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Photo by Tracie Morris/Donn Young Studio
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Myron Barnum's official residence doesn't look
like much. "I live right about there," he says, pointing. It's a waist-high
section of concrete wall, ornamented this evening by a row of plastic go-cups
and occupied by a few seated people -- all homeless men and women.
Barnum spends much of his days and most of his nights here
in this part of Jackson Square's pedestrian plaza. So it's home in a very practical
sense. It's now also his home officially, according to his Louisiana voter-registration
form.
In many cities, homeless people like Barnum routinely register
to vote by mapping out the location of their "home," whether it be park bench,
cardboard box or doorway. Not in New Orleans. That's because Louisiana is one
of two states (Virginia is the other) that doesn't allow homeless people to
vote without a specific street address.
In early October, it seemed as though Barnum had leapt that
hurdle to become the first local homeless man to successfully register with
what is known in voter lingo as an "non-traditional address" -- namely, his
spot on the street. Last week, Barnum discovered that his triumph was incomplete.
A Gambit Weekly public-records request revealed that the Orleans Parish
Registrar of Voters had not registered Barnum according to the map he'd drawn,
which would have allowed him to vote in the French Quarter -- in Ward 5, Precinct
1. Instead, he had been placed in a different area -- Ward 2, Precinct 4 --
at the street address for the Multi-Service Center, a daytime drop-in center
for the homeless.
And so last week, Martha Kegel, a staff attorney at the New
Orleans Legal Aid Corp. (NOLAC), found herself in discussions with Louisiana
Assistant Attorney General Angie Rogers LaPlace. Kegel represents homeless people
in civil matters and is a co-counsel in Barnum's case, along with Charles Delbaum
from her office and Judson Mitchell from the Loyola University Law Clinic.
Kegel's discussion with LaPlace concerned two issues, she says.
"We're asking them to correct his registration, which is clearly erroneous.
But most importantly, we're asking that they change the policy of not allowing
unsheltered homeless people to vote."
LaPlace would not comment for this story because it could involve
litigation. For her part, Kegel says that it's distressing that her services
were even required. "I think it's a shame that a homeless person needs to find
a lawyer in order to register to vote," she says.
In early October, as Hurricane Lili was gathering steam in
the Gulf, Kegel and Delbaum were putting the finishing touches on the voting-rights
lawsuit that they were preparing to file on behalf of Myron Barnum.
"On September 16, 2002," reads the prepared
lawsuit, "Mr. Barnum went to the City Hall office of the Orleans Parish Registrar
of Voters with the intention of registering to vote in the November 5, 2002
federal and state elections. ... Mr. Barnum attempted to fill out the voter-registration
card he was given. He was told that because he is homeless and does not live
at a shelter, he would not be allowed to vote." According to the prepared filing,
Barnum was told that he would not be allowed to vote without a numbered street
address.
The suit alleges that the defendants -- Commissioner
of Elections and Registration Suzanne Haik Terrell and Orleans Parish Registrar
of Voters Louis Keller -- "have refused to permit Myron Barnum to vote solely
because he is a homeless individual without a traditional residence." This,
according to the filing, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution.
About a week prior to the Oct. 7 voter-registration
deadline, Delbaum, following federal-court guidelines, called the Louisiana
Department of Elections and Registration to notify them of the pending lawsuit.
Suddenly, the lawsuit wasn't necessary. "Their attorney got back to us and said
that they were willing to allow Myron to register to vote," says Kegel.
For Barnum, the outcome was mixed. "I won
and I lost," he says. He did feel a sense of victory, he says, when he submitted
his voter-registration form with his Jackson Square "home" indicated on the
form's standard map. On the other hand, Barnum explains, the next homeless person
who tries to register with an untraditional address could easily be rejected,
because the old voting laws are still in place. "They used a quick fix to a
big problem," he says.
With his close-cropped hair, fresh shave,
loafers and sweater vest, Barnum looks more like a college professor than a
homeless person. He was born, he says, in 1957 in Chicago, "at Michael Reese
Hospital, 3900 South Ellis." He graduated from "Mount Carmel High School, 6410
Dante," and then received a degree in business administration "from Roosevelt
University, 610 South Michigan."
After college, Barnum worked a variety of
jobs, often in the hospital or pharmacy fields. At one point, he read in the
newspaper that the Veteran's Administration hospital needed IV technicians to
prepare chemotherapy drugs. "I got the job," he says with a grin. "I read a
book about it first. We're strange people -- bipolar people." He was first diagnosed,
he says, in 1985.
Barnum says he had never been homeless before
this summer in New Orleans. He also says he had never been arrested. Then on
Labor Day, Barnum was arrested and charged with criminal trespassing while walking
through a parking lot near the Jackson Brewery with two other homeless men.
"I was with the 'wrong' people -- Tiger and Pops," he says. The cop said, 'What
are you doing with them?' I said, 'I can't be with people?'" He was soon
handcuffed and taken to Orleans Parish Prison. The charges were dropped four
days later.
It's been a difficult summer for Barnum. Right
now, he's in a stage of his disorder called "rapid cycling." He's not currently
taking medication -- "I just ride it out,' he says -- because lithium made him
feel more crazy and a combination of new prescription drugs that had helped
him in another city is not available to him through Charity Hospital.
When Barnum is "extremely manic," he travels.
"I can hear the world calling me and I get up and go somewhere," he explains.
Which is why, during the last few decades, Barnum has lived in more than 40
states -- and has voted in about 20 of those. "Of course," he adds, "before
this, I always had an address."
As Barnum was trying to register, several
people, including one in City Hall, he says, told him that he should just "find"
a street address to use. "What a novel idea," says Barnum wryly. "A homeless
person with an address."
"If they sleep on top of a heat grate, homeless
people here in D.C. are allowed to vote," says Michael Stoops. Stoops is director
of community organizing for the D.C.-based National Coalition for the Homeless,
which sponsors a voting-rights campaign called "You Don't Need a Home to Vote."
Since its inception in 1992, the campaign
has convinced 10 states to pass laws confirming homeless people's unequivocal
right to vote. Thirteen states already had such laws in place. Two dozen more
states have verbally concurred. In the early 1990s, a similar bill was introduced
in Louisiana by then-Senator Marc Morial. It did not pass.
"I think that some legislators worry about
fraud," says Stoops, explaining why elected officials might oppose such a bill.
"I think that they also worry about homeless people being used a political pawns."
Stoops notes that the Gore campaign in 2000 was criticized because one of their
donors was giving homeless people in Milwaukee a pack of cigarettes if they
registered.
Stoops thinks that those worries are largely
unfounded. The courts have agreed. A series of decisions in the last few decades
have supported the right of homeless people to register to vote where they live,
even if it's a non-traditional address.
In Stoops' opinion, the voting barriers faced
by the today's homeless in Louisiana follow in the same ignominious tradition
as poll taxes and literacy tests. "Homeless people are today's disenfranchised
population group," he contends. "If you don't have a normal domicile, you aren't
eligible to vote."
The Louisiana Legislature has a long history
of allowing questionable voter registration practices. There are, of course,
the historical injustices, like the circa-1960s Louisiana "interpretation test,"
which required a potential voter to interpret a section of the state or federal
constitution to the voting registrar, who had ultimate discretion as to whether
the interpretation was satisfactory.
Just five years ago, the ACLU Louisiana opposed
a bill that would have denied the right to vote, in certain elections, to people
who didn't own property.
Only one opinion has been written in Louisiana
about the voting rights of homeless people. In 1999, Louisiana Attorney General
Richard Ieyoub wrote a four-page opinion about whether a residence at a park
or under the Mississippi River Bridge would "satisfy Louisiana's residency requirements
for the purposes of voter registration." In Ieyoub's view, it did not.
Homeless advocates have long felt that this
opinion needed revisiting. In one perplexing section, the opinion questions
"whether a residence at a park or under a bridge is legal, as our Criminal Code
provides a crime of vagrancy when persons loaf the streets or loiter public
places without lawful business or reason to be present." The Louisiana vagrancy
statute cited in support of this argument had been declared unconstitutional
back in 1970.
Some portions of Ieyoub's opinion helped homeless
people by clarifying crucial issues. For instance, he wrote that "a homeless
individual may use a shelter as his residence for the purpose of registering
to vote." Registered-voter rolls obtained by Gambit Weekly show that
more than 1,000 homeless people are currently registered at the street addresses
of local shelters.
But the so-called "unsheltered" -- the people
on the streets -- are clearly denied the vote in this state. Even Louisiana's
voter-registration application reflects that denial. Kegel picks up a uniform
voter-registration application, created by the 1993 National Voter Registration
Act for use in every state. Like every other state that requires voter registration,
Louisiana uses a version of that form today. Except in Louisiana, one key phrase
is missing.
The federal version of the application reads:
"If you live in a rural area but do not have a street number, or if you have
no address, please show on the map where you live." On the Louisiana version,
the clause "or if you have no address," is omitted.
Barnum is standing firm until this form and
the pertinent voting laws are changed. Even if the state of Louisiana refuses
him, he says, it will have to confront his situation again and again. "Hundreds
of times," he predicts. That's because Barnum plans to form a coalition of homeless
people in New Orleans. Some of the coalition's first efforts will focus on wrongful
arrests and on voter registration, with an emphasis on people without addresses.
"It's everybody's right to vote," notes Barnum.
And it's an especially precious right for him and other homeless people, he
says. "Because if I can't vote and let anyone know how I feel, they will really
never hear me."
He takes a scan around at his surroundings.
"Look," he says, gesturing at his cohorts in their hand-me-down clothes. Barnum
has no political clout, he says. No wealth. He doesn't have much more than the
clothes he's wearing and the contents of his black canvas briefcase.
But he does have a vote. "I think that politicians
feel the power of the vote more than anything else," he says. "Because that's
how they get their paycheck."
