Another Reason Florida Mattered

I was talking with my friend Rachel the other day, who's considering going into electoral reform activism. I think electoral reform is really, really important, but it's not something I ever want to do myself, so it's a little like playing tag. If I convinced her to do it, I wouldn't have to feel guilty about not doing it. She believes the job of an organizer is to bring together and empower grassroots movements, and a lot of her hesitation about taking up the issue was she felt like there was no grassroots movement to back it and that it was mainly a concern of the elite. She might be right, but I think there's a lot of evidence that the average voter (especially the average minority voter) worries about disenfranchisement.

One of my friends voted in a historically black neighborhood in Atlanta and said the young woman in front of him brought four photo ids to the polls because she was so worried someone would keep her from voting and she wanted to vote for Obama so badly.

In PA, there were frequently reports from minority would-be voters who had been registered but mysteriously never received their voter reg card.

The other day, I was meeting a bunch of friends for breakfast and didn't feel like getting properly dressed so I just threw on my Dean sweatshirt. On the train, the guy sitting next to me asked who I was voting for. When I responded, he said, "well, I'm not going to vote for Obama just because he's black. I'm going to vote for the person who promises me my vote is going to get counted. Why doesn't anyone talk about that anymore? I haven't heard anything about that. Bush stole the election in 2000, you know that? I haven't voted since then. Not going to vote this time, either."

He was from New Orleans and he still didn't have a permanent home. There were a myriad of reasons he could have been angry at the government. The one he picked was the very oldest scandal, the Supreme Court decision that won Bush the presidency, the failure to recount the votes of Florideans.

I made some pretty feeble "not voting isn't a good way to protest the system" arguments but he got to me a lot more than I could get to him. If you're afraid your vote isn't going to count, why vote?