African American Voters Face Sadly Familiar Obstacles to Voting

Newswise — The voting rights of some African Americans are still partially abridged, contrary to the 15th Amendment, now more than 130 years old. The problem will affect the 2004 presidential election and raises the possibility yet again of a presidential election outcome being connected to some rate of minority vote suppression, says a Swarthmore College voting expert.

"African Americans are very loyal to the Democratic party," says Professor of Political Science Richard Valelly '75, the author of a new book on the struggle for black enfranchisement. "Due to the residential hypersegregation that still exists in the U.S., pro-Republican operatives seeking to keep some number of black voters away from the polls know where to run their so-called 'ballot security' programs — such things as leaflets with false warnings about ID requirements and the penalties for failing to meet them, or fake phone calls purporting to be from the NAACP telling elderly people to stay home. These programs have been around for decades, and unfortunately they have been connected to the Republican party."

In addition, Valelly says new election rules in Florida and Ohio could also have unfortunate discriminatory consequences. "The secretaries of state in those battleground states are issuing rules for the counties that, if adopted, will blunt the impact of minority voter registration drives," he says.

Valelly also worries about the widespread use of felony disenfranchisement , which disproportionately affects African American voters. "There is no good reason for it at all," he says. "First, it raises all kinds of problems for enfranchised registrants who share names or parts of names with disenfranchised felons. It also harms people who have paid their debt to society and impedes their struggle to rejoin their place in the polity, to seek gainful employment, and to rebuild their family lives."

According to Valelly, the author of The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (University of Chicago Press), released this month, the struggles of 2004 are just the latest chapter in an extraordinary history that dates to the Reconstruction and to the legal disenfranchisement of free black voters in many Northern states before the Civil War. "It is remarkable that a country which prides itself on being the first large-scale electoral democracy in world history is among the last advanced democracies still working to achieve full inclusion," he says.

Valelly, a 1975 Swarthmore graduate, is an expert on minority voting rights, election law, American party politics, social movements, and public policy. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1984 and has been a research scholar at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. This academic year he is a visiting research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University.

Located near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective liberal arts college whose mission combines academic rigor with social responsibility. Swarthmore, with an enrollment of 1,500, is consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.