Turn Law Into Action

In an Indiana primary earlier this year, Helen Hernandez planned to use her lunch break from her janitorial job to vote. Although she arrived without any identification, Hernandez expected a routine process at the polling place since she had voted regularly for nearly 50 years. The poll workers who greeted Hernandez, however, were unfamiliar with Indiana election law and failed not only to allow her to cast a vote without identification but also to provide her with a provisional ballot. Pressed by time and uncertain of her rights, Hernandez simply left.

When the New York Times reported the story of Helen Hernandez in early August, fraud wasn’t the culprit cited. Rather, the paper underscored the technical mistakes plaguing election administration in this country. Indeed, according to a CalTech/MIT study, as many as 1 million votes may have been lost in 2000 due to such polling place errors.

Although poor and minority communities are disproportionately affected, the limitation of voting rights is not a poor person’s issue or a black person’s problem—it is an American dilemma. Among the bundle of American rights, none is more fundamental than the right to choose one’s government. And when registered voters are routinely excluded from the electoral process, democracy is weakened for all of us.

In an earlier era, students were a vital part of the movement that expanded voting rights. In 1963, a young Joseph I. Lieberman joined 100 college students from Yale and Stanford to register black voters in Mississippi. Writing in the Yale Daily News about his reasons for skipping class to travel south, he said, “I am going...because there is much work to be done there and few men are doing it….It all becomes a personal matter to me. I am challenged personally.”

All of us who cherish the democratic process should continue to feel that personal challenge. And students, in particular, can assume as vital a role today as Lieberman and his classmates did 40 years ago.

Recently, Just Democracy organized at Harvard Law School for the purpose of mobilizing students around the country to aid the voting process. Partnering with nearly 50 American universities in more than 30 states, Just Democracy has established a national network of student volunteers that will work in nearly 500 polling places on Election Day to reduce the errors that cost so many votes.

While the current flaws in our elections are distinguishable from the racially motivated practices of an earlier era, they are just as effective at disenfranchising voters. Hernandez’s voice is no more heard today than it would have been in 1963 had unfair laws been used against her.

So how do students and other volunteers fix a voting rights problem? First, they get trained and then they get inside the polling places. When voters are mistakenly told they do not qualify for a provisional ballot or unnecessarily asked for photo identification, it often results from poll workers being unfamiliar with the law. Just Democracy plans to send law students and undergraduates trained in local election law to polling places where they can serve as resources for the election administrators.

Election officials confirm the need for this kind of support. Tom Leach, a spokesperson for the Chicago Board of Elections, said to the New York Times in August, “Training your poll workers gets harder every election. We’re laying more and more on the judges, and they’re not professionals, they’re senior citizens and housewives.”

Even with the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) by Congress in 2002, mistakes by the judges threaten to affect hundreds of thousands of voters. In a recent Chicago primary after the implementation of HAVA, 93 percent of provisional ballots cast were discarded, mostly due to election worker mistakes.

It may not be possible to eliminate human error from this process, but America must do better than allowing a million votes to be lost. When Just Democracy volunteers fan out on November 2nd, they will be working with election officials to preserve the integrity of the voting process. Just Democracy volunteers will operate under a non-partisan banner because Americans of all political stripes must support the premise that an eligible voter acting within the law has the right to cast a ballot. And finally Just Democracy volunteers will be demonstrating that this generation cares about protecting the rights for which previous generations of Americans have worked so hard.

We cannot ignore the example set by those who battled discriminatory voting practices because the disenfranchisement today is more nuanced and less mean-spirited. There is still much work to be done and we hope you will get involved in doing it.

William D. Rahm is president of the Harvard Chapter of Just Democracy. Ariel Neuman is National Communications Coordinator of Just Democracy.