Whitewashing the New Orleans vote?

April 15, 2006 | Kemberly Samuels, a former resident of the hurricane-ravaged 9th Ward now living in Houston, took a three-hour bus trip last Monday to cast her ballot during early voting for the New Orleans mayoral election. "I didn't trust the absentee process because I didn't want a repeat of what happened to the people in Florida," Samuels told Salon in a phone interview. The 52-year-old African-American teacher was part of an ongoing effort by civil rights groups to bus into Louisiana any voters who were scattered by Katrina to neighboring states. "I felt that it was my right as a citizen to vote in person, and that it would send a message that we want to have a say in who will run our city."

Samuels, who said she hasn't missed an election in the 34 years since she began voting, has spent the seven months since Katrina volunteering with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, an advocacy group for low-income families, to educate displaced New Orleans residents about the upcoming elections. She fears that tens of thousands of potential voters may be effectively shut out of the April 22 primaries and the May 20 general election.

Louisiana officials have offered two alternatives to accommodate displaced residents: absentee ballots, and 10 "satellite" polling stations set up around the state to which voters can travel. Despite a recent outcry, a federal judge in Louisiana determined that officials were not required to provide polling stations outside the state.

Sharing Samuels' concern are civil rights advocates, legal experts and researchers who have tracked Katrina's toll. They warn that not nearly enough has been done to protect against the disenfranchisement of New Orleans residents -- a majority of them African-American and from poorer neighborhoods ravaged by Katrina. Beyond the reliance on absentee ballots and in-state satellite polling stations, critics say the integrity of the election is threatened by serious problems within the city itself, where some polling stations are dilapidated and possibly hazardous, and others are inaccessible to the disabled -- a violation of federal law.

In late March, New Orleans lawyer and civil rights advocate Tracie Washington sent eight visiting UCLA Law School students to photograph the 76 polling places sanctioned by state officials for the election. They discovered at least seven locations to be inaccessible to the disabled. One polling location on Eastover Drive in New Orleans East, a predominantly black neighborhood that was devastated by Katrina, is just the bare skeleton of a building, with exposed wiring and no walls. Photographs of the polling places, reviewed by Salon, show several buildings with no apparent way to accommodate the disabled, including one with a zigzagging set of 15 stairs. According to Washington, a majority of the 76 sites do not meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, due to uneven sidewalks, a lack of wheelchair ramps, and inadequate parking.

"It's obscene," said Washington. "Many of [the locations] are completely inaccessible to visually and mobility-impaired individuals. We will have a significant portion of our voting populace that will not be able to access the ballots because they will not be able to get out of their wheelchair to get up some stairs."

Washington also noted a sharp drop in the overall number of polling places in New Orleans. For the last mayoral election in May 2002, there were 252 polling places citywide, according to the Web site of the Louisiana secretary of state.

Louisiana officials have suggested that the election can proceed just fine, despite the trying circumstances. But all involved agree almost unanimously on one thing: This may be the most important election in New Orleans' history, because its next mayor will play a critical role in the city's reconstruction.

Secretary of State Al Ater shrugged off concerns about accommodating displaced residents. "With a 39 cent stamp and by doing it by mail, I don't know how much more accessible you can get," Ater told Salon. More than 17,000 requests for absentee ballots had been received by the Tuesday deadline, according to the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters office. Of those requests, 70 to 75 percent have come from African-Americans, according to Ater, who reiterated, "No one has been left out of this process."

According to John Logan, a professor of sociology at Brown University, a recent survey shows that more than twice as many blacks as whites were displaced out of state after Katrina. Logan headed a study released in January that found that New Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population if residents displaced by Katrina were unable to return to their neighborhoods. Logan's research included the Current Population Survey released by the U.S. Department of Commerce in December, which showed that an estimated 102,000 African-Americans outside Louisiana were eligible to vote, compared with 48,000 whites. The number of blacks scattered within the state drops to an estimated 31,000, compared with 92,000 whites.

"The population that has returned to the city or general area is white and middle class," Logan said. "It's quite clear that if voting is higher within the state than by people out of state, that introduces a serious race and class bias to the electorate."

"We believe that the court could order out-of-state voting so that these displaced voters are not more burdened than white counterparts who stayed in parts of the city that did not flood and therefore have better access to the polls on Election Day," said Washington, one of several local lawyers who have pushed for out-of-state polling places. Without them, Washington believes, a "train wreck" is inevitable.

Next page: The worst-case scenario? Holding an election widely viewed as illegitimate