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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1988, Ronnie Dugger looks at the risks of computerized voting
The New Yorker's complete coverage of the 2004 Presidential race
On March 7, 1965, John Lewis, the twenty-five-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led about six hundred marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. When they reached the crest of the bridge, the protesters were set upon by helmeted Alabama state troopers and local sheriff's posses, who were swinging clubs and firing tear gas. One of the first troopers on the bridge slammed his nightstick into the left side of Lewis's head, fracturing his skull. "I remember how strangely calm I felt as I thought, 'This is it,' " Lewis wrote years later in his autobiography. " 'People are going to die here. I'm going to die here.' " As it turned out, more than fifty marchers were treated for injuries, but no one died.
The attack on the unarmed protesters shocked the country, and President Johnson used the events of what became known as Bloody Sunday to advance an essential part of his civil-rights program. On March 15th, Johnson addressed a Joint Session of Congress to demand that legislators pass, at long last, the Voting Rights Act. Adopting the great anthem of the civil-rights movement, the President concluded his speech with the words ". . . and we shall overcome." Five months later, on August 6th, Johnson signed the bill into law, and invited Lewis to the Oval Office to celebrate the occasion. Toward the end of their meeting, as Lewis recalled, Johnson told him, "Now, John, you've got to go back and get all those folks registered. You've got to go back and get those boys by the balls. Just like a bull gets on top of a cow. You've got to get 'em by the balls and you've got to squeeze, squeeze 'em till they hurt."
Thirty-seven years later, in 2002, Lewis was called on by a federal court to answer a charge that he had violated the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against African-Americans. Lewis was an eight-term member of Congress by then, and a pillar of the Georgia Democratic Party. In the nearly four decades since the act's passage, it had revolutionized the franchise in the South. The literacy tests that were still in effect throughout the region were immediately suspended. Federal registrars replaced local officials who refused to register blacks. And the Attorney General was authorized to eliminate poll taxes wherever they remained. Amended and expanded in 1970, 1975, and 1982, the act also prohibited the kind of racial gerrymandering that allowed white state legislators to draw district lines that prevented African-Americans from winning elective office. It was this provision which Lewis was charged with violating.
During most of that time, the Justice Department's Voting Section, which consists of three dozen or so lawyers who are responsible for enforcing the Voting Rights Act, had insisted that states in the South draw some legislative districts with heavy minority populations, so that African-Americans could be assured of representation. But in the redistricting that followed the 2000 census Lewis and the Democrats, who then controlled Georgia's General Assembly, decided that this process had become counterproductive to black interests and they spread the largely Democratic African-American vote around to more districts. "My congressional district was probably sixty or sixty-five per cent black," Lewis told me recently. "Now it's barely fifty-two per cent. That's fine. I can win, and I'm running unopposed this year." As Lewis testified in the voting-rights trial, Georgia is "not the same state that it was . . . in 1965 or in 1975 or even in 1980 or 1990. We've changed. We have come a great distance. It's not just in Georgia but in the American South. I think people are preparing to lay down the burden of race."
The Justice Department argued that the Georgia plan violated the rights of African-Americans in several of the redrawn districts, a contention that outraged Lewis. "For them to suggest that someone who almost lost his life to get the Voting Rights Act passed...
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