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Come Election Day, Hurricane Victims, Foreclosure Victims May Be Left Out
By Kevin Canessa Jr.
October 10, 2008
Keywords: election 2008, Election Day, foreclosures, financial crisis, voter disenfranchisement, voter challenges, Jesse Jackson Jr., vote
Imagine the horror of either these scenarios: Your home has been foreclosed. You have to pack up your every belonging. You leave behind a home that was once yours but now belongs to a bank.
Or, perhaps even worse, you lived through Hurricane Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, or any number of other hurricanes that caused significant damage--and when you returned after the storm, you found your home was totally destroyed, gone. Out of despair, you had no other choice but to pick up the pieces and move elsewhere--in some cases, hundreds of miles away in a completely new community.
For thousands of Americans, one of these two scenarios was a harsh reality some time between August 2005 and today. All of these events took place after the last American presidential election.
Fast forward to 2008. It's time to elect a new president. But voting was the last thing you thought of as your home was being foreclosed or as you escaped your storm-ridden area.
That is, of course, until now.
What if you don't still live where you last registered to vote?
If your state's voter change-of-address deadline has passed (click here to find out for certain), it's possible you'll be shut out from voting come Nov. 4. And this has many people up in arms because, according to several accounts, being displaced does not constitute a legal reason to disqualify anyone from voting.
In many places--including Michigan--voters whose homes were foreclosed or who lost their homes because of a storm will be challenged by Election Day officials, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. writes in The Huffington Post.
"Meanwhile, the [Michigan] Republican Party, led by this crew of rich, out-of-touch 'homies,' is preparing to deny the right to vote to Midwesterners who have already suffered from home foreclosures," Jackson writes. "I'm not kidding. Republican Party officials in states like Michigan and Ohio have admitted that they are preparing to challenge voters at the polls, using home foreclosure data--the idea being that if your home has been foreclosed upon, of course you had to move, which means your address has changed and you are vulnerable to being challenged at the polls."
But he also points out that the Obama campaign has already filed motions in several states with the hopes of stopping any challenges to displaced voters.
"Haven't people who have lost their homes--many of them due to sub-prime schemes and scams--suffered enough without the Republican Party piling on and trying to deny them the right to vote? John McCain should be ashamed of his party. Oh wait, that's the old John McCain I was thinking of," Jackson writes.
Solutions?
In Louisiana, where many were affected by hurricanes, voter rolls have not changed as a result of people moving around. Jacques Berry, the press secretary for Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne, says anyone who previously registered to vote in a Louisiana parish (county) can still vote in their old districts, even if they've moved out of the state because of a hurricane or because they were victims to home foreclosures. They can vote one of two ways: by absentee ballot or by early voting (a week or less before the election).
It's too late now, however, for anyone from Louisiana who has been displaced to register to vote for the first time, according to Dardenne. Of course, this doesn't account for the notion that a voting challenger could contest displaced voters who try to cast a ballot in their old districts.
Elsewhere, since election laws differ from state to state, those displaced by a hurricane or a home foreclosure can find comprehensive information from the web site Vote411.org. Once you're there, you can click on your state to find your state's election procedures. If you believe you may have trouble voting, call the appropriate contact as listed on the Vote411.org.
Click here to visit 411.org.
Click here for Google's election 2008 information.
Click here for DiversityInc's 2008 election coverage.
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