Outgoing congresswoman hints at challenging Georgia voting laws

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.

Party bosses are called party bosses because they run a political party whether it is Libertarians, or Greens or the Constitution party or the Republicans, or the Black Lesbian party.

In practice, only two sets of party bosses -- the Republicans and Democrats -- have privileged places on the ballot. In most states, the Libertarians and/or Greens have drawn enough voters to routinely qualify.

Let the people form parties then choose a candidate within that party to represent it in the general election, then the public at large makes their chose from those candidates.

Did you see the recall ballot in California a few years ago? That's the kind of chaos you get when the barriers to ballot entry are low, and when they're high, the "start your own party" plan is an exercise in futility. The kind of multi-party balloting you suggest could be workable, and in fact works in other countries, but it would require major changes in electoral law nationwide and probably wouldn't be very popular.

To now give the government power over how the people choose their party's candidates can do more harm than good.

In most cases, it is the major parties themselves (at least at the presidential level) that made the change from a caucus/convention system to primaries, because it gave them more competitive candidates. The Greens and Libertarians manage to choose candidates without primaries.

In other cases, the nominating process was a means of disenfranchisng voters -- by which I don't mean the loose definition used by Dems today, but literally ensuring that some folks were not allowed to vote in any meaningful way.

To clarify, it seems to me that what you're suggesting is something more than the closed primary -- in which only voters registered with a party may vote in the primary, but anyone may register with the party -- and toward a system in which the party leadership may control its membership. Correct?

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