Election Day security at the polls

Nelson Graves
Published: October 29, 2008

On Oct. 24, The News Virginian ran an editorial cartoon entitled “Curiosity Killed the Cat.” It coincided with feelings I’m having also. While the cartoon’s point was to question Barack Obama’s associations and associates, it so happens that I have questions about what and why his candidacy has caused to occur – increased security at the polls.

I hate to believe that election boards and registrars across America are fearful of Obama’s supporters, particularly African Americans. But what else can the promises of increased security mean?

Obama’s primary campaign that drew thousands to hear him and his subsequent nomination appears to have created a fear that there will be problems at the polls. As millions of new registrants and potential voters joined the rolls, election boards everywhere began preparing for Nov. 4.

I don’t know who originated the saying, “There’s never a cause without an effect,” but that best describes the high anxiety surrounding this year’s presidential election. I’ve been a voter for 45 years but have never witnessed the “safeguards” that are in place this year.

Reports appear daily in newspapers and on the evening television newscasts that more precinct workers have been recruited and trained. Voting machines, power lines and lists of eligible voters have been tested, checked and culled respectively. These precautions were taken because nobody wants the back-and-forth challenges that occurred in 2000.

Anticipation of long hours in voting lines may lead to instances of short tempers and frustrations but I don’t look for major problems. As much as his supporters – black, white and all other colors – want Obama elected, there’s no way any of them will disrupt the process.

If Obama is defeated and his defeat is not marred by accusations of being “stolen,” the American democratic process, works. Consider that for decades it didn’t.

For years – especially since the start of Jim Crow – blacks wanted to vote and have a voice in electing their representatives but faced all sorts of obstacles: from threats to life and limb, to testing and poll taxes, to law enforcement intimidation at polling places, to threats of being fired by employers.

Organizations such as the NAACP organized in 1909 to advocate for the right of blacks to vote. Fifty-plus years later, individuals such as Medgar Evers were still advocating for the right of blacks to vote (in Mississippi). The right to vote, which was already guaranteed by the Constitution, was reaffirmed, enforced and protected by the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Blacks began going to polls en masse. We voted when there was only a choice of the lesser of two evils and no security. This year, with Obama emerging as America’s first African American with a legitimate chance of being president, of course blacks will go to the polls as never before.

But most amazing now, considering all that blacks overcame to vote, is to make whites feel comfortable by knowing there will be security at the polls.

Nelson Graves, Western Virginia director of the Virginia Minority Supplier Development Council, writes writes a weekly column for The News Virginian. E-mail him at .