by Robert Rackleff

Holding elections after an unprecedented natural catastrophe seemed to present insurmountab le problems. Could the city, the candidates—and the voters—pull it off?

Retired housewife Beulah Labostrie, veteran teacher Kemberly Samuels and consultant Greg Rigamer experienced different ordeals in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005—but shared similar concerns about the impact of the storm and its aftermath on the political scene in that city. The following tells their story, considers the challenges Katrina created for conducting elections and protecting voting rights and offers an account of the role played by ACORN and other nonprofits in the days before and after the 2006 elections.

As the nation learned in shocking detail, Hurricane Katrina smashed into Louisiana and Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico to create the nation’s cost-liest and most extensive natural disaster ever. The storm killed an estimated 1,836 people—destroying or damaging hundreds of thousands of homes and “laying waste to 90,000 square miles, an area the size of the United Kingdom,” according to a U.S. Senate committee report.

It also laid waste to that region’s elections systems, which have yet to recover fully. This situation jeopardized the rights of hundreds of thousands of voters, many of them minorities and poor, and many more of them displaced from their homes. State and local elections officials were overwhelmed by myriad problems ranging from destroyed equipment and voting sites to an inability to locate voters who had left the area. New Orleans was at the center of these elections problems, made urgent because its elections for mayor and other local offices were scheduled for February 4, 2006, barely three months after floodwaters receded and long before even basic utilities like electricity and running water had been restored. Moreover, by the end of 2005, only an estimated 100,000 of the city’s 440,000 pre-Katrina residents were back home, and the slow pace of reconstruction promised that not many more would return in time to vote.

	Beulah Labostrie

Louisiana legislators faced facts and postponed the city’s primary and runoff elections until April 22 and May 20. But even these later dates alarmed civil rights and community leaders, who feared that Katrina’s depopulation of New Orleans would undo decades of political and voting rights progress made by African Americans there and throughout the state. A coalition of voting rights organizations sued unsuccessfully in federal courts for a further postponement. But they had better luck convincing state and local elections officials to adopt at least some special measures needed to accommodate displaced voters. Then they organized extensive campaigns to reach and mobilize New Orleans voters living in other cities, especially Houston—even arranging for chartered buses to carry them back to the city to vote in their home precincts or at 10 satellite voting centers scattered around Louisiana.

One key organization was ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which had over 9,000 member-families in New Orleans before Katrina and some 1,200 members of the Katrina Survivors Association afterwards. Though ACORN, like other groups, was hobbled by the hurricane and flooding that scattered its members throughout the country, they received grants from Carnegie Corporation of New York and other funders to help mobilize displaced voters for the 2006 elections.

Moving slowly along a broad front, Katrina killed 1,577 people in Louisiana and 238 in Mississippi, and displaced over 700,000 residents of those two states. The storm destroyed some 300,000 homes and damaged most sewer, water, electrical and gas services to the area; even by the end of 2006, much of this damage still awaited repairs. Beulah Labostrie speaks in awe at the devastation: “It was beyond our comprehension. You couldn’t dream such a thing could happen in America,” she said.

As the April 22 and May 20, 2006 city elections approached—over seven months after Katrina—New Orleans was still staggering. For example, by early spring:

Only an estimated 180,000 people lived there, compared to 440,000 before Katrina. Many were returnees, but many others were newcomers attracted by reconstruction jobs. Those still displaced were scattered throughout the country, most notably in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Baton Rouge, with the possibility they would never return. One writer called the change: “Big Easy to Big Empty.”

Only about 60 percent of pre-Katrina utility customers had service, while the suppliers struggled to rebuild gas and electric systems in flooded neighborhoods. This was the case in large sections of the predominantly black New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward, where working streetlights and traffic signals were luxuries.

The city’s health care system had collapsed. Only three of its nine hospitals were open, totaling 456 staffed beds, compared to 2,269 pre-Katrina. Fully reopening New Orleans’ closed hospitals remains in question due to lack of funds and uncertainty about future population size. With indigent health care especially affected, the poor have often had to seek care in Baton Rouge, 75 miles away. Only about 1,200 of the estimated 4,400 physicians practicing in the city earlier were still working there in spring, 2006.

With nowhere to deliver most incoming mail and postal workers shortages, residential mail service was nonexistent in most of the city. Many branch post offices were still unusable, and thousands of customers had to trek to a makeshift trailer city next to the Superdome to collect their mail.

Landline and cellular telephone service was still spotty. New phone books distributed at mid-year by BellSouth had 100,000 fewer residential listings and 17 fewer pages of business listings. Accuracy was also a problem.

Less than a third of the city’s public schools had reopened by late summer, in time for the fall elections. By November 2006 many of the unoccupied school buildings sat virtually untouched and wide open since Katrina. Families with children were especially reluctant to move back to the city, uncertain about the education system’s revitalization.

Violent crime increased as the criminal justice system strained to keep up, to which Governor Kathleen Blanco responded by sending in state police and National Guard troops to help with patrols. Citing high crime and lack of action by government as the city’s most important problems, one-third of New Orleans residents polled in October 2006 said that they were either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to leave within the next two years.

	Kemberly Samuels

The problems were many and circular, as city leaders coped with debilitating losses of tax revenues by laying off employees, which curtailed vital services, exacerbating the difficulties of living there, which further discouraged residents from coming back and generating sufficient tax revenues.

Several stories illustrate the storm’s painful consequences for thousands of New Orleanians. Beulah Labostrie, for example, lived all of her 85 years in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, an established neighborhood of African American middle-class families. Widowed, with grown children and grandchildren, she was a stalwart of ACORN’s leadership, rising to state president. Although Katrina’s floodwaters ruined her home, she felt fortunate that she could move back in only 14 months later, once repairs by her grandsons were finished. Numerous relatives were worse off, especially the elderly ones, with no real way to repair and return. “They’re nomads, going from child to child, or relative to relative, with no way to fix up their homes,” she said.

	Greg Rigamer Photos: © Sean Gardner

Over in the Ninth Ward, veteran teacher Kemberly Samuels and her husband had to leave their flooded home to live temporarily in Houston, where she found ACORN members helping refugees like them and she decided to join. Although Samuels and her husband returned to the city nine months later, they were unable to renovate, and lived with relatives instead. Their two grown children can’t return because they don’t have housing. “The recovery is moving too slowly,” she said. “There’s too much red tape. The working class can’t come back.”

With some 75 employees in his technology and management consulting firm—specializing in demographic research and data management—Greg Rigamer was hard pressed to salvage his home and business. Both buildings were in heavily flooded areas near Lake Pontchartrain. He relocated to Baton Rouge—buying a house there for temporary lodging, which he furnished with new air mattresses—and began to reassemble his staff, connected at first only by the Internet. Now back in New Orleans, Rigamer has emerged as an expert on the impact of Katrina on voting and population shifts.

With problems so raw and crippling, by early 2006 the challenges seemed insurmountable for holding city elections as soon as February as well as statewide and federal elections in the fall, especially when the goal was to enable full participation by a scattered and demoralized populace.

Next page: By the end of 2005, only an estimated 100,000 of the city’s 440,000 pre-Katrina residents were back home, and the slow pace of reconstruction promised that not many more would return in time to vote.

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