Displaced Voters Make Wishes Known For New Orleans
Primary Election for Mayor Is April 22

By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2006

HOUSTON -- Career educator Kemberly Samuels is not particularly partisan, but in recent weeks she has been giving her fellow New Orleanians some straight talk about politics.

The primary election for mayor of the Big Easy is April 22, and no matter how far the survivors of Hurricane Katrina have scattered, Samuels believes they must vote.

"Now's your time; now's your time to make your voice heard," Samuels said into a telephone inside a cramped, cluttered room in the offices of the group, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. "You gonna make a difference. We want you to come out and vote. You gotta get off your butt and get out and do something. You just can't complain."

Election volunteers such as Samuels, along with Louisiana election officials, are working to energize the diaspora of hurricane survivors spread out from Baton Rouge to Boston. The volunteers have been working phone banks and making door-to-door visits. They've distributed absentee-ballot applications, voter-registration cards and information packets. And they've created Web sites with election information.

This week, Samuels and her compatriots in the Katrina Survivors Association of Houston, in conjunction with ACORN, are taking busloads of evacuees living in Texas, Arkansas, Georgia and Mississippi to early-voting sites in Louisiana. The goal is to deliver 4,000 votes, either by absentee ballot or in early voting -- especially from among moderate-to-low-income African American residents still unable to return to sections of the city that are uninhabitable.

"We're trying to make a statement that even if we're not back in New Orleans or Louisiana, New Orleans is still our home," said Dorothy Stukes, chairwoman of the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association. "We all want to come back home. We all want to be a part of the rebuilding and have a voice in selecting someone who wants us back, because there's a lot of people in New Orleans that's trying to keep us out."

Another Houston-based grass-roots group, the Metropolitan Organization, is continuing to work on its goal of signing up 10,000 absentee voters. Last weekend, it sponsored an "accountability session" in New Orleans with the top-polling mayoral candidates to address the concerns of evacuees via videoconference.

"Voters want to make sure their agenda gets heard," said Rene Wizig-Barrios, the lead organizer of the Metropolitan Organization.

The effort, scholars have said, may be the most massive get-out-the-vote drive since the mid-19th century, when soldiers cast ballots during the Civil War. So far, the results appear promising.

Louisiana's chief elections officer, Secretary of State Al Ater, said last week that his office had received a record number of requests to vote by mail -- or absentee -- in the mayor's race. More than 14,000 requests -- the majority of them from residents living out of state -- were received by the beginning of April, and applications were "climbing daily." He did not say how many had been processed.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the highest number of absentee ballots requested had reached 2,500, but more typically it ranged from 1,200 to 1,500, he said.

"It's entirely possible that we'll have 20 to 25 percent of the votes that get cast by mail," Ater said. "I think that shows that the campaign works" to alert displaced residents to the mail-in voting system.

New Orleans voters have until Tuesday to request a mail-in ballot and until April 21 to postmark it. They can also deliver the ballots to polling sites in the city on April 22. The election is a primary, after which the top two vote-getters out of almost two dozen candidates will face off in a general election on May 20.

The number of registered voters in Orleans Parish has dropped to about 297,000 from the pre-Katrina number of slightly more than 299,000, according to the Louisiana secretary of state's office. The last mayoral election drew only about four in 10 registered voters. Although the number of mail-in ballot requests is encouraging and concerted efforts to draw voters continue, it is especially difficult this year to predict the turnout, Ater said.

"I don't know what to expect in this situation. . . . We're kind of in uncharted waters," he said.

"If this whole crisis, this whole disaster" doesn't motivate people, Ater said, "I don't think we're ever going to get them motivated, are we?"

The candidate's campaigns also are reaching out to the evacuees by traveling to cities such as Houston and Atlanta for voter forums; by culling the national change-of-address directory to compare with registered voter lists for New Orleans; and by requesting absentee ballot applications, which are public records.

"It is a difficult thing to do," said Tim Phillips, campaign manager for Audubon Nature Institute President Ron Forman, who is a front-runner in the race along with New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu.

"In the main, the reality is that most of the voters are right here in Orleans Parish and within 100 miles," Phillips said. "So we spend our time running up and down the road to Baton Rouge more than anything else."

Landrieu's campaign spokesman said it is opening offices in Baton Rouge and Houston to be closer to voters whose support they are seeking.

Early voting is also scheduled all this week. This year, Louisiana established more early voting sites, especially near the corners of the state to accommodate displaced voters who want to drive in. ACORN-sponsored buses, for instance, will transport New Orleanians living in Houston and San Antonio this week to Lake Charles to vote; those living in Dallas, to Shreveport to vote; and those living in Little Rock, Atlanta and Jackson, Miss., to New Orleans to vote.

"Anything we can do to get the people to vote we'll do, because we know there's power in numbers," said Maranda Scott, formerly an assistant property manager of a housing development in New Orleans and now living in Houston with her husband and daughter. She was working the phone banks at ACORN's offices last week trying to persuade New Orleanians to sign up for the bus trip to Lake Charles. "They have to come out and be heard so we won't be in this situation again."

Even if some displaced voters are coming to the realization that Houston will probably become a permanent home, they want to participate in this, the first post-Katrina election, said Terry Jackson, a New Orleanian who is helping the Metropolitan Organization sign up absentee voters.

"Even though they're making a new start, they want to get involved because they have families still there," Jackson said. "Their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters are all still there."

Staff writer Matthew C. Wright in Austin contributed to this report.