The Black Informant

I tend to stay away from political stories on the weekend, but this particular issue has been on the coals for a good while now.

First the news…

“The Justice Department approved plans yesterday for the first New Orleans election since Hurricane Katrina, despite objections from civil rights groups who said the voting arrangements do not adequately accommodate the city’s displaced black voters.

The storm has tilted the racial balance of city residents in favor of whites, many believe, and controversy has surrounded the question of what kind of accommodations should be made to allow the tens of thousands of black evacuees to vote from outside the state.

The state plan for the election calls for sending mass mailings to evacuees, easing restrictions on absentee ballots, and setting up satellite polling stations around Louisiana. But it stops short of arranging for balloting in other states such as Texas, Mississippi and Georgia, where many evacuees are dispersed.

Several civil rights groups, including the NAACP, urged the Justice Department to call for out-of-state polling places.” (more…)

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What I am not getting here is why has this particular issue been made into a voting rights violation by activists? If a person is a citizen of New Orleans, they have the option to vote via an absentee ballot. The process is simple and there are no lines. Just fill in the form and send it in. That’s it!

The one thing that has made me mad about this situation is that this is just another example of how the game of politics (in this case, Liberals) is hell-bent on portraying black folks as helpless and ignorant. The same activists who are pushing for more polling stations are the very same ones that want to convince America and the rest of the world that Jim Crow and the American polling station are synoumous entities–it is a lose/lose situtation if you take the time to listen to their rhetoric.

Remember this scary claim?

Black Voters ‘Afraid’ of Electronic Voting Machines, Activist Says

By Marc Morano

CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer

September 30, 2004

An African-American civil rights spokeswoman said on Wednesday that the new computerized voting machines “terrify” her, and that blacks are “afraid of machines like that.”

Joanne Bland, the director and co-founder of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Ala., told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the new computerized voting machines are going to intimidate black voters in Florida and elsewhere and suppress their vote in the November presidential election because many blacks are not “technologically savvy.”

“The computers really terrify me. The electronic voting — the new machines — I think it will turn off a segment in my community, particularly the elderly. We are not as technically savvy, and we are afraid of machines like that, and they (African-Americans) probably won’t go [to the polls] and they probably won’t ask for assistance, said Bland, who spent the last week in Florida.

“It is going to turn them off totally and I want that to stop,” said Bland, who also serves as a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Public Accuracy, which predicts that “several million voters” may be “deprived of voting rights again” in 2004. (more…)

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

I for one am tired of these portrayals that blacks are a bunch of poor, scared, helpless, ignorant bunch of people. The sad thing is in many cases we condone such portrayals.

What these activists want is drama…and lots of it. They want a scenerio where a black person gets “dissed” by some white person at a polling station in order to create national outrage. Press conferences will be staged to remind Americans that the spirit of Jim Crow still lurks behind every corner. They refuse to simplify the process by letting voters avoid the long lines while still FULLY taking part in the democratic process. Long lines at the polling station (which you will find in any district) are like red meat to mainstream media and civil rights activists because they know they are bound to find at least one black person who is tired of waiting. Unfortunately this ploy usually works because folks tend to make judgement based on what they see on the news versus doing their own full investigation which oftentimes is just as simple as making a phone call.