This will be my final President's Message. On January 21st, the VADC will elect a new President.

Ernie Zavodnyik, former Vice Mayor of Venice, has been nominated by our Nominating Committee. Whoever may be elected, I wish them a productive term as President. I hope they will derive as much satisfaction and inspiration as I have from the association with a wonderful and committed group of Democrats, both those on the Board and members generally. At any rate, the coming year is guaranteed to be an exciting one. I am optimistic that it will also be a good year for Democrats. I think Floridians, and Americans generally, will come to see that the Republicans have been sacrificing the welfare of the citizens in order to pursue narrow political agendas, and will act on that perception in November.

By the time you read this, the January 10 Awake Sarasota rally to “Send a Message to Main Street” will be history, but the two themes of that rally, voter suppression and redistricting, will still be very much with us.

While a large majority of Florida voters approved a constitutional requirement for fair election districts, it is apparent that the Republican controlled Florida Legislature is doing all it can to circumvent this requirement. They are still trying to draw gerrymandered maps to preserve some of the incumbents and they are dragging out the process, probably in order to allow as little time as possible for challenge prior to the important 2012 elections.

As we know, in 2010 the Florida legislature, secure in their full control of all three branches of government, went on a spree, passing right wing legislation in a number of areas, including especially the area of elections. Key elements of these election laws were:

Early Voting: Cut back from 14 days to 8 days, but no longer including the Sunday prior to election day.

Voter Registration: New rules making it very difficult for groups such as political parties, political clubs, League of Women Voters, etc. to conduct registration drives. Onerous procedures required before such groups can begin registering voters, steep fines if registrations are not turned in within 48 hours, etc.

Address Change at Polls: Must vote a provisional ballot if a change to a different county.

Citizen Initiative Petitions: Must be completed within two years instead of four.

County Supervisors of Elections: Required to follow directives of the Secretary of State.

All of these requirements, as well as the existing voter ID requirements (picture and signature) appear to be aimed squarely at suppressing the Democratic vote.

·        The groups most likely to lack required ID tend to vote Democratic, and some of these groups, college students in particular, are more likely to have moved from their county of prior registration.

·        The Sunday prior to election day has historically seen very heavy early voting by African Americans after church. It is painfully obvious that this must have been the sole reason for excluding that day.

·         In recent years, voter registration drives by various groups have been extremely successful in registering more Democrats than Republicans.

Florida is by no means the only state to have embarked on this kind of voter suppression. Perhaps a dozen other states (all Republican controlled) have passed similar legislation and others are trying or planning to do the same. This appears to stem from a coordinated strategy aimed at securing wide dominance of the Republican Party, and is likely initiated and guided to a great extent by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

 According to Olivia Ward in the Toronto Star, ALEC is an organization that puts state lawmakers together with representatives from some of the country’s most powerful corporations to advance their legislative agendas.  “It’s the most influential organization the majority of Americans have never heard of”. Some 2,000 state legislators belong to the organization, the vast majority of them Republican. By its own record, it has created an arsenal of about 800 “model” bills, templates or blueprints for future laws. They are tabled about 1,000 times a year across the country; about one in five are passed.

 In the words of its manifesto, “ALEC provides its public- and private-sector members with a unique opportunity to work together to develop policies and programs that effectively promote the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty.”

Republicans argue that these changes were necessary to combat voter fraud, and no doubt, it is convenient for many of them to believe that as an article of faith. The facts are that there is no evidence of any significant amount of fraud in the current election process. These legislative changes have been compared to “amputating a leg to solve a hangnail problem”.

There are some rays of hope. The Justice Department is looking at some of these laws, including Florida’s, to see if they contravene the Voting Rights Act with regard to rights of minorities. The Justice Department has already blocked the voter ID provisions of the South Carolina law. In Ohio, enough signatures were collected to suspend that state’s voter suppression law until voters can endorse or repeal it in the 2012 election. In Florida, legal challenges to the voter suppression provisions have been filed by several groups, including League of Women Voters and the ACLU. State Rep. Mark Pafford, D-West Palm Beach, has introduced a bill that would reverse a number of these restrictions. While these efforts in Florida may or may not succeed, they will be effective in focusing attention of voters on the restrictive and partisan nature of the statutes.

Henry Bright