Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 2 | The Lost (And Found) Voters of Hurricane Katrina, page 5

The May 20 face-off between Nagin and Landrieu showed that racial polarization had set in. About 80 percent of Nagin’s votes on April 22 had come from blacks, while about the same percentage of Landrieu’s were white. It was a remarkable reversal for Nagin, who in 2002 won with 80 percent of the white vote, and only about half the black vote, against his black opponent. In the 2006 runoff, Nagin appealed openly to black voters, but also to white conservatives, with Republican help. This strategy worked, and Nagin defeated Landrieu by 59,460 to 54,131 votes, confounding most observers who had all but written him off. Reflecting the intensive campaign and mobilization efforts, voter turnout for the runoff increased to over 113,000—about 83 percent of 2002 turnout—buoyed by an increase in absentee ballots cast, mostly from out of state.

Mayor Ray Nagin speaks after being sworn in for a second term as Mayor of New Orleans on Thursday June 1, 2006.

Associated Press

But geographic disparities within New Orleans continued to show the lingering impact of Katrina. Voter turnout exceeded 2002 in the predominantly white Garden District and French Quarter—areas least affected by flooding—but dropped 23 percent below 2002 in the predominantly black middle class New Orleans East precincts and nearly 40 percent in the poorer Lower Ninth Ward where flooding had been severe.

The Fall Elections
With the city elections over, New Orleans voter interest flagged in the fall elections—even in the race for the 2nd Congressional District seat held by Democratic Representative William Jefferson, the subject of an ongoing federal corruption investigation. In the September 30 Open Primary, voters selected state senators and representatives as well as the Insurance Commissioner and Secretary of State. They also voted on 13 constitutional amendments, and approved important revisions to the system of levee boards and tax assessors.

The statewide turnout was less than 23 percent of registered voters. Without the mayoral race to motivate them, it was even lower in New Orleans. Only 31,710 voted in Orleans Parish; a dismal 12 percent of all registered voters there cast ballots on September 30, and black turnout was about half of that total.

On November 7, in the Open General Election, voter turnout in New Orleans more than doubled to 71,100 votes, or about 20 percent of registered voters. Voters statewide approved eight constitutional amendments, including consolidating seven Orleans Parish assessors into one, and they elected six members to Congress. The seventh, 16-year Representative William Jefferson of New Orleans, won only 30 percent of the vote and was forced into a December 9 runoff against his nearest challenger, state Representative Karen Carter. Their predominantly black congressional district covers parts of two parishes, and both candidates were black. The runoff concluded with a surprise victory by Jefferson, re-elected with 57 percent of the votes, reminding many of Mayor Nagin’s come-from-behind win barely six months earlier.

Throughout the fall, organizations like ACORN had continued their get-out-the-vote efforts as before, but struggled against lower national attention, less compelling races for New Orleans voters and fewer options for convenient out-of-town voting. For example, there were no more satellite voting centers throughout the state. Local voters had to make more of an effort to get to the polls, and the number of absentee ballots cast declined sharply.

Looking to the Future
The post-Katrina exodus by black residents, especially the poor, has taken a heavy toll on voter participation in New Orleans, and there’s a serious possibility that most of those living temporarily out of state will never return. National attention and extensive involvement by civil rights and community groups like ACORN and the NAACP had a strong impact on voters and provided a lift to local spirits in the 2006 mayoral race. “With less than half the population [at the time of the mayoral election], to have 80 percent of the votes cast in 2002…clearly that’s a significant number,” observed Rigamer.

Then came the fall elections. Even with im-portant issues like levee boards before local voters, the sharp falloff of par-ti-cipation in New Orleans was an ominous sign that the surge of voters the previous spring would not soon be repeated. Samuels believes that housing, jobs and services are the answer. “Housing now is so unaffordable. The working class can’t afford to move back here,” she said, adding that, with so few low-wage workers in the city, “that means that we can’t reopen things like hospitals.”

The legendary political influence on city, state and presidential elections—once held by residents of the Seventh Ward, New Orleans East and other now-familiar neighborhoods—is no more. Mobilized before by networks of political clubs, churches, civic and civil rights groups, even extended families, these legendary enclaves of civic involvement have taken a huge blow. “The middle class people who were so staunch about voting are gone. A lot of people have lost heart,” Labostrie said. “The social and political life centering on churches and clubs in Gentilly is missing,” she said. “Katrina destroyed all of that.”

While giving credit to the many organizations that pitched in during the 2006 mayoral elections, “the real heroes, of course, were the voters of Orleans Parish, who, despite unprecedented obstacles, honored our democracy by exercising their political voice through the ballot box,” the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law concluded. Those “heroes” will be sorely tested when elections for governor and other statewide offices take place in the fall of 2007, followed by presidential and other federal elections in 2008. Voter outreach and turnout efforts, election reforms and vigilant protection of voter rights ultimately cannot make up for a permanent loss of population.

For example, Orleans Parish delivered only the fourth highest vote total for a parish in Louisiana in the September 30 election, a precipitous fall from pre-Katrina counts, when the parish routinely had the largest number of voters in the state, and could assert its electoral power, supplying big majorities for statewide Democratic candidates to overcome conservative vote totals elsewhere.

However, in New Orleans, Rigamer doesn’t think that the balance of political power will shift as much as feared. About a third of the pre-Katrina population didn’t vote anyway, he noted, and returnees tend to be homeowners who vote regularly. “Who’s going to come home first, the owners or the renters?” he said.

Central to the restoration of electoral justice and inclusive politics in Louisiana is revitalization of the historic communities of New Orleans. Continued efforts to protect voting rights and mobilize the electorate are very important, but the need for massive reconstruction and renewal of that historic city is urgent and indispensable. It is this factor that will ultimately decide the future of voting rights there.

Robert B. Rackleff is a consulting writer and elected county commissioner in Tallahassee, Florida. He earlier was a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, U.S. Senator Ed Muskie and J. Richard Munro, chairman of Time Inc. He is also a retired Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer. Rackleff earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree and was a doctoral student in U.S. History at Florida State University. He is the author of “Overturning Buckley,” in the Carnegie Reporter (Summer 2000), and a 1972 book, Close to Crisis: Florida’s Environmental Problems.