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Guest Editorial
America: Stand Up and be Counted
Marc H. Morial
Friday, October 22, 2004; Page 22
Can you count? Do you think your opinions about how the United States of America is run should count? Do you care if your opinions are discounted? These are the questions all Americans must ask themselves as the countdown continues toward the November 2 Election Day.
All Americans who are registered to vote must go to the polls and be counted. Anyone who figuratively shrugs their shoulders at the prospect of voting is a fool. But don’t tell them that directly.
Instead, mention just some of the issues facing the country at one of the most critical junctures in its history: the war of terror, the future of Social Security and Medicare, aid to education and other social programs, tax cuts, and renewing the physical infrastructures of our urban areas, for starters.
Recall for them how close in vote totals the 2000 Election was and help them recall the dismay and anger of those whose ballots were lost or invalidated or who were turned away from the polls in Florida and elsewhere. Every one of those disenfranchised voters in the turbulent aftermath of the 2000 Election made it clear—often in visceral language—they understood what it meant to be denied the vote.
Many African Americans well understand the fundamental meaning of Americans’ right to vote because it’s deeply embedded in their own group history: Without the vote, you don’t count. With the vote, you do count.
Even a cursory reading of the determined, poignant, seven-decade struggle of African Americans to regain the vote in the South after the Supreme Court legalized racial discrimination in the Plessy decision of 1896 makes that truth clear. However, the more positive dramatic proof came after Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1964, according to data compiled by the Washington-based think tank, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, there were only 350 black elected officials in all of the United States.
Five years later that number had jumped to nearly 1,500. Today, there are more than 9,000 black elected officials, including 614 in state legislatures and 39 members of the House of Representatives, and one soon-to-be-elected African-American Senator from Illinois.
Equally important, African Americans are becoming more heavily layered in important posts in the infrastructures of both major parties. For example, according to David A. Boisitis, Senior Research Associate at the Joint Center, this year blacks comprised 20.1 percent of delegates to the Democratic convention, and 6.7 percent of delegates—a record total for the GOP—to the Republican convention.
The new reports of recent weeks and days of extraordinarily large increases in voter-registrations indicate that Americans of all backgrounds “get it”—they understand that the threat of terror facing our nation and the world and the serious domestic issues we must grapple with now and in the years ahead demand the electoral participation of as many of us as possible.
And there’s no question that the memory of the razor-thin closeness of the 2000 Election has galvanized many new registrants. “The vote was so close four years ago,” Joseph R. Passarella, director of voter services for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, told the New York Times, “people are now thinking, ‘hey, maybe my vote does count.”
Of course, as the Times story points out, “the big unknown is whether the new registrations will result in higher turnout.” The nation’s overall voter participation hovers around 50 percent. Census studies indicate that in 2000 64.3 percent of African Americans of voting age reported being registered to vote, and that 54.1 percent did vote that November. That compares to 70 percent of whites saying they were registered to vote, and 60.1 percent saying they did vote in that election.
America must do better this time. Getting registered voters to actually show up at the polls is the goal now as the various state voter-registration deadlines come and go and the myriad voter-registrations campaigns—including the nonpartisan Unity ’04 coalition, which the National Urban League has joined—turn their attention to producing a big voter turnout.
The success and momentum of the voter-registration campaigns should make it easier than ever to convince voters that not voting is the height of civic irresponsibility. As writer Maida Cassandra Odom, declared in the August issue of the National Urban League’s Opportunity Journal: “Vote because you owe it to history. … Vote because it is your civic duty. … Vote because everything is political whether we like it or not. … Vote because some people don’t want you to. … Vote because politicians need to be led by the people. … Vote because your vote does count. … Vote because you have a stake in the future for yourself and for your children, so act like it. Vote.”
As for those who are registered but won’t vote this November, all we can do is pity the fools.
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League.
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