This is my first attempt to turn an open thread comment of mine into a diary of my own.
Rachel Maddow's show was new last night on MSNBC. She had an excellent commentary "Talk Me Down" segment arguing that voters have a new poll tax.
In a nutshell, her argument is that a four, six, eight hour wait in line amounts to a modern day poll tax. How much do you earn in an eight hour day? Do you have an employer that is totally okay with letting you have a day off to wait in a voting line?
As always with Rachel, very, very good points.
RACHEL: In January 1964 the 24th Amendment to the Constitution abolished the poll tax. A poll tax was a fee that you had to pay at the time of voting. If you didn't have the money to pay the poll tax, you couldn't vote. In other words, the only people who had an effective right to vote were people rich enough to pay the poll tax. Anybody too poor to pay it had no real right to vote, that's why southern states had the poll tax, it was a handy way to keep poor African Americans from voting, even if they had a technically constitutional right to do so.
Well, it's 44 years down the road now since the poll tax was constitutionally abolished, and what do you know, we've got sort of another poll tax. It looks like this:
VIDEO: Reporter: "Lines at some early voting sites extend three hours, and the wait only got longer (man in video holding sign, "four hour wait.")
New Reporter: "In Atlanta voters were queued up long before the doors opened, eventually more than 900 people. Voters in Quenette (sp) County, Georgia waited more than eight to ten hours. Voters say the two to five hour waits are tolerable because of what's feared come Tuesday. Voter in line: "Election day voting might be a little bit worse."
RACHEL: Let's hope not. This is a poll tax. If you have early voted already, how much did it cost you to vote? An hour? Two, three, four, five, six hours?
I got online at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel website today to check out the wait times for early voting there. They did not list a single voting site in all of Broward County, Florida with less than a two and a half hour estimated wait time. If your voting site was the African American Research Library in Fort Lauderdale? That will be six hours, please, sir. At Miramar City Hall in Miramar, Florida, that will be five hours please, ma'am. At the Pompano Beach Library? Five hours.
Please. This is a poll tax. How much do you get paid for an hour of work? Do you have the kind of job that will be delighted to give you an hour, a half day, a whole day off work because you were waiting in line at your precinct? Even if it won't cost you your job, can you afford to not work those hours? Are you elderly or disabled? Do you not have the physical stamina for that kind of exertion? This is a poll tax.
Now, it is patriotically inspiring to see Americans who are willing and able to stand in a six hour long line to vote. It's inspiring. It makes me teary, frankly, but who is not in those lines because they can't afford to be? How many people didn't early vote in Georgia in Florida, in North Carolina in Ohio because the lines were too long and they couldn't afford the multiple hour wait and so they decided to wait and see if hopefully the lines will be less long on Tuesday, on election day itself? Well, what if the lines are long on election day, too?
After the 2004 election, Democrats commissioned a poll in Ohio that found that as many as 129,000 voters got tired of waiting in the long lines in Cleveland and Columbus and elsewhere in Ohio. 129,000 Ohio residents who wanted to vote but they couldn't afford to. They couldn't afford multiple hours to wait in line. That's 10,000 more votes than the margin by which Kerry lost that state, and lost the election, giving Bush another four years.
It's one thing to worry about the vote being stolen, about whether or not our votes really get counted right. It's one thing to worry about partisan Republican efforts to purge voters off the rolls who rightfully belong there. Those things are worth worrying about, but the lines at voting places? There's no wondering about that.
If you are confronted with a long line on election day, your country needs you to commit to stand in it. If you are an employer and your employees are late to work on Tuesday or have to leave early in order to vote, your country needs you to cut them some slack. If you're an elections official, your country needs you to have contingency plans for your contingency plans, and frankly, probably a stock pile of paper ballots under lock and key to turn to if the lines are so long as to be disenfranchising.
And if you are a politician, your country needs you to abolish this poll tax, to make the right to vote equally available to every American, regardless of our ability to pay, whether that payment in is in cash or in time.
No matter who gets elected, it is time to fix this election season -- this election system once and for all. Too many people bled for this right for us to see it squandered.