2008 elections: Will history repeat itself?

Remember Florida during the 2000 election? What about Ohio during the 2004 election? Massive fraud and manipulation aimed mainly at African-American voters in those states is widely regarded as having changed the outcome of who would eventually occupy the White House.

Will it be déjà vu all over again in 2008? Plans that would add Michigan to that list during this presidential campaign were uncovered in the online liberal magazine MichiganMessenger.com. A Sept. 10 article by Eartha Jane Melzer reported that the Republican Party plans to use lists of foreclosed homes to challenge African-American voters in Michigan, who are expected to come out in massive numbers to vote for Barack Obama for President on Nov. 4.

According to Melzer, 60 percent of all subprime loans—the ones more prone to default—were made to Michigan African Americans. One in every 176 households in Wayne County, which includes metropolitan Detroit, received a foreclosure notice during July. In Macomb County, the figure during the same month was one household in every 285, meaning that 1,834 homeowners received foreclosure filings. The Macomb County foreclosure rate puts it in the top three percent of all U.S. counties with distressed homeowners. And to top it all off, John McCain’s regional headquarters is located in the same office building as foreclosure specialist David A. Trott, who raised between $100,000 and $250,000 for the Republican nominee.

The Detroit News printed a Sept. 12 article in response to Melzer’s report, quoting a Macomb County Republican Party official who alleged that they were not planning to prevent African Americans facing foreclosure from voting. This rebuttal was printed after an understandable angry outcry following the Sept. 10 article.

The fact that African Americans and other oppressed peoples are concerned about being disenfranchised from this upcoming historic election is totally justified. Not only recent history but past history speaks for itself.

Restricting the “right to vote” is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. that formally began when the Declaration of Independence stated that only white-male property owners could legally vote. Even when slavery was abolished and voting was legal for men of African descent, the right to vote was soon sabotaged by poll taxes, special literacy tests, lynchings and violence when Black people tried to register and join the voting rolls.

The federal Voting Rights Act was only passed a little more than forty years ago in 1965 on the heels of the heroic Civil Rights movement. More recently in Florida in 2000 voter registrations for many African Americans were erased when a contractor hired by the state of Florida removed names that were similar to those on a list of people with felony convictions who were permanently banned from voting in that state at that time.

Again in 2004 in Ohio, massive and varied methods were used to influence the outcome of the election—from providing too few voting machines in urban African-American polling places, which created long waits that discouraged voting, to deleting legal registrations. Many African-American voters testified to such discriminatory tactics at hearings held to investigate the election.

With African-American homeowners disproportionately targeted with subprime, high-rate and adjustable-rate loans; with less accumulated assets resulting from the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and racism; with higher unemployment and underemployment, it is no surprise that African Americans—particularly women—are hit hardest by foreclosures.

Now the Michigan Democratic Party and the Obama campaign have filed suit to block using foreclosure lists to challenge voters in November. A lawsuit is okay, but what is even better is to carry out a nationwide, grassroots, militant campaign to stop all foreclosures and evictions. Campaigns in Michigan, Los Angeles and Boston are now underway to mobilize to win a two-year moratorium on foreclosures and evictions proposed in Michigan’s SB 1306.

The right to housing, the right to political representation as well as the right to health care and a job are basic rights that must be defended and fought for in the streets all over the U.S. with Black, Latin@, other oppressed peoples and workers leading the way.