An election, southern-style
It’s always amusing to me to hear the US crying foul about rigged elections in other nations (Ukraine comes to mind) when we do it so well, and these days so blatantly, right here at home. Unfortunately, this is still particularly true in the south.
The numbers for the April 22nd New Orleans municipal primary, which have been recently released, are not pretty. And from the answers that I got from the Secretary of State’s office yesterday, it seems like the runoff tomorrow will be the same. In the primary, only 31% of registered black voters actually cast a ballot, compared to 45% in the 2002 election (statistics courtesy of the LA secretary of state’s office). The joke here is that the Secretary of State seems to think there is nothing wrong with this election, though the blame must really go more on the feds.
Following is a conversation that I had with Damon Hewitt of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund yesterday about these issues for a radio show that we are about to launch locally.