Discovering Columbus
At the Polls and in the Penitentiary in Ohio
by Janet Thomas
posted 11/11/04
My friend, Agi Vadas and I went to Columbus, Ohio as part of the 2004
Election Protection Project, a consortium of civil rights organizations
committed to protecting voter's rights nationwide. It was founded by the
NAACP and People For the American Way after the 2000 voting fiasco in
Florida. Their focus is on serving minority populations subjected to a
history of voting irregularities and voter disenfranchisement.
We initially
decided to participate in Columbus because after our election activities,
Agi planned to visit Rich Nields, a death row inmate with whom she has been
corresponding for nearly six years. He's in the Mansfield Correctional
Institute, an hour's drive from Columbus. I wanted to do Election Protection
because I'm not a U.S. citizen and for the first time in my 45 years of
living in this country, I was feeling the pain of not voting.
We arrived in Columbus on Saturday night, fully prepared to get to work on
Sunday. Election Protection had planned an area-wide weekend canvassing to
get out information about voter's rights. When we arrived at the field
office Sunday morning, we met a dejected Annie Womack, the Columbus Election
Protection coordinator. She announced that there would be no canvassing
because of a complex array of legal challenges to Election Protection
activities by the Ohio Republican Party. So on Sunday all the volunteers
were immobilized.
That evening we returned to the field office to observe the legal briefing.
It was for nine leaders of the legal team and was led by Steve Raikin, a
Wash, D.C. attorney. On Tuesday there would be 60 attorneys and 60 law
students on call at the legal command center, all ready to respond to
precincts with problems.
"What's happening is right out of Jim Crow when the
KKK was at it's peak," said Raikin. "Our role as lawyers and law students is
to cut down on voter confusion and serve voters on a non-partisan basis."
For three hours he addressed "the patterns and practices of invidious and
insidious voter intimidation," and what could be done to prevent it. When we
left the meeting, the courts had moved to support the Democrats request to
keep challengers away from the polls and to allow provisional ballots. Still
no word on the wording of the voter's bill of rights flyer.
Monday evening was spent in Election Protection training with about 300
other volunteers who had traveled from all over the country to participate.
In the hall next door, more than a hundred lawyers and law students
underwent their own training. We would be working in teams at 19 of the
minority precinct polling places in Columbus. Our roles were to be strictly
non-partisan; we were to be a resource should voters need support or help in
the voting process. Our job was to make sure that voters weren't harassed,
that they understood their rights and had a resource right there at the
polls should there be any irregularity.When we left the training there was
still no settlement of the wording for the Ohio Voter's Bill of Rights.
On Tuesday morning at seven we were at our polling place at Douglas
Elementary School. We wore our black and white Election Protection t-shirts
and had a box with a cell phone programmed for calls to the legal center, a
camera for documenting incidents, a batch of complaint forms and affidavits,
and, finally, a huge stack of voter's rights flyers. There were more than a
hundred people in line to vote and already two of the three Diebold
touch-screen voting machines were dysfunctional. Complaints were recorded as
voters who had showed up at six to vote early had to leave without voting in
order to get to work on time. We called the legal command center. By eight
no attorney had arrived and I went back to the field office to get more
complaint forms and to voice our legal concerns in person.
Shortly after returning to the school, an attorney arrived. "It's the same
everywhere," he said. "Long lines, malfunctioning machines, frustrated
voters." It wasn't yet nine o'clock in the morning. It started to rain.
Hard. Although we were told to keep our non-partisan distance from political
party representatives, MoveOn.org had a canopy so we based ourselves under
it and went out to approach individuals as they arrived to vote. We greeted
voters, gave them flyers and told them if they had any trouble with the
voting process to let us know. At one point during the day, voters were
waiting in line for three hours.
By noon, attorneys had filed suit against the Franklin County Board of
Elections for mismanagement resulting in voter intimidation. It was a long
wet day at the polls. "Ohio as the new Florida," was one headline. There was
such extensive mismanagement of absentee ballots that in the middle of the
day, Election Protection attorneys obtained a court order giving all Ohio
voters who had not received an absentee ballot on time the right to cast
provisional ballots at polling places. Judge David Katz urged media outlets
to encourage voters who had been denied ballots earlier in the day because
of their prior absentee requests, to return to the polls to cast provisional
ballots.
The voters persevered through it all, turning out in record numbers to stand
for hours to cast their votes. The determination on the parts of so many to
cast their vote no matter what the conditions, was an inspiring display of
democracy. The democratic infrastructure, however, was missing in action.
On Wednesday, Michael Manley, Amnesty International's death-penalty
abolition coordinator in Ohio, drove Agi and me to the Mansfield
Correctional Institute where Agi visited Rich Nields in prison. Afterwards,
we drove to a meeting with his attorney, David Hanson, in the Columbus
public defender's office. He, too, was shell-shocked by the results of the
presidential election and had his own election day story to tell about
casting his vote. His precinct was divided into two districts; both were
voting at the same location, but in two different lines. Hanson, who is
white, waited with the residents of his mostly minority neighborhood, three
hours to vote. At some point he realized that residents from the other part
of his neighborhood were getting in and out of the polls much more quickly.
They were also mostly white and mostly wealthy. When he got to the Diebold
polling machine, he noted that his part of the neighborhood, which was more
heavily populated, had only three machines; while the other part had five.
Hanson then gave us some idea about where Nields was in the death-row legal
process. He said that Rich did not belong on death row; that his case had
been mishandled and should have been manslaughter charges; that Hamilton
County where he was tried had the worst record in the state for imposing the
death penalty; that Rich's attorney had been incompetent; the prosecuting
attorney and the judge were both avid death-penalty proponents. He held out
little hope that Nields execution could be prevented.
When we left Hanson's office at about 5 p.m., there was an anti-Bush
demonstration developing on a street corner in front of the Federal
Building in downtown Columbus. We parked the car and joined in. Both Michael
and Agi addressed the crowd, which had grown quickly. When the demonstrators
started off on their march, we left and went off to a dinner Michael had
arranged with other Amnesty folks in Columbus.
At dinner, Agi, a Hungarian-American who escaped Nazism and Communism and
was stateless for 17 years, expressed her fury that Kerry had conceded
without waiting for the Ohio vote to finish being counted. Her sentiments
were similarly reflected around the dinner table. My own mind was filled
with images of voters coming out in a pouring rain to wait for hours to
vote, only to have their candidate-we were in overwhelming Kerry
country-concede before their votes were fully counted. Then there were the
array of legal issues that I knew had surfaced through out the day. Where
were they now? What was the point?
Thursday was the long trip home. Three plane rides brought us back to San
Juan Island, off the coast of Washington State. I was reminded of Agi's
comment from five days earlier as we'd waited to board our early morning
plane to Seattle. "We're on flight 1492 from Houston to Columbus," she said.
"It was when Columbus discovered America. Maybe we'll discover something
about America, too-in Columbus."
One thing is all too clear: No matter how strong is the grass-roots movement
for change in the US, it's meaningless if the basic right to vote, and then
have the vote count, is a mockery of the democratic process. It appears that
the poor and the disenfranchised are systematically disenfranchised as
voters, and also made all-too-ready candidates for the death penalty. Not
having enough money to afford to spend a day in line at the polls, or fees
for a decent attorney, are all too painfully connected in this county. Until
there are fundamental human rights for all, there will be no fundamental
freedoms for anyone.
At this writing, the Ohio 2004 vote is under close scrutiny. Within the next
few days I'll be sending off my papers to become an American citizen.
Janet Thomas is the author of "The Battle in Seattle-The Story Behind and
Beyond the WTO Demonstrations." (Fulcrum 2000)
Note: Election Protection had more than 25,000 volunteers, including 8,000
lawyers, serving in 43 legal command centers, 56 field offices, and on the
ground in more than 3,500 precincts in 17 states. For state-by-state
coverage of how things went in terms of voter's rights, go to: electionprotection.org
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