Who gets to vote

     Georgia, Georgia 
The whole day through  
     Just an old sweet song 
Keeps Georgia on my mind.

     Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell, 1930

My own COVID shot malaise lasted one day. It happens to some people.  A risk of the sore arm and a day of fatigue is not a good reason to delay getting the vaccine. 

Since I felt sort of punky yesterday, I asked my friend Jack Mullen to give me a COVID-Skip-Day by writing a Guest Post, maybe something about Georgia and the controversy over the vote. Republicans say they are trying to stop fraud, Democrats call it the new Jim Crow. In little ways, the Georgia law makes voting harder for Democrats, particularly ones who would vote by mail or who would vote in large cities, which is where the Democrats are. Meanwhile, they make it a bit easier to vote in small towns. And they give the Republican legislature the power to override everyone.

Georgia tinkering leads in a single direction, toward making voting harder for Democrats, whose Get-Out-The-Vote efforts have led to higher use of absentee vote by mail. (It is a non-partisan technique. In Florida, that was the GOP method for getting out the vote.). Georgia is shortening the period when one can request an absentee ballot; is increasing the ID requirement for those ballots; is requiring people to state their justification for voting by mail. The new law reduces dramatically the number of drop boxes for ballots in large counties to one for every 100,000 people, but specifies that every county, including small rural ones, should have at least one. The available drop boxes are to be moved to buildings that have limited hours, making them less available. The new law says the drop boxes are closed four days before the election. Say, what? It means that people who got an absentee ballot, and who waited until near election day to drop it off, cannot, and mailing them on the weekend before the election risks them not arriving in time. Voters are stuck. Experience in vote by mail in Oregon is that a great many people wait until near election day, and then drop off their ballot. They are still digesting campaign news, and people procrastinate. There is a predictable last minute rush--now blocked off.

Jack Mullen is two years ahead of me in school. He attended Medford High and the University of Oregon; he served in the Peace Corps; he worked with me for U.S. Rep. Jim Weaver. Jack drove taxis for a while in San Francisco. Jack stays current and informed on events. He drove a man and his wife from a downtown hotel to the San Francisco airport, and mid-ride said to the passenger: "Aren't you Byron White, the Supreme Court Justice? I am sure I recognize you." It was. I don't know many people who would have recognized Byron "Whizzer" White by sight from a rear view mirror in a car. Jack could.

Jack gave me this memory of the struggle to be able to vote. Like all of the first wave of Boomers, he lived it, as did I. We were citizens for the purpose of being sent to Vietnam, but not citizens for the purpose of voting.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

     “They should participate in the political process that produces this fateful summons to serve in the military.”

President Eisenhower on the 18-20-year-old vote in 1954 State of the Union-

Mullen

If you thought that the immediate 1870 blowback from the adoption of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in the form of poll taxes and literacy tests was severe, get a load of what the Georgia Legislature, along with over 40 state legislatures, are up to these days. I think it is open to discussion, even with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that the current impediment of Americans to vote is as severe in 2021 as it was in 1871.

There are too many provisions to the recently passed Georgia law to limit the African American vote for me to list. The most egregious is the Governor of Georgia has the discretion to nullify any county election result he or she wants, in effect, to render the Georgia State Secretary of State’s power to oversee election results obsolete.

I am not an African American, I do not live in Georgia, I live in Washington D.C. Nevertheless, I too feel my basic right as a tax-paying American citizen is thwarted, even more so when I think of my-soon to be 18-year-old neighbor.

Back in my college days when the Vietnam War was raging, at 18 years of age I registered for the draft at our local Medford Draft Board on the second floor of the Post Office Building in Medford'. Peter tells me he went to the Post Office in Cambridge to do the same thing when it was his turn. They sent the notice to Medford. Every community was in charge of keeping track of their their own local young men eligible to be drafted into the military.

Many of my Class of 1965 at Medford High were indeed drafted and not one had the right, as President Eisenhower advocated, to participate in the political process. Five of my classmates of the Class of ’65 fought and died in Vietnam for an America in which they could not vote. You better believe many 18 to 20-year-old draft eligible males and their friends and parents fought hard to lower the voting age to 18. Finally, in 1971 the 26th Amendment passed and was signed by President Nixon to lower the voting age 18. When the news hit me as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the highlands of Guatemala, I was pleased, as were many others who worked hard to lower the age.

As a D.C. resident, as I look at my 17 years-old-neighbor mowing his lawn, I realize that he, like Peter and me, when we were 18, will not be able participate in the political process. If a war were started, he could be drafted and sent by those older than he to fight the war. To remind readers of Peter's blog, DC residents, and there are over 700,000 of us, lack representation in the House and Senate. It is taxation without representation. It is being drafted without representation.

There are many reasons that tax-paying residents of Washington D.C. deserve statehood and a voice in the Senate and House of Representatives. I find no reason more important, as I did when I was 18, than the right to be heard on matters of war and peace

If the right to vote is sacrosanct in the United States, why can’t participation be encouraged, not limited? Is this too much to ask?

The Senate voted 94-0 in favor of the 18- year-old vote on March 10, 1971. On March 23 the House of Representatives voted 401-19 in favor. President Nixon signed the 26th Amendment into law on July 5, 1971. I’m left wondering if those 19 votes in the House were a harbinger of a voter limitation movement that we now see in over 40 states.