Five Minutes With John Edwards

Hurricane Katrina raised awareness about the desperate poverty that so many residents of the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana live in every day. But John Edwards has been talking about American poverty since long before Katrina made landfall.

After a career of representing individuals against corporations in personal injury suits, he ran for the Senate from his native North Carolina and won. Six years later, in 2004, he ran for president, making poverty alleviation and greater equality a central theme of his campaign, and he continued to do so as the Democrats' nominee for Vice-President.

Now he is pursuing those objectives as director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as Honorary Chair of the Center for Promise and Opportunity in Washington DC.

Tell us a little about your Project Opportunity college tour, why you think it's necessary, what you want it to accomplish and how?

Well, my view is that after Hurricane Katrina we have an extraordinary opportunity. The country is hungry to do something about poverty, not only on the Gulf Coast , but in America. And so many times in my life I have seen what impact students and young people can have. I saw it in the 1960s when I was a teenager -- when students led the fight for civil rights and they spoke out against the war in Vietnam. They had a huge impact on their own country, not just for that time, but forever. And I think we have that kind of opportunity available to us now.

So what I'm gonna do is go to ten college campuses to get young people engaged in fighting against poverty: to get 'em to come to the event that we have on campus, and to commit to at least up to twenty hours of community service, and to advocate for policy ideas, projects, that can do something about poverty in America. Actually in some campuses we're focused on community service and others we're focused on advocacy for policy ideas.

We have ten campuses, on every campus we have a core group of students who are doing the organizing, getting people to the event and helping determine what it is in the community we're gonna ask young people to do. So bottom line is, we're gonna get more students, more young people involved in their communities, and find that they can make a change in poverty.

In light of all the reports of voter disenfranchisement in Ohio and other swing states what are the steps you think we need to take to make sure that every vote is counted next time?

What I think is more important than focusing on the last election is focusing on moving forward and on what we should do to make sure our election system works the way it should. I think there was a lot of evidence and a lot of anecdotes in our last election about the voters being unable to cast their votes. We know there were people in Ohio that had to wait many hours just to be able to vote, while people in other areas, in some cases in more affluent communities, were able to vote in minutes -- that's not the way our election system is supposed to work. These are also some of the things we saw in the 2000 elections, particularly in Florida.

We have important work to do to make sure that everybody is confident that when they go to the polls, they'll be able to vote, and they'll be able to cast their vote in a reasonable amount of time, and they will be certain that the vote they cast was counted. Those things include making sure that we have the resources in place, particularly in poor voting precincts, to have adequate equipment -- it means making sure that we have an audit trail for the voting process.

Beyond that, I think we should take the election process out of the hands of partisan politicians and instead set up non-partisan election officials and election boards to monitor what's happening so that we know that the election process works appropriately. We live in what is supposed to be, to the rest of the world, a shining example of democracy. And we also live in the most prosperous area on the planet. There is no reason for anyone, in the process of our elections, to have a question about whether their vote counts.