What does it mean to live in a democracy? The citizens of the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Iraq are asking and answering that question at great cost.

Yesterday, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, with the aid of Democratic California Sen. Barbara Boxer, interrupted business as usual on Capitol Hill in order to force Americans to face this same challenge. House Democrats who challenged the electoral votes from Ohio knew they would not alter the results of the presidential election. They simply hoped to pause the grinding machinery of government long enough to examine the operation of American democracy.

Interrupting the electoral vote count has occurred only twice before in our nation's history. It happened in 1969 because of a single rogue elector. Far more critically, the votes of the Electoral College were challenged in 1877 when a razor-thin election between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden generated a congressional deadlock. Congress eventually retreated behind closed doors, where Southern Democrats conceded to Hayes' presidency in exchange for the end of Union occupation of the defeated Confederacy.

This compromise cleared the path for Southern states to institute Jim Crow. Freed from the oversight of the federal government, the South used the rhetoric of states rights to strip black men of their right to vote, to segregate public accommodations, to provide inferior education to black citizens, and to allow and promote the terrorist rule of lynch-mob violence.

African-Americans learned from the unholy alliance of the Hayes-Tilden compromise that the rights of citizens can never be left to unexamined processes in Washington or in the states. The Democrats who objected yesterday were castigated as lunatics and undignified extremists. Their opponents lamented that their actions were pathetic, and advised these representatives to "get over it" and allow the Congress to get back to work. The reality is that democracy is messy, difficult and often dangerous. When the revolutionaries of the American colonies took up arms against King George, it was not to establish a more efficient government. When the soldiers of the Union marched into battle, it was not to ensure that the federal government would always run on time.

When old men and young girls fell from the force of fire hoses in Birmingham, Ala., it was not a struggle for bureaucratic convenience. These were sacrifices made to create, protect and extend the right of people to govern themselves and to hold accountable the governments instituted among them.

The issue at stake is simple. On Nov. 2, voters cast ballots in 50 separate and unequal elections. Not only do voting procedures, machinery and oversight vary tremendously among the states; they also differ precinct to precinct. The evidence is clear. We live in a nation where it is systematically more difficult for some citizens to exercise their right to vote.

There is no question that these citizens tend to be black, brown, poor and urban. Such glaring disparities in our electoral system demand both a full accounting and a remedy. Yesterday's floor debate was a first, tentative step in that process.

Four years ago African-American representatives challenged the electoral vote in Florida, hoping to provoke this same discussion. In a scene now made famous by Michael Moore's "Farenheit 9/11," not a single senator would join the members of the Congressional Black Caucus in their fight to address these core issues of democracy. This year the story was rewritten.

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) proudly announced "a senator has signed the objection." It was a potentially important moment for the Democratic Party.

As senators such as Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois consider possible presidential bids, they will have to decide if they will be cowed by the Republicans or if they will follow Boxer's courageous example and join in the fight to protect our basic liberties. Clinton and Obama did speak supportively on the Senate floor about the election challenge. But Boxer was the only senator to vote to sustain the objection. Thirty-one House members voted to sustain it.

The coming year will reveal if others will find the moral courage to reframe our nation's political debates. The words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. should silence those critics who dismissed today's debate as a distraction. "Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right."

Melissa Harris Lacewell is assistant profesor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of "Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought."

© 2005 Newsday, Inc.

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