Features » November 16, 2005 » Web Only

Voter Disenfranchisement by Attrition

With friends like FEMA, who needs Jim Crow?

By Benjamin Greenberg

New Orleans residents displaced by Katrina, like Mary Elizabeth Johnson, above, may find it difficult to vote in upcoming elections.

When Hurricane Katrina came ashore in New Orleans, it destroyed half the city’s voting precincts and scattered 300,000 of the city’s residents, most of them black, across the country. With citywide elections still scheduled in February and March for 20 key public offices—including mayor, criminal sheriff, civil sheriff and all city council members—restoring the city’s democratic capability might seem an urgent task to some, but not to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

All evacuees who apply for assistance must tell FEMA who they are, where they lived before they were displaced and where they live now. Since early October, Louisiana Secretary of State Al Ater, a Democrat, has been dogging the agency for the names and temporary addresses of evacuees, so he can send them information about how to maintain their right to vote in Louisiana.

Because many evacuees are far from New Orleans and cannot make a special trip home for the elections, their only way to vote will be by absentee ballot. But, citing privacy concerns, FEMA stonewalled Ater for weeks. They finally reached an agreement on November 8, but it is an open question if the compromise will lead to fair elections.

Ater has also requested $750,000 from FEMA for a Nationwide Voter Outreach and Education Campaign.

“Given the inability of the displaced voters of Louisiana to receive local election information via their local news, some kind of extraordinary outreach should be made to educate those voters,” says David J. Becker, election consultant and former senior trial attorney for the voting section of the U.S. Department of Justice. “Otherwise their voting rights may be yet another victim of Hurricane Katrina.”

Many evacuees have moved several times since they first applied for assistance, and they may never receive voter information unless they learn by word of mouth or through the media to contact Ater’s office for ballots. Consequently, Ater is proposing a publicity campaign that would include direct mail, radio and TV public service announcements, satellite media tours and travel for himself and staff members to areas with high concentrations of evacuees.

Why should FEMA pay for this? The Stafford Act, which gives FEMA its role in coordinating relief efforts, provides that FEMA may make contributions towards the repair of damaged public facilities and provide “technical and advisory assistance” for “the performance of essential community services.”

Stonewalling

On October 5, Ater asked FEMA’s liaison to his office, Arvin Schultz, for FEMA’s list of evacuees. Schultz responded On October 14 to Ater’s requests with a terse e-mail, writing that FEMA “will not fund the outreach program. They will not let you have a copy of the FEMA applicant list. Sorry!!!” Two days later, Ater appealed to Deputy Federal Coordinating Officer Scott Wells, the top FEMA official in Louisiana. Ater’s appeal was rejected, this time with the rationale that releasing the list of evacuees would violate the Privacy Act of 1974.

Ater then went to Washington, D.C., to negotiate with FEMA and lobby Louisiana’s representatives and senators to push the agency to reverse its decision. He suggested a compromise: FEMA could take the voter rolls from him and mail the election materials itself to avoid disclosing the evacuees’ addresses. Though FEMA said it wanted to work with Ater, agency officials dragged their heels for nearly two weeks. FEMA Spokesman Butch Kinerney says the main problem was “mechanical questions” about the best method for reaching voters while protecting privacy.

On November 8, FEMA finally made a clear concession. The agency said it would pay to send a one-page flyer to all evacuees that would explain voting rights and include ways to contact Ater’s office. Yet, Ater still does not know when FEMA will mail the flyer.

In contrast, the agency responded quickly to share the same information with law enforcement. At the end of September, Texas law enforcement officials began asking FEMA for the list of evacuees in order to determine where sex offenders evacuated from Louisiana might have landed in Texas. By the middle of October, FEMA declared that while it would not release all of the names and addresses, it would cross-reference the evacuee list with the sex offender list for any legitimate law enforcement agency that requests it. In order to expedite the process, FEMA now provides law enforcement agencies with a form letter they can use to ask FEMA to identify sex offenders from Louisiana who have fled to their communities.

Reshaping the Voter Base

Despite FEMA’s compromise with Ater, the agency is still flouting the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Without the means to carry out his Nationwide Voter Outreach and Education Campaign—and to do so expediently and over enough time to be effective—it will be impossible for Ater to ensure that thousands of displaced voters do not face an undue burden in securing their right to vote. The current mechanism for reaching displaced voters by mail is essential, but it is not enough. “You can’t expect the average person to be an election law expert and to know what to do,” says Ater.

“For lawyers who do voter protection work to ensure that every vote cast is counted, it’s going to be a very challenging election,” says Judith Browne, co-director of the Advancement Project, a group founded to promote racial justice and democracy, and co-chair of the Legal Committee of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition, a grassroots movement of persons disproportionately impacted by the hurricane. “If there is an absentee ballot campaign, protections must be put into place. There is concern that the kind of voter suppression we saw directed at people of color in Ohio in 2004 will be directed at Katrina victims in the upcoming elections.”

In Ohio and other states, low-income black voters were vulnerable to partisan challenges to their registration status because they were least likely to have identification and most likely to change residences between election cycles.

Evacuees will be considerably more vulnerable as targets in the upcoming high-stakes elections. “If the Republican Party had long lists of people to challenge at the polls in 2004, what kind of action will we see around many thousands of absentee ballots in 2005 and 2006?” says Browne.

Black voters are not the only ones facing the hardships of relocation, but they are the group most affected by Katrina. At the end of October, Gallup released a survey of evacuees that showed that “the differences between racial groups were, on average, much larger than the differences between high- and low-income groups.” While there are no hard numbers for how many of the 300,000 New Orleans evacuees are black, it appears to be well over two-thirds. Pre-Katrina New Orleans had a population of 500,000, of which nearly 70 percent was black.

Today, the city is down to an estimated 70,000 residents (including contract workers). The most populated areas are the predominantly white districts nearest the Mississippi River—Uptown, the Lower Garden District, Warehouse District, French Quarter, Marigny—while areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward, which were more than 90 percent black, are being kept near empty by police, military and paramilitary forces.

With 73 percent of New Orleans residents over the age of 18, according to Census 2000, roughly 219,000 of the New Orleans evacuees should be of voting age. If we estimate conservatively that 70 percent of those evacuees are black, that’s 153,300 black voters whose poll tapes FEMA is replacing with red tape. This is voter disenfranchisement by attrition. There may not be visible long lines outside of polling places, but the scale is much larger than anything in Ohio or Florida.

“Many who were residents of New Orleans and who want to go back were not registered voters,” says Browne. “These folks are outraged by the government’s inadequate response to the flooding and are passionate about these issues now. They want to vote.”

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• Reader Comments

  With friends like FEMA, who needs Jim Crow?

  Good one, Benjamin.

  Posted by David in Canada on Nov 18, 2005 at 6:29 AM

  Just came across your site on the net and I had to respond.  Benjamin Greenberg’s article goes to the heart of what is wrong with our country and my city, New Orleans.  If residents of New Orleans cannot take the personal responsibilty to educate themselves on election issues then why do we want those people determining the future of this city.  I happen to be one of those “white district” residents and am considering running for the city council of New Orleans because of the pathetic leadership that we have had to endure for decades. 

  It is not an issue of race as Mr. Greenberg puts it, but an issue of desire.  Those of us who want to work and bring our city back are doing just that.  Black and white residents together are here working.  There are not many residents here holding out their hand demanding that the government take care of them.  Those days I pray have been washed out with the flood waters.  If you want to vote in the citywide election, then figure out a way to get your ballot casted.  Voting is a right that carries with it a huge responsibility and the responsibility to vote is not one of the government or interest groups but one of the INDIVIDUAL.  Maybe we can finally get leaders elected who do not have fleets of buses bringing robots to the poles every election while telling them who to vote for.  The black population in New Orleans has been used for decades by the black leaders themselves who want to keep the city poor and stupid.  Hopefully Katrina WILL make an new New Orleans and personal responsibility will be the foundation for which it is built

  G. Waguespack

  Posted by Wolfew on Nov 18, 2005 at 4:46 PM

  If residents of New Orleans cannot take the personal responsibilty to educate themselves on election issues then why do we want those people determining the future of this city.

  Because they live there, and most of the people you hope to represent do not.

  I happen to be one of those “white district” residents and am considering running for the city council of New Orleans because of the pathetic leadership that we have had to endure for decades.

  What you mean “we”, Kemo Sabe?

  Voting is a right that carries with it a huge responsibility and the responsibility to vote is not one of the government or interest groups but one of the INDIVIDUAL.  Maybe we can finally get leaders elected who do not have fleets of buses bringing robots to the poles every election while telling them who to vote for.  The black population in New Orleans has been used for decades by the black leaders themselves who want to keep the city poor and stupid.

  Well, actually, voting is a social responsibility, whereby the group of people with the greatest number of votes gets to periodically re-establish the people who govern them, as duly constituted in a government, another social organization.  One of the social responsibilities of this government is to provide the electorate with a system of education, another social organization, dedicated to the cultural reproduction and economic information of its beneficiaries, many of whom are indeed “robots”, or workers.  In fact, most of them are workers, who receive substandard education, wages, housing, and virtually no medical care to speak of, from their more affluent employers, who happen to be over-educated, over-paid, over-insured and effectively absent from the community from which they select their labor force.  Perhaps if they returned from their sylvan sanctuaries among the suburbs to live among the people they despise and subsequently exploit, they might learn to appreciate them accordingly, and quite possibly elevate an asshole such as yourself to the City Council.

  Posted by Major Major on Nov 19, 2005 at 12:55 AM

  I wasn’t going to respond upon reading your post however I am concerned about you tripping and taking that huge plunge when you decide to climb down off of the ivory tower(please watch your step).  The theoretical diatribe you presented is a great lesson for a high school civics class.  However what you do not understand is that we(that would be the “we” who actually are living in New Orleans) may be the only ones who remain in the city.  I’d like to know what crystal ball you are viewing which tells you which residents are going to come back to the city and which ones are not. 

  As far as the residents who “receive” substandard education, wages…, well shame on the political powers running this city and shame on the residents for continuously voting these jokers in.  It is obvious that you have some problem with demanding responsible behavior from individuals.  We(there’s that darn “we” again) had better hope that returning residents of New Orleans reject the “give me” mentality and adopt a proactive “get it done” mentality or this city will wither on the vine. 

  Oh and by the way, I have been called a lot of things in my life, but never a quad pound sign.  I appreciate the compliment.

  Posted by Wolfew on Nov 19, 2005 at 7:41 PM

  Hee Hee,  this one bites, Major.

  Actually Rabbit can’t say as he had any problem with Wolfew’s position. Rabbit had a slightly different view but for once would have to defer to the local knowledge.  Being a Rabbit from OZ and all. 

  It is hard to get over the feeling that the whole thing has been used, if not even set up, to displace the large proportion of poor and black from New Orleans, to the benefit of investment in the medium term.  Rabbit sees no way to equate such as Wolfew as being in any way connected to such forces and from thence is led consider his words from their own perspective and they sound like an admirable way forward.

  Is it Wolfew’s intention to build a New Orleans which does take a humane and intelligent approach to supporting those who will always be around? Those who are for whatever reasons rendered unable to support themselves either temporarily or permanently?

  The question is basically, is this a socialist or fascist plan?  Rabbit uses these terms only as poles of reference. To which pole do we tend?  Both can speak as you have, Mr Wolfew.

  Posted by Rabbit on Nov 23, 2005 at 12:16 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 13 posts.