Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Who Can Vote?

It was the 29th of August last year. I woke up in Texas, for the first of what I hope to be many more mornings. I’d left Colorado Springs and my home of twenty years the day before and was now in an apartment where I would be for the next four months as I oversaw the construction of my new home. I didn’t have a job, although I did have a retirement, and my wife had only the promise of a contract in her profession. There we were, a family displaced—man, wife, aging mother-in-law and Siberian Husky, all together with only the clothes we had packed for the interim. Our household goods were stored somewhere.

It was that same morning that more than 300,000 New Orleans residents similarly awoke in temporary quarters. They had evacuated in advance of Hurricane Katrina and few knew what the future held.

There is a significant difference though. My move was planned and I knew what the outcome was going to be. For the evacuees, there was more doubt. Most expected to avoid the winds and rains, and then return to their homes to continue their lives. What followed was considerably different. The storm initiated the levee failures which effectively destroyed large portions of the city. Return is not possible for the foreseeable future.

The finger-pointing and blame-assignment has taken place and the end result is that a lot of money has been spent and considerably more has been promised. There has been a lot of posturing about “bigger and better” for the Big Easy, but objective assessment can only lead to a conclusion that it would be better for market forces to determine the size and shape of New Orleans than populist posturing. Sure, we would all like it to be like it was before…or would we?

Do we want the slums and unemployment and poverty to be recreated? Can we funnel the funds back into corrupt and ineffective governance that exacerbated the disaster last August? Is it reasonable to build a new city at national tax-payer expense in an area that might be unsustainable against a recurrence of a Category 4 or 5 storm?

The No-Plan Plan

The fact apparently is that a city of about 400,000 inhabitants has lost more than 300,000 of them and they aren’t coming back any time soon. Just as I’m not going back to Colorado, they aren’t going to return to NO. They might find jobs, they might enter schools, they might build new homes in Texas and northern Louisiana and Arkansas and Tennessee. Or, they just might descend back into the poverty and squalor they left in New Orleans, but in a new city or town.

Will I vote in the Colorado primaries this year? Of course not. Well, I did live there for a long time. Shouldn’t I be able to cast an absentee ballot? No rationale person would agree that I would be participating in election of people to represent me. I don’t live there any more.

Why then do we have this campaign to let the evacuees, now residing elsewhere and with no date or time certain for their return, vote? Representing Whom?

You know the answer. The folks who have returned and will rebuild aren’t the ones who elected the incumbents. The folks who are invested in the city won’t retain the officials who failed to serve them well. Posturing about the “chocolate” nature of the city isn’t the same as fulfilling executive functions. That means there must be some way to get those votes back, even if they aren’t residents.

If you don’t have an address in a district, you can’t normally vote. If you don’t have a phone number there, if you don’t have a driver’s license, if you don’t go to schools, if you don’t pay taxes (!), you don’t get a say in the governance. It’s as simple as that.

You get to vote where you live and work and pay.

No comments: