[media-credit name=’AJ Maclean’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]Author and activist Frances Piven told a capacity crowd in Grainger Hall active reform and protest are the only way to change the present state of politics in the United States following the re-election of President George W. Bush in a Thursday night lecture.

Piven spoke after she was awarded the Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship Award from the University of Wisconsin Havens Center.

The night’s attitude was strongly partisan, as Piven began the lecture by saying, “We’re all crushed, disappointed [and] sad” after Bush’s victory last Tuesday night. However, she said, even though it is possible the election was “stolen” by the Republican Party, at least half of all American voters still voted for him.

Adding the recent election added more Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, Piven said, “We’ve got to try to understand how they accomplished this.”

The Republican Party did so well, according to Piven, because voters’ views on issues such as the war on terror and “sex” values echoed Republican propaganda.

“It was unlikely that we were going to win by the normal route of electoral campaigning alone. But that is what we tried to do,” she said. “We rallied behind Kerry, Edwards and the Democrats, and worked very hard to unify ourselves.”

“We then set out doing lots of voter registration work. We tried hard to get out the vote … and we did — 114 million people voted last Tuesday.”

Something unique to happen during this election, according to Piven, was parties trying to mobilize the electorate and enlarge the electorate, which was historic.

Piven added another major impact on the election was a campaign by the Republican Party to “suppress the vote.”

“The 2004 election opened a window,” she said, noting suppression such as road blocks in black neighborhoods to restrict voters from the polls, relocation of polling places to fool people and giving voters wrong instructions.

Piven said after the embarrassment of the 2000 election, in which the whole world wondered how a democratic leader was chosen in the courts, legislation was passed that further hurt the system.

She said the Help America Vote Act allowed local election officials to ask for identification without specifying what kind, allowed provisional ballots without telling what to do with them and provided money for computer ballot machines, or “black boxes.”

Piven grew passionate as she continued and drew her speech to a close, stressing audience members to learn from the 2004 election the importance of doing more than just voter registration in future elections.

“We should confront [American politics] with noisy and vocal resistance,” she said, adding the 21st century should change to a “democracy that embraces, as our brothers and sisters, the people of the world.”

UW junior Jeff Schiller said he attended Piven’s speech because he was interested in hearing about voter mobilization, which he has not seen in Madison for a while.

“She opened my eyes [by saying] you can’t really just obey rules and attempt to get people to notice unless you either have millions … of [supporters] or have millions of dollars.”

Piven founded Human SERVE, a group that played a major role in the passage of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which expanded access to voter registration, according to a UW release.