hastily drawn new maps, so they left one New Orleans dominated seat which now has a finger up along the river into Baton Rouge.
The problem is that 250,000 of us had already voted either by mail ballot or absentee ahead of the May 16th primary. A conference committee in the words of the ACLU of Louisiana “quietly passed” a “sweeping rewrite” of the state’s election code in House Bill 842, including canceling all of those votes. The bill went further and prohibited “any election official from disclosing those votes.” Years ago, when our daughter was an ACORN organizer in Argentina, she feared that her absentee ballot would never be counted. I assured her that they had no choice but to count her ballot and all ballots. That was the law. I was wrong. The legislature seems to feel it has the power to cancel any election and seize the ballots at will and whim.
Of course, while they were at it, why not throw out everything but the kitchen sink. The same bill would prevent the annual roll canvass, even in election years, which purges votes from those deceased or who have moved out of state. Some of that is necessary and some of it can be abused as the Voter Purge Project has found. Worse they want to give the Secretary of State “new rulemaking authority with no corresponding transparency requirement.” In short, you could lose your vote without a clue. All of this is being done without any public hearing or input. We are irrelevant. We’re just voters.
In a related matter, after Trump failed to get his voter bill out of the Senate that would have recast the voter list and tried, contrary to the Constitution, to give the federal government control of voting, he took a shot at some of what he wanted with one of his favor weapons, an executive order. He wanted to mandate purges by forcing states to consult a federally created citizenship list. He’s come a cropper there. A Justice Department lawyer had to admit to a federal judge that such a citizenship list was “likely incomplete and unreliable for determining voter eligibility.”
Nationally, rather than locally, I guess that’s good news, but there’s no way to escape the feeling that as unfavored voters, the federal administration now and its state wannabes are playing whack-a-mole with us in order to do everything they can to either keep us from voting or to eliminate our votes.