Golden State Today

Former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer said during an interview recently that the Republicans' call to challenge the vote is nothing like her and former House Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones’ challenge of the vote in 2005.

Boxer, along with Jones, objected to President George W. Bush’s re-election after the 2004 race. 

“Well there's no comparison to what Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones and I did in '05,” Boxer said in the interview. “Number one; John Kerry had conceded the race, we have a president here who's orchestrating kind of an overthrow of the election.”

Boxer said they were up front that they didn’t want to overturn the election and simply wanted to focus on voter suppression that had occurred in Ohio.

“She came to me on behalf of members of the Black Caucus; she showed my photographs of African American voters standing in line in the rain with children in their hands, some of them in their arms for up to nine hours,” Boxer said. “We found out that there were only two voting machines in some of these precincts whereas in the white areas there were 20.”

Boxer said all they wanted to do was focus on electoral justice.

“We didn't want to get any other votes; we just wanted to focus on what we called electoral justice,” Boxer said. “And after that was over - not that I was popular at the moment because senators were very angry they had to spend an hour listening to this.”

Boxer said after having their moment to discuss the issue, she and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton wrote a bill to help get resources to local governments to help with getting more voting machines, but that bill was never passed.

“I do not regret it for one half a second,” Boxer said. “When Stephanie Tubbs Jones came to my office she had been a judge before she was a member of Congress. She had tears in her eyes because of what she saw.”

Boxer said she would never regret taking an hour to talk about the right to vote.