Fields, Jackson undermine Louisiana democracy

If the Rev. Jesse Jackson is going to carpetbag in Louisiana on the conduct of elections, it would do if he got his facts straight. Then maybe the hurricane-force blowhard winds that he produces wouldn’t spawn little tornadoes like state Sen. Cleo Fields’ lawsuit to stop the Apr. 22 elections in Orleans Parish.

Jackson asserts several inaccuracies. First, like it should make any difference, New Orleans will have a majority of black voters present on Apr. 22. The fact that Jackson mistakenly mentions that New Orleans’ population composition present now is majority white implies that he really wouldn’t think voting rights is an issue if he had known a majority black population likely will be on the ground on election day. That is, if a hurricane shattered a majority white city that left a majority of non-whites in the city on election day, we wouldn’t hear a peep out of him. It’s not voting rights he’s concerned about, it’s power for a constituency he claims to represent.

Also, when Jackson writes “Louisiana … refused to provide satellite voting places for those dispersed,” it’s obvious he paid no attention to what happened in the last special session when the state bent over backwards to set up 10 of these for the next couple of elections (he can check here for a full account). He also accuses the state of holding “an election with a secret voting roll in New Orleans.” This is patently untrue: anybody can request to see the names of registered voters in Orleans Parish at any time.

Fields takes these untruths and runs with them, claiming in a request to the U.S. Department of Justice that the state has not done enough to ensure minority voting rights. In fact, the state has complied with its own laws, in the past found adequate by the federal government, and even gone beyond them, by spending millions of dollars to directly inform displaced voters about election aspects.

Indeed, Fields shows little understanding for the basic principles of American government when he echoes claims that evacuees are unlikely to take advantage of the complicated procedures that would let them vote by mail-in absentee ballots (why are these people different from anybody else for whom these procedures have been in place for years; aren’t all people to be treated equally?) and when he makes statements like “What's the rush? There's not one vacant position. All of these positions have elected officials that are in place.” Uh, OK, but a fundamental precept of our representative democracy is that elected majoritarian branch officials serve fixed, not open-ended, terms.
In this light, the actions of Jackson and Fields represent a disregard for democratic principles, even as they insist they are allegedly trying to promote them.