Getting Ferguson Majority to Show Its Clout at Polls
FERGUSON, Mo. — Down the street from where the body of Michael Brown lay for hours after he was shot three weeks ago, volunteers have appeared beside folding tables under fierce sunshine to sign up new voters. On West Florissant Avenue, the site of sometimes violent nighttime protests for two weeks, voter-registration tents popped up during the day and figures like the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. lectured about the power of the vote.
In this small city, which is two-thirds African-American but has mostly white elected leaders, only 12 percent of registered voters took part in the last municipal election, and political experts say black turnout was very likely lower. But now, in the wake of the killing of Mr. Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white Ferguson police officer, there is a new focus on promoting the power of the vote, an attempt to revive one of the keystones of the civil rights movement.
“A lot of people just didn’t realize that the people who impact their lives every day are directly elected,” said Shiron Hagens, 41, of St. Louis, who is not part of any formal group but has spent several days registering voters in Ferguson with her mother and has pledged to come back here each Saturday. “The prosecutor — he’s elected. People didn’t know that. The City Council — they’re elected. These are the sorts of people who make decisions about hiring police chiefs. People didn’t know.”
N.A.A.C.P. leaders are creating a door-to-door voter registration effort with a jarring reminder as its theme: “Mike Brown Can’t Vote, but I Can.” Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, is working with others to hold a “candidate school” for people, including young black residents who say they want to serve on a city council or school board but need guidance on what a political campaign requires.
The attempt to galvanize voting comes against a backdrop of intense political struggles over the ballot in the state. In 2000, polls were kept open late in St. Louis because of long lines, and Republicans complained about possible voter fraud — one chapter in what would be a long battle over elections and voting.
Republican lawmakers, who dominate the Missouri legislature, have repeatedly pushed for a measure requiring photo identification for voters at polling places, saying it is needed to combat fraud. Democrats have called those efforts an attempt to discourage minority voters. A 2006 voter ID law was overturned by the State Supreme Court for violating the State Constitution. The latest measure stalled in the State Senate this year.
Local factors in Ferguson complicate matters, too, including a relatively transient population and the timing of municipal elections — held in the spring instead of November, when presidential or congressional elections drive much higher turnout. On the first day of Ms. Hagens’s registration drive, she said, she helped 28 people fill out forms to vote, but five people who approached her to sign up said they were felons and might not be eligible.
Over the last 25 years, the population of Ferguson, now about 21,000, has shifted from nearly three-quarters white to mostly black. Even so, five of the six City Council members are white, as is Mayor James W. Knowles III. Mr. Knowles, who once led the St. Louis Young Republicans, won a second term in April with just 1,314 votes from among the city’s more than 12,000 registered voters. No one ran against him.
Ask people along the streets here why they choose not to vote and they answer, mostly, with shrugs. Voter turnout has been far higher in presidential elections, and some had not even realized there was a mayoral race last spring. “You don’t really see the candidates or even anything about them until a week or two before the election, and even then it’s not much,” said Alyce Herndon, 49, who has voted but, like many here, said she had not had cause to attend Council meetings.
David C. Kimball, a political scientist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has studied voting patterns in the county that includes Ferguson, said some other suburbs that became black majority communities earlier than Ferguson, such as nearby Dellwood, have since begun electing black leaders. “There is often a lag time,” he said, noting that Ferguson’s black population was only slightly higher than half the total as recently as 2000.
There are small indications, Mr. Kimball suggested, that black voters in Ferguson had begun to exert at least some political muscle even before Mr. Brown’s death. In a school board election for a district that includes Ferguson residents, three black candidates ran this year, after the removal of a popular black school superintendent. Only one of the three won a seat, but Mr. Kimball said he viewed the campaign as a modest sign of shifting.
Among some Republicans, the mounting political efforts have provoked tension. Told of the voter-registration booth that had appeared near a memorial for Mr. Brown, Matt Wills, the executive director of the state Republican Party, voiced outrage in an interview with Breitbart News. “If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is,” Mr. Wills was quoted as saying. “I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate.”
Other state Republican leaders have distanced themselves from those remarks, and Mr. Wills did not return requests for an interview. “I think he spoke inartfully about one effort,” Ed Martin, chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, said in an interview. “Anything we can do to get more participation is good for all of us.”
Timothy Jones, a Republican who is the speaker of the State House, said any efforts to engage more voters in the political process were a positive development. “If people are lawfully registering people to vote, I have no issue with that at all,” he said.
Democrats, though, said Republican leaders, who control both chambers of the legislature in Jefferson City but not the governor’s office, had a long history of attempting to draw limits on voting that would most affect voting patterns among minorities in St. Louis, Kansas City and places like Ferguson.
“Their record is not about trying to open up the voting process but rather to limit it,” Senator McCaskill said in an interview. She said at another point, “It’s hard for me to believe that they’re sincere since they have blocked every effort for an early-voter law, they’ve put a pretend early-voting bill up where it really doesn’t allow for early voting, they have pushed, all over this country, for voter ID.”
The state has no provision that allows early voting; absentee voting is permitted if a voter provides a specific reason. A petition drive to get anextensive early-voting measure on the ballot this year failed to fulfill a signature requirement, officials said. The legislature approved a separate early-voting measure that will appear on the November ballot, but critics say it is so limited — only six days of early voting and none on weekends — that it amounts to an attempt at putting the issue to rest without giving voters much chance to vote early.
Organizers here speak of sparking a national movement. The leaders say they are undaunted. “This is going to go past Ferguson,” said John Gaskin III, a spokesman for the St. Louis County N.A.A.C.P. and a member of the national board of directors.
“What I’ve told people is I want them to be aware that there’s a Ferguson near you, near every city,” Mr. Gaskin said. “I don’t think people will run out of steam on this one.”
Last weekend, Trayvon Martin’s father urged people to register as he appeared on stage at a peace rally in St. Louis. Over a period of several hours, though, few people came forward to register.
Demarkus Madyun, 26, of St. Louis, said he was already registered but had come to the registration table to update his address.
“If we’re going to try to say that the system has to be corrected for us to receive justice, we have to do everything that we can to be a part of the system,” he said. “Until we have people in office, it will never be better. Not just presidents — mayors, county executives, the governor.”
Without that, he added, “then everything that we’ve done for the last few weeks is for nothing.”
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