Homeless join forces to register their own voters

Jim Cronin displayed the aplomb and charisma of an old-time ward boss as he cheerfully hobnobbed with the crowd gathered for the voter registration drive. When he took to the stump -- flanked by the mayor and former mayoral candidate Mel King -- the 65-year-old homeless man assumed the role of ambassador.

''Welcome to America!" Cronin belted out to the spirited assembly of newly registered voters, the majority of them homeless, too.

At that July 22 Cast Your Vote! event, Cronin and a team of other Pine Street residents enlisted about 170 homeless and low-income voters. Since December, their local campaign has gleaned 700, according to co-organizer Fred Atkinson. A plucky movement born on a tiny island in Boston Harbor, it has quickly swept the nation. Following its lead, nearly 50 simultaneous voter education clinics for homeless and low-income people were held July 22 across the country, amassing more than 1,000 new registrations in 17 states.

''The residents at Pine Street really pioneered this," said Katie Fisher of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, in a telephone interview from her office in Washington, D.C. The coalition's statistics reveal stark discrepancies between income levels and voting patterns. Citing data from the 2000 US Census, Fisher said that 59 percent of people earning between $10,000 and $15,000 a year are registered voters, compared with 82 percent of those making more than $75,000 a year.

While the National Coalition for the Homeless organizes its own weeklong voter registration drive every fall, Fisher, who helped coordinate the July 22 event, said she is unaware of any other voter registration campaign led by homeless people themselves.

The Boston-led drive has been ''very helpful" to the National Coalition, said Fisher. ''It gives them a real opportunity to feel out where the needs are and more time to bring in others. And it makes it a lot easier when homeless people are doing the recruiting themselves."

''It started out with a visit from our representative in the State House," said Atkinson, who, like Cronin, is a resident of a Pine Street-operated substance-abuse treatment shelter on Boston's Long Island. Atkinson said state Representative Anthony Petruccelli came to the shelter during December's budget hearings to brief the 200 homeless men living there about what programs were on the chopping block at the State House relative to issues including affordable housing, health care, and job training.

''Then he told us that, without you being a registered voter, [elected officials] don't have to spend any time listening to you, that you're not part of this process," said the 55-year-old Atkinson.

After Petruccelli left, Atkinson said he and a few of his friends got to talking about how the representative's message of self-determination and reimmersion into society seemed to dovetail with their own treatment program's philosophy of recovery. With that in mind, Atkinson, Cronin, and two other homeless recovering addicts, Dwayne Lopes and Roger Chagnon, set out with a modest goal of registering 25 of their peers on the island to vote.

The results far exceeded their expections. Within a month, they had registered 73 men on the island. (Today the number of registrants is up to 174.) In March, when the four were invited to Pine Street's South End headquarters to give a talk, they left with 78 new voter registration cards to file. From there, they were asked to tour several ''dry shelters" around the city. At each stop, Atkinson says, their drive mustered the majority of unregistered voters listening to their speeches.

After they started getting requests from homeless advocates farther afield for them to take their show on the road, Atkinson says the team was forced to rethink the scope of their campaign.

''We were always asking people: What are they doing on their own behalf?" said Atkinson, noting that several homeless people he has registered now carry a stack of blank voter applications with them to enlist others they encounter on the streets.

Sitting on a stone bench near the Mary Baker Eddy Library in the South End the day after the Cast Your Vote! event, Atkinson tugged at his backpack, which he says is usually loaded with 250 blank registration forms. ''It weighs 75 pounds," he joked. ''That's how I know no one will steal it."

A Hyde Park native who became homeless in 2003, Atkinson says when he and Cronin, a South Boston native, began to canvass the city together over the winter, he was struck by how the old school politicos they ran into -- like former mayor Kevin White and former police commissioner and city councilor Mickey Roache -- seemed to recognize Cronin. Cronin explains that in the early '70s, during a stint of sobriety, he was paid by the city to retrace his alleyway hideouts as part of a statewide outreach effort to rehabilitate street alcoholics and was profiled as a model of recovery by local and national media.

Now Atkinson, with a lumbering 6-foot-4 frame and steely blue eyes, gets recognized in the streets, too, he says -- often by homeless people seeking voter registration forms.

On the day of the Cast Your Vote! event, Cronin wore a T-shirt, shorts, and an easy smile. Cronin says his passion for voting was born nearly 30 years ago. A Navy veteran, he served prison time in the mid-'60s for ''a drunken burglary," he said. When he was released, he said, his former jailers told him that, as an ex-con, he had lost his right to vote.

''That was the prevailing belief at the time. No one ever questioned it," said Cronin. Ten years later, he said, he was advised by a lawyer friend that that wasn't true. ''Once I realized that I could vote and I could register, it reconnected me with America," said Cronin.

Known on the streets as ''Bay Rum Jimmy" for his proclivity toward drinks thought unsuitable for human consumption, Cronin spent 20 years leading a double life -- alternately working as a die cutter for the same sympathetic boss and, when his bills were paid, disappearing for weeks at a time on drinking binges. Eventually his lifestyle caught up with him.

Cronin found a spot in Pine Street's treatment program two years ago and is nearly ready to make the transition out. Lopes and Chagnon have already moved into their own places and found work.

Cronin says he gets emotional witnessing what he calls ''the shift," which he defines as an inner change when a homeless person chooses to register.

''There's a lot more involved when a homeless person registers to vote. You have to overcome a certain amount of stuff," Cronin said, thumping his chest. ''It's good for you in here. I tell them, 'I don't care who you vote for. Unless you register, nobody hears you.' "

Atkinson comes off a bit flintier in his sales pitch. When he took to the podium at the July 22 drive, clad in a dress shirt and dark slacks, he described voter registration as a necessary catalyst for the homeless to begin to take action on their own behalf.

''We can't just wait around for someone to do the work for us," said Atkinson. ''When you register to vote, you send a clear and defining message that you are here and you are participating."

Like Cronin, Atkinson sees voting as a critical step for the homeless to regain their place in mainstream society. And Atkinson says he knows how tenuous that niche can be.

After a harrowing period in October 2002 -- when his sick mother died in the hospital, his best friend died in their shared apartment, and he got laid off from his job as a shipping-and-receiving manager -- he says he ''found a bottle and hid in it for six weeks." A functional alcoholic for decades, Atkinson says he detoxed himself immediately after that binge and has been clean ever since. But his temporary withdrawal from society was enough to leave him in financial ruin. He sought refuge at Pine Street's emergency shelter a few months later and was offered a spot at the inn's two-year transitional program on Long Island in March 2003.

Atkinson says he sees his work on the voter registration drive as a way to pay back the shelter for allowing him the time he needs to recover.

His personal crusade also includes attending House, Senate, and City Council hearings three days a week and questioning his representatives about the decisions they make on behalf of the local homeless population.

In the spring, he and Cronin sat down with Senate President Robert E. Travaglini to discuss the upcoming legislative agenda.

''That's the beauty of being registered," said Atkinson. ''You can walk right into their offices and they have to sit down and talk to you."

Travaglini called their meeting a ''reminder of who we're supposed to be helping."

''Once you become a familiar face in these halls, people identify with your cause," said the senate president in a phone interview.

''Listen, everybody makes mistakes," Travaglini said about Atkinson and Cronin. ''It was very clear that they're very passionate, very committed, and very aware that there's power in politics and that they want a piece of that power."

Atkinson says that part of their team's effectiveness in registering voters has been the personal insight about recovery that each member imparts in their pitch, a message that he thinks resonates best with men like themselves. In considering the shift to a broader, national stage, he said, they worried that their particular stories would seem out of context.

Like many of the events around the country, Boston's Cast Your Vote! drive was staffed by homeless volunteers who had been trained in local election laws, in this city by Boston Vote.

According to Secretary of State William Galvin's office, a voter can list a shelter as an address or indicate a street corner on a map in order to register, and if he or she doesn't have a Social Security number, the state is required to assign a voter identification number.

Eating ice cream under the shade of the white tent set up for the drive's party-like festivities that day, Pine Street resident volunteers Robert Futch and Thomas Todd joked about their newfound rights.

When a shelter administrator proffered Todd a sandwich-board sign advertising the event for him to slide on and take to the streets, he shook his head.

''Can we take a vote on this?" Todd quipped.

On a lull from his duties as registrar, the 50-year-old Dorchester native and former lumberyard laborer then got serious.

''I had a problem, but I came to a turning point in my life. I know firsthand that turning around isn't easy when you don't have the government working with you," said Todd, who became homeless two years ago. ''The training we need is out there, but it's scarce. It's like, there's 50 people who want to learn, but there's only money for 10. So then you have people competing with each other who wouldn't normally be competing and shouldn't be competing."

''I registered to change up and become part of society. I felt mature when I did it. I felt like I belong to something bigger," he said with a grin. ''Each member amasses the whole."

Kellyanne Mahoney can be reached at kelmahon@globe.com.