Kerry alleges voters were 'suppressed'
Links poll issues to King's struggle
In his first high-profile address since conceding the presidential election, Senator John F. Kerry used Boston's annual Martin Luther King Jr. memorial breakfast yesterday to decry what he called the suppression of thousands of would-be voters last November.
"Thousands of people were suppressed in their efforts to vote. Voting machines were distributed in uneven ways," the former Democratic nominee told an enthusiastic audience of 1,200 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in South Boston.
"In Democratic districts, it took people four, five, 11 hours to vote, while Republicans [went] through in 10 minutes. Same voting machines, same process, our America," Kerry said.
In an e-mail message he sent to his supporters on the day before Congress certified the election results earlier this month, Kerry cited "widespread reports of irregularities, questionable practices by some election officials, and instances of lawful voters being denied the right to vote" in the battleground state of Ohio.
But he also said his legal team had found no evidence that would alter the outcome. President Bush defeated Kerry in Ohio by 119,000 votes.
Kerry has stayed out of the spotlight since the election, vacationing in Idaho and taking a tour of Europe and the Middle East without reporters in tow. He left and returned from that trip unannounced. In his return to public speaking yesterday, Kerry exhibited a passion that many of his critics found him to be lacking on the campaign trail -- a change in tenor he and his aides promised in several brief post-election comments.
"My friends, this is not a time to pretend. We're here to celebrate the life of a man who, if he were here today, would make it clear to us what our agenda is. And nothing," Kerry said, his voice rising in anger, "would he make more clear on that agenda than, in a nation that is willing to spend several hundred million dollars in Iraq to bring them democracy we cannot tolerate that, here in America, too many people are denied that democracy."
The crowd, many of them part of the African-American community that claimed disenfranchisement in the 2000 and 2004 elections, gave Kerry a standing ovation.
Critics of the election process in Ohio say there were not enough voting machines in urban, Democrat-leaning precincts, leading to long lines that dissuaded many voters from casting ballots. In some cases, polls were held open after the announced closing time to allow everyone in line to vote, but some left without voting after standing in line for hours. Some blacks in particular have also charged that there were organized efforts to send voters to the wrong voting places, and troubling disparities in the way voting machines counted Democratic votes. Political analysts have said Bush won on the strength of turnout among white, Republican-leaning Christian conservatives in Ohio's more rural communities, such as those downstate near Cincinnati.
Ohio election officials could not be reached for comment yesterday, but in the past they have denied any improprieties. When a small band of Democratic lawmakers objected to the certification of the election results, House majority leader Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, accused Democrats of a "crime against the dignity of American democracy," and said they were devoted to conspiracy theories.
Without offering details, Kerry aides said yesterday that the senator plans to file legislation to correct some of the election problems that occurred in 2000 and 2004. Aides also said that a political action committee he started after the election -- a committee that could lay the groundwork for a second presidential campaign in 2008 -- would also be dedicated to preventing disenfranchisement.
After the disputed vote in Florida in 2000, Congress approved the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and authorized $4 billion so that states could create central computerized voter lists and update voting systems by 2006. But many states have not yet made improvements, and two federal agencies are planning inquiries to look into problems that plagued both old and new systems last November.
In addition to discussing the November vote, Kerry offered a thinly veiled critique of the Bush administration's frequent mention of religious faith. Reading from King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail," Kerry noted that King criticized fellow clergymen who stood on the sidelines of the civil rights struggle mouthing "pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities."
"When you look around this country, it is clear that there is still an incredible divorce between those who profess faith and those, like so many of you, who actually carry it out on a day-to-day basis," Kerry said. "Faith has been pushed into the politics of our country in a way not to unite, but to divide, not to elucidate but to hide and to obscure, not to open up opportunity but even to shut the doors of opportunity."
After listening to Kerry's remarks, Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, said that "there are many improvements to be made in our electoral process." Romney said no eligible voter should be denied the right to vote, but like many Republicans he is at least as concerned about allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots.
"Either voter fraud or voter suppression -- either or both is wrong," he said.
Before his speech, Kerry spoke to reporters about his recent overseas trip, criticizing the Bush administration for failing to seek extensive help from other countries in training Iraqi security forces. Kerry said President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt told him that Egypt could be training between 500 and 1,000 troops every month, far more than the 146 it is training now. He said European leaders are also eager to contribute more. "It's clear that they're prepared to do more, but the administration has not put the structure together for people to be able to do it," he said.
Kerry also said the administration has not done enough to repair the relationship between Iraq's Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims.
"All of the Arab world is deeply disturbed by the absence of sufficient political diplomacy," he said. "And now it's clear to me that the major event is not the election itself, but what happens immediately after the election."
Glen Johnson of the Globe staff contributed to this report. 