United States of America vs Ike Brown - Essay Example

? There was recently a case in Nuxombee county of Mississippi where the United s government accused a black man, Ike Brown, of unfairly using his position of power as head of the county’s democratic committee to violate the rights of white voters and white candidates through a variety of means including improper use of absentee balloting, intimidation, running caucuses in private locations as well as other complaints, ranging from procedural to much more serious. This essay will summarize the complaints and evidence of that the Government presented against Ike Brown, his defense, as well as comment on the strangeness of this situation, that is, of the government using the voting rights act to prosecute a black man for the violation of white voter’s and candidates rights. The fundamental complaint against Ike Brown by the United States government is that he abused his position as chair of the Democratic Committee in his county to unfairly stop white voters from participating in the primary elections when they had the right to, and unfairly persecuted white candidates who were running in those elections. Some of the governments allegations simply attempted to demonstrate that Brown had a strong bias towards white candidates – this includes statements by Brown criticizing black voters who chose to vote for white candidates, and other acts of outspoken intimidation such as naming a list of white democrats who he discouraged to vote in the election. They also accused him and the committee he chaired of many procedural violations such as mis-handling the counting of absentee ballots, and allowing campaigning within and around polling stations. They also demonstrated that the elections committee violated state policy by only having about six percent of the polling officers for the Democratic primary be white, even though twenty percent of the Democratic population was white, though with a sample size as small as polling officers and a country of only about 11,000 people, it is hardly surprising this disparity could exist. A great deal of the government’s evidence thus simply tried to show that Brown had a preference for black voters, polling officers and elections officials. But the bulk of their evidence rests on absentee balloting laws, and the Government’s assertion that Brown abused absentee balloting procedure in order to both favor black candidates and prevent white voters from participating in the electoral process, as well as manipulating assisted balloting procedures to favor black candidates. Mississippi state election law has two features that are meant to make elections more accessible: absentee balloting and assisted balloting. Both have strict controls. Absentee balloting is for people who, for some reason, are not able to be present, for instance if they are in school out of state or deployed with the armed forces, but there are strict controls on what excuses allow a person to use an absentee ballot. Assisted balloting is when someone else assists the voter in filling out their ballot, which is only allowed to be done in the case of blindness, physical disability that prevents someone from being able to vote, or demonstrable illiteracy, and who have requested assistance in filling out their ballot. The US Government provided evidence that Brown violated these procedures. The Government contends that Brown accepted and actually even pursued absentee ballots from black voters who were currently living within the county and had no reason whatsoever to vote via an absentee ballot. Furthermore, they presented witness testimony that these ballots were filled by people other than the voters (assisted balloting) despite the fact that the voter was in no way disabled or illiterate and had not requested assistance in filling out their ballot. The government contended that Brown and his associates essentially filled in absentee ballots for black people who were unlikely to vote, brought the ballot in favor of a black candidate for them to authorize, and then sent it away. In some cases they did not even bother getting it signed by the voter, the Government contends, providing testimonial evidence by a person who claims that it was not her signature either on her absentee ballot or on the envelope it was contained in. The Government also contends that, while thus allowing absentee balloting for black voters who were not eligible for it, Brown forced white voters who had valid absentee balloting cause to vote in person or have their votes be disqualified. This was the crux of the Government’s case, though it also presented evidence of other misdeeds such as recruiting ineligible black candidates from out of county to run against white candidates. Brown had essentially two defenses against these accusations – First Amendment defenses and flat denials. In the case of the vast majority of the election wrongdoing Brown was accused of by the government, he simply flatly denied that it had happened. He denied, for instance, failing to read absentee ballot’s name aloud during the vote counting process, denied filling out absentee ballots for people who had not requested assistance, and denied having forced people who would have been eligible to vote by absentee ballot to vote in person. His second major defense was against things that he had said publicly, and that were on the public record. For instance, he publicly criticized black voters who voted for white candidates, and made other racially polarizing remarks encouraging black voters to only vote for other black candidates. To these allegations which were in the public record and thus relatively hard to refute, he simply said that he was within his First Amendment rights to say those things as a private citizen, and that it was in the capacity he was speaking, and not as the chair of an elections commission. There is a significant amount of irony to the United States Government using the voters rights act against a black person in defense of white voters. The main source of this irony was the fact that the act itself was created to defend black people from persecution when they tried to vote, and to dismantle Jim Crowe and other practices that would prevent black people from voting as was their legal right granted to them by the fourth amendment. The attempt by the government to use this law against a black person in defense of white rights shows several things. The first of these is simply that there has been some strides in black rights since the law was passed, as it would have been almost inconceivable for black people to be in a powerful enough position to hinder the voting rights of white people when the law was first enacted in 1965. It does, however, seem somewhat ridiculous for the government to put so much time and energy pursuing Ike Brown in this particular case, however. Though it seems that there was certainly some wrongdoing in this case, and obviously white voters need to have the right to vote equally with black ones, the structure of our country is still so incredibly discriminatory to black people and to black voters that this relatively small case seems like a misuse of government resources. When every election in the past decade has had accusations of racial bias, of closing down poll stations and longer lines in black communities, and while black people still have such a harder time accessing education, and are still so terribly under-represented in nearly every section of government, this case begs the question: were there not bigger issues to be tackling with this time and energy? Read More