Posted on 09/08/2006 10:05:06 PM PDT by TWohlford
Outgoing Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney hinted Thursday that she or her supporters might try again to challenge the legality of state voting laws that allowed Republicans to vote in the Democratic primary where she lost her House seat last month.
McKinney, the first black woman elected to Congress from Georgia, said "malicious crossover" voting by Republicans disenfranchised black voters in her district from picking their candidate of choice, despite the fact that the winner of the primary is also black.
She said the state's primary system violates the Voting Rights Act, which was first passed in 1965 to protect minority voters.
"In the state of Georgia, we have some unfinished business with respect to the Voting Rights Act," McKinney said after a panel session on U.S. intelligence programs she hosted at the annual conference of the Congressional Black Caucus. "We have got to do subsequent lawsuits to deal with these statutes."
McKinney's supporters made similar arguments in a 2002 lawsuit after McKinney lost her seat to Denise Majette. A U.S. District Court judge dismissed the suit, and the decision was upheld by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
McKinney, who won the seat back in 2004 after Majette gave it up to run for Senate, would not say Thursday whether she is planning another lawsuit. She said the question might be better posed to her constituents and that she is not ready to announce a next step.
Unlike some other states, Georgia allows voters to pick which primary they want to vote in, regardless of their party status.
"What happened to me ... is that an incredible number of Republicans decided they would pick up Democratic ballots," she said. "I guess you could say I'm the poster child for Republican crossover."
McKinney, a firebrand known for her confrontational style and a scuffle with a Capitol Hill police officer earlier this year, was forced into a runoff in the July Democratic primary by challenger Hank Johnson, an attorney and former DeKalb County commissioner. Johnson, who also is black, went on to defeat McKinney 59 percent to 41 percent in the Democratic runoff.
Voting results show that Johnson fared well in heavily Democratic areas of the district that had been McKinney's base of support, such as south DeKalb County, where Johnson won 57 percent of the vote in the primary runoff.
McKinney, who declined to discuss her political future, also charged that the state's system for runoff elections, in which winners must take more than half the vote to avoid a runoff, violates the law.
Shortly after the election, McKinney blamed her loss on the media and on electronic voting machines, which she says are a threat to the nation's democracy.
She hosted a forum on alleged civil rights abuses by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, comparing them to well-documented efforts to silence black activists in the 1960s. Panelists blasted the Bush administration for creating what they said was a police state in which fundamental constitutional rights are consistently violated.
"We know where the wickedness is in Washington, D.C. It's at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," McKinney said.
What a babe? Is she married?
Let's talk about this primary cross-over problem....
If you restrict a primary to just your people (Dems, GOP, greens, etc) then don't you have to ask for an ID when they vote? I thought that IDs for voting were racist or something.
And, how would you determine who is part of the club? Who puts together the list? Do you have to publically declare your party when you register? Would the GOP people be able to exclude the RINOs, or the Dems exclude Lieberman moderates?
Enquiring minds, etc
I am against the primary system in general. It gives way to much power to the parties.
We have this situation in California.
The primary is only for the party, it has nothing to do with rights or freedom.
The parties should be able to choose their own candidates, they should not be open to the opposition party choosing their candidate for them.
In effect a opposition party queering the other sides primary has negated the actual official governmental election.
In Florida for instance the Nelson democrats could literally have chosen his Republican challenger, they could have even had a sympathizer run in the Republican primary and chosen him.
(Please no remarks about the Florida primary)
I'm sorry to see her go. The more raving lunatics on the Democratic side of the aisle the better. Makes our jobs easier come November. I'd hate to see the moonbats be replaced by rational people.
"
McKinney, the first black woman elected to Congress from Georgia, said "malicious crossover" voting by Republicans disenfranchised black voters in her district from picking their candidate of choice, despite the fact that the winner of the primary is also black.
"
I'm sure the difference in the 57-43 election was crossover voters!!!!!
"I am against the primary system in general. It gives way to much power to the parties."
I can't imagine how not letting each party choose their own candidates would be an improvement.
I don't think Ronald Reagan would have made that cut.
I do believe that John McCain would win.
I'm registered as an independent. I join whichever party I need to to vote in a primary to best affect the outcomes I want, then change back later. So, unless you try to Permanently lock citizens into one party you mostly just create the more paperwork that I and other crossover voters are still willing to go through.
Why? Because here in the south, until the last decade there were often Democratic candidates more conservative than anything the republicans were running. Or we want to get rid of representatives like Cynthia McKinney, or the late unlamented Mike Synar.
I picture a couple of students sitting around a computer in the year 2110 studying history laughing about her.
Just an incredible amount of patriotic American voters decided to pick up the trash and throw it out. Bye Bye.
LOL, you found a hedgehog!!
"I'm registered as an independent. I join whichever party I need to to vote in a primary to best affect the outcomes I want, then change back later."
I like the result you are going for, because we are both conservatives (I'm independent too), but I think the government should stay out of all political parties internal processes to prevent the very thing that you are doing.
A few decades ago, the Democratic party in Southern states was whites-only, claiming that as a private organization it was free to discriminate. Because the Republicans weren't competitive in those days, and the Democratic primary effectively decided the general election, that helped to ensure that if any blacks managed to register and vote, their votes wouldn't mean much.
I don't see how letting party bosses who weren't elected or even appointed by elected officials tell the voters which candidates they may choose from would benefit democracy. The hypothetical abuses of open primaries pale in comparison to the actual abuses that occurred in closed primaries; crossover voting might swing a close race, as happened to McKinney in 2002 (I don't think it was that close this time out), but I don't know of any instances of wholesale hijacking of one party's primary by the other.
In your hypothetical, if the Democrats were so dominant that they could swing the Republican primary their way, then wouldn't they be dominant enough that it wouldn't matter who the Republican nominee is?
That's fine because it would keep Democrats from doing the same thing, which they did in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
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