Registration is fine — but only voting counts
COMMENTARY BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX

Published USA Today – October 29, 2004

I will always remember my first vote. I was all of 7, pigtailed, and on a mission to walk four scant blocks from our home to the polls in my San Francisco neighborhood. As my mother held my hand in that fall of 1960, she told me about the struggles black people had in Mississippi around voting.

There had been no March on Washington yet; no Voting Rights Act. But Rosa Parks had refused to move to the back of the bus. The civil rights movement was often a topic of conversation. And, at the end of the 1960 election season, everyone was buzzing about Sen. John Kennedy's call to Coretta Scott King to express concern when Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Georgia.

I beamed with pride as Mom hoisted me up and let me pull the lever for Kennedy in the curtained booth. At school, I bragged that I got to vote at a time when it was something that black folks had to fight to do. Back then, people fought for the right to vote. Now, both parties spend millions of dollars trying to urge people to get out to vote.

While I participate in and support efforts to get out the vote, I am troubled that people have to be cajoled to do something that is a basic civic duty. How can people complain about the direction of government when nearly half of us fail to participate in the process, either by not registering to vote or by registering and then not voting?

Millions of new voters have been registered in this election cycle. According to Pat Ford, this year's chair of Unity '04 — an alliance promoting voter-empowerment — more than 1 million new African-American voters have been registered. Voices for Working Families, a Washington, D.C.-based voter-education organization that focuses on women, has registered more than 80,000 new voters in Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Michigan, Louisiana and other states. Dozens of other groups for both parties have worked to register new voters. The outcome of this election will hinge on voter turnout, though, not registration.

As much as I applaud these efforts, voting is the least we can do, not the most we can do, to ensure the integrity of our democracy. We also must encourage new people to run for office at the local level. We need to make sure that our elected officials understand how passionately we will safeguard the honesty of the process.

I got voter fever more than four decades ago. Voting is the symbolic way that we, as citizens, “lift every voice and sing.” Nothing is more important in a participatory democracy.

Julianne Malveaux is co-author of Unfinished Business: A Democrat and A Republican Take On the 10 Most Important Issues Women Face. She's a member of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.