Democracy, Voting & Criminal Injustice: Announcing A Trilogy of Articles

Most US citizens have never been refused or purposely deterred from exercising their rights to vote. We all acknowledge that it's obviously wrong and even unAmerican....but wholly unimaginable as a widespread problem.

Most citizens believe that vote suppression must be rare, isolated incidents.....hardly worth all the fuss. Nothing more than the usual overdramatic fretting of a few liberal nit-pickers and whiners.

But that's not the case in 21st century United States. Millions of US citizens were wrongly and deliberately denied their sacred right to vote in recent years, and millions more were thwarted in having their vote accurately counted. Millions.

I served as an election official in the November 2004 elections, both to offer assistance as part of my civic duty, but also to understand the voting process in America. We worked from 6 AM to 10:30 PM on Election Day, with negligible breaks amid record-breaking voter turnout to ensure that every person who desired to vote could do so. Political affiliation meant zero to our teams of workers. It was all about honoring each citizen's sacred right to express their opinion in this democracy.

It shocks me that corrupt officials would seek to criminally block or alter another person's precious vote. And I want it to shock you, too. The ability to vote, and have that vote accurately counted, is both linchpin and litmus test of democracy. Without it, there is no democracy.

I'm writing a trilogy of articles to educate about voting rights and about the reform needed to correct radically-serious voting injustices....before free and fair elections are merely distant memories in our country.

My first article in the series is Democracy & Voting: Ohio 2004 as Lesson in What Can Go Wrong. As an example of US democracy willfully derailed, this article highlights, for your quick reading, Congressional findings of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio for two main areas of voting: access to voting, and accurate recording and counting of votes.

To complete the trilogy, the next two articles will be about: 1. The Voting Rights Act, which was one of Martin Luther King.Jr.'s passionate goals. Some in Congress don't want to renew several Voting Rights Act provisions that expire in 2007; and 2. Current proposals for electoral reform and legislation.

Yes, it's true that most of us have never been refused or purposely deterred from exercising our right to vote. We should all care that this wrong has occurred to others, though, because it can happen also to us.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said,"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."