Now, I’m from Florida, so you don’t have to tell me about problems with voting. It should be an embarrassment to this Congress and to the American people that The United States, the world’s most powerful country, both in terms of economic and military power, has to pass a law entitled, “Help America Vote,” to ensure that what went on in Florida, and in many, many cities and states around the country, both in 2000 and in 2004, does not happen again.

Now there are those who say time and time again, just “get over it.” Stop complaining; stop going back to the past. But I was there, I saw what went on in 2000 in my own congressional district. Thousands and thousands of votes were “discarded.” Old voting machines in primarily African American voting precincts tossed out the votes of my constituents, just never counted them. We had police intimidation in minority areas of the city, we had thousands of people “mistakenly” removed from voting rolls; we had hundreds turned away because of terrible structural problems with “provisional balloting” in the state of Florida, and on, and on and on. And you all know what happened next, we have been forced to live for the last five years, and the next three, with President Bush, Dick Cheney and Haliburton running our country!

So in 2002, with great struggle, we pushed through HAVA here in Congress. Not that it was a perfect bill, but it was at least a start, a beginning, to address the serious problems of voting rights and voting difficulties in our nation. The bill even had a mandate for the creation of “The Election Assistance Commission,” a new independent, bipartisan agency designed to carry out grant programs to improve and update states’ election systems; provide for testing and certification of states’ voting systems, and study election issues. Yet one thing the Election Assistance Commission does not have is any teeth! It was designed merely as an advisory commission, without any rule making authority, and without even being able to enforce any of HAVA’s requirements and provisions! So where does that leave us?

Well, in the 2004 presidential elections, we have quite a lot of people who, to this day, do not believe that George W Bush fairly won in Ohio. And in my state of Florida, just last year mind you, we had Florida Department of Law Enforcement Officers intimidating elderly members of Orlando’s African American community. We saw the State of Florida, under Governor Bush, attempt to repeat the removal of eligible voters from the voting rolls, something the Governor would have followed through with had their actions not been challenged in court by CNN and others. Now this last instance is something that occurred with the backdrop of what happened in 2000, when over 50,000 voters were wrongfully removed from Florida’s voter rolls and subsequently, denied their legal right to cast a ballot. In fact, the Governor spent $4 billion of taxpayer money to purge suspected felons, many of who were never convicted of any crime!

I would like to close by saying that I will be fighting hard, along with my CBC colleagues and others involved in the fight, Representatives Steny Hoyer, Rush Holt and others, Senator Chris Dodd and all the civil rights organizations across the country, to correct the problems we as a nation still confront with our voting systems. For one thing, it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we have paper trails, that is: voter verifiable paper audit trails on all electronic voting machines by 2008! I also think we must have a nationwide, uniform system of processing provisional ballots, which voters can use when there are questions about their registration. Folks, we have come a long way but we still have a lot of work to do. I know that working together, we can accomplish this, and revitalize confidence in our nation’s election system. Remember:   the strength of the wolf is in the pack.