Election Reform: The Fierce Urgency of Now

By Jean Kaczmarek, co-chair Illinois Ballot Integrity Project DuPage Chapter
August 20, 2006

http://tinyurl.com/hkvon

The author delivered the following speech on August 19, 2006 at the Take Back the Vote Rally held in Warrenville lllinois by the Illinois Ballot Interity Project.

Eighty-six years ago yesterday, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified giving women the right to vote after a 72-year battle.

Forty-three years later on a hot August day, Martin Luther King delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech “to remind Americans of the fierce urgency of now.”

Here we are, 43 years later on another August day, faced with the unfinished work of civil rights in our electoral process, to also “dramatize an appalling condition.”

The heart of election reform is a matter of civil rights. When our votes are not counted, all of us are strapped in a chair and force fed with iron clamps and tubes, all of us are plastered with fire hoses with a force which strips bark off trees, all of us are sitting at the back of the bus.

Until this decade, I had been blessed to have never felt the pang of suppression. I was born in a time, place and circumstances where discrimination and withering injustice were fenced off and never about me. Many of us here today share similar roots.

We all feel the pangs of suppression now. Over and over, on local, state and federal levels, the voices of the people are not being heard on election day. Our family’s very lives are being sucked into the black abyss of unaccountability, malfunction, corruption and fraud. At times, the rage is so overwhelming, it nearly drops us to our knees and takes our breath away.

As an election reformist, I am simultaneously inspired and haunted by those who shed blood for the fundamental right to vote. I am inspired when history proves the possibility of real progress. I am haunted by the spirits of patriots whose life’s work vaporizes with prohibited code, back doors, swapped memory cards or a flip of a switch.

Would Iron-Jawed Angels Alice Paul or Lucy Burns, after enduring horrific abuse in the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia for picketing a wartime president for the right to vote, quietly accept the accuracy of an election based on assurances in a news release on corporate letterhead? What would James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner -- the three young men shot dead on a rural Mississippi road for daring to assist people to exercise their right to vote -- say about mandatory voter ID cards, voter registration database fraud, or caging lists of soldiers fighting for democracy in the Iraq War only to be disenfranchised on election day?

Most of all, I am haunted by the simple question: Do I have that kind of courage?

King preached that our destiny and freedom were inextricably bound with one another. This room is filled with a melting pot of passions…the environment, education, security, health care, the economy, jobs, privacy, assistance to the least among us, peace -- each bound with one another and each with high stakes on election day. To move forward with all our goals, we must first come together and accomplish…one goal.

We urge you to join our cause and push this boulder out of the way. Alice Walker said, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” We the people are the owners of our electoral process. We the people can restore democracy. We the people have the power.

A man pontificating “Free at Last, Free at Last” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 43 years ago wasn’t a story. He wasn’t a threat. The threat was that over a quarter of a million people bothered to show up that day -- the largest demonstration held at our nation‘s capital at the time.

As I stand before you, two absolutes fortify me – that my conviction for an open, fair, accurate and secure electoral process follows a moral, honorable and patriotic path to truth and light – and, that all of you bothered to show up today.

“One equal temper of heroic hearts,” the poet sings – “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”