Low-income voters could be pivotal

Author: Robert Landauer

Published: October 10, 2004

Item: Why are voter-registration workers assaulting us on streetcorners, at malls and on our doorsteps? If people with incomes at $15,000 or less had voted at the same rate as people with incomes of $75,000 or more in 2000, another 3.9 million votes would have been cast, according to analysis by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That's 3.6 percent of all votes cast in 2000, and a million more than Ralph Nader got.

Only 41 percent of citizens eligible to vote in families making $15,000 a year or less actually voted in the 2000 presidential election compared with 75 percent of those in families making $75,000.

Once low-income citizens register, they are likely to follow through, especially in presidential elections: 72 percent of registered, low-income voters cast ballots in 2000. That's still less than the 91 percent of the higher-income registered voters voting in 2000. In tight elections, though, low-income turnout could make the difference.

Item: Three down, one to go on presidential/vice presidential debates. But the question that will affect more Americans' long-term security than terrorist attacks hasn't been asked:

With corporate pension plans failing in large numbers, what specific steps would you take as president to ensure that all of the delayed pay earned by workers will be there for them when they retire and that taxpayers won't have to bail out the increasingly shaky federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.?

Item: A so-called middle-class tax cut was signed into law last week. The name is a propaganda coup for political handlers. More than two-thirds of the tax cut will go to the fifth of households with the highest incomes, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. Households in the middle 20 percent of the income scale will get only 9 percent of the tax cuts, an odd result for a "middle-class" tax-cut bill, and will receive an average tax cut of just $162 from the bill next year. By contrast, households in the $200,000 to $500,000 income range will get an average tax cut of $2,390.

Item: The Federal Election Commission is the nation's campaign umpire. Its duty is to see that players -- candidates and contributors -- don't corrupt the rules of the game. But the game is getting rowdy and out of control as the nearsighted, partisan-paralyzed FEC stumbles on with no-calls, slow calls and bad calls.

Its incompetence was hammered home on Sept. 18 when U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly tossed out most of the technical rules the FEC adopted to apply to the campaign-finance reform law championed by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and by Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Marty Meehan, D-Mass.

The reality is that enforcers become enablers when their actions don't deter misbehavior. A glance at the FEC Web site (www.fec.gov) shows that cases from the 2000 election have lingered on the regulatory docket until 2004. Dirty-tricksters have learned that getting unfair advantage is well worth the risk of years-later action from regulators.

Congress needs to restructure the FEC. It is not carrying out the campaign reform that the public sought and that lawmakers ordered.

Item: "A recent study by the United States Civil Rights Commission reports that 13 percent of all black males in the country are disfranchised because of a felony conviction," reports the American Civil Liberties Union. It refers to felon disfranchisement, concentrated in Southern states, as "the last vestige of slavery in our country."

Altogether, 5 million Americans, overwhelmingly people of color, have lost the right to vote even after completing sentences for felony crimes.

The Supreme Court could remedy this discrimination by clearing up its strained exception to the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause in a 1974 case, Richardson v. Ramirez. Legal vehicles are at hand -- conflicting rulings from 9th and 2nd federal appeals circuits.