From: Michael Pugliese 
Subject: SNET: Blacklisted at the Polls
Date: 14 Dec 2000 12:24:36 -0500
To: snetnews@topica.com

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CounterPunch
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
November 16-30 2000 VOL. 7, NO.20

Blacklisted at the Polls

Beyond the obsession about defiant punch card machines, obstacle course
ballots, and pregnant or hanging chads, there are more serious issues
that, in the miles of print written about the election in Florida, have
received barely a mention: the systematic intimidation of poor people,
blacks, Hispanic, immigrants and the disabled.

Try this story related to CounterPunch by Ron Davis of Miami-Dade County.
"Our family always votes together. This year it was my turn to drive.
After work, my wife Lisa and I borrowed a van from a friend and picked up
my brother, my parents and my uncle and aunt. About a block away from the
polling place, we were pulled over by a county sheriff. He looked in the
van and asked me if I had a chauffeur's license. I said, this is my family
and we're going to vote. He said, 'You can't take all those people to the
polling place without a license. Go home and I won't write you a ticket.'
I was tired of arguing. We went home and all tried to vote later. But it
was too late."

Or how about this account told to us by Dave Crawford of Broward County:
"I showed up at the polling place with my five-year old daughter. I was
stopped at the door by an election official. He asked me my name. I told
him. He said, 'Son, we've got a problem. You're not allowed to vote.' I
asked him what the hell he was talking about. He said, 'Son, says here
you're a convict. Convicts can't vote.' He had this list in his hand. And
I told him that I'd never even been arrested in my life. I handed him my
voter ID card. He just shook his head, smiled and pointed at a list. He
never showed me my name. My daughter began to cry and I left in disgust."

On November 7, blacks and Hispanic turned out to vote in record numbers.
But tens of thousands were shunted away before they reached the polling
booth. The scenes, many of them narrated during an extraordinary 5-hour
hearing sponsored by the NAACP and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights
Under Law, harked back to the pre-voting rights act South, when black
voters were denied the franchise through a variety of schemes, from the
poll tax and character vouchers to loyalty oaths and literacy tests.

Across Florida, black voters were turned away from the polls by hostile
election workers who demanded voter ID cards, even though those weren't
required from white voters. Police set up roadblocks in black precincts
around Tallahassee. Other police intimidated voters by asking if they were
felons. Polls in black precincts closed early, often with dozens of voters
waiting in line. Other polls were moved from their original locations
without notice. Dozen of black college students who had registered this
summer weren't permitted to vote. Other voters were told that their names
weren't on the voter rolls only to find out later that they were. Haitian
voters were often asked for two forms of identification.

Stacey Powers, a former cop who is now a news director at a Tampa radio
station, spent the day visiting different polling places in Tampa's black
neighborhoods. She said dozens of black voters were turned away after
being told that their names didn't appear on the voting registers. Powers
said that when she reminded some voters that they could sign an affidavit
and then vote, she was booted out of the polling place.

"There were illegal poll watchers, threatening people, telling them: 'I
know where you work. You're going to get fired'"reported Charles Weaver,
publisher of the Fort Myers-based Community Voice.

A catalogue of these accounts was assembled and shipped off to Janet Reno,
who, as attorney general, is charged with enforcing the Voting Rights Act.
So far, the Clinton Justice Department hasn't taken one step to
investigate the charges. "This is a strange stance from the Justice
Department", said Kwesi Mfumi, head of the NAACP. "They just seem to get
colder to civil rights as the administration draws to a close."

Then there were the more than 12,000 largely black voters who were evicted
from the Florida voter rolls in May, supposedly because they were
ex-felons. In the sunshine state the system functioned in a particularly
devious way.

Nearly all of those booted off the rolls turned out not to have had
criminal records. But nearly all of them were black. Some 8,000 went
through the le-gal red tape to assert their voting rights. The remaining
4,000 didn't bother. Nearly all of those votes would have gone to Gore.
The list was prepared by a company known as Database Technologies, a firm
picked by Secretary of State Katherine Harris. As the London Guardian
reported, Database Technologies is a subsidiary of ChoicePoint, which is
has been under investigation for misusing personal information gathered
state computers. ChoicePoint's beleaguered CEO, Rick Bozar, made a timely
$100,000 contribution to the Republican National Committee early this
year.

Even those who made it inside the polling booth found out later that their
votes didn't tally. While the press and the Gore pr machine raged about
the injustices done to Jewish voters by the infamous Butterfly ballot, the
real story, even in Palm Beach County, was the effort to suppress the
black vote. Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell, who speaks venomously of
the Gore machine, was one of the first to point this out. "I looked at
those precincts," said Caddell. "And it struck me that most of them were
in predominately black areas. Of course, they would be just as unlikely to
vote for Buchanan as the Jewish retirees. But the Gore people made a
deliberately effort to spin it as a case of 4,000 elderly Jewish Democrats
being duped into voting for a Nazi." A similar point was made by Adora
Ori, the president of the NAACP's Florida chapter. "A closer examination
has to be made. The precincts that have the most irregularities at this
point seem to be black and minority."

The Democratic Party has displayed a marked disinclination to make any
political capital out of the denial of black and Haitian voting rights in
Florida. After a couple of days hammering the issue Jesse Jackson was
evidently told to cool it. In Duval County, a Republican stronghold, about
25,000 votes were tossed out by the canvassing board. More than 17,000 of
those came from black precincts. "That so-called voter error rate raises
real questions about what was going on up there," says Kendrick Meek, a
Florida state senator from Miami. Duval County has one of the highest
illiteracy rates in the United States. More than 47 percent of the voting
age population is considered functionally illiterate, making it nearly
impossible for them to comprehend Florida's obscure ballot. Top to it off,
according to numerous accounts, election workers regularly demeaned as
being "dumb and retarded" those voters who asked for help.

Throughout Florida, more than 187,000 votes were dismissed, more than half
of them from black precincts. Nationally more than 2.8 million ballots
were eliminated, often because of some trifling error by the voter. A
disproportionate percentage of these discarded votes originated in black
and Hispanic precincts.

Although more than 95 percent of blacks supported Gore, election offices
controlled by Democrats seemed just as determined to suppress the black
vote as Republicans. Listen to this account from Palm Beach County
resident Marie Didier. "My husband and I moved to Palm Beach from New York
City eight months ago. We had just retired as public school teachers. We
registered to vote at the motor vehicle department when I got my license.
Months went by and we never received our voter cards. About six weeks
before the election I began to get nervous and called the DMV. They said
it wasn't their problem and that I should contact the election office. I
drove down there. They had no record of us. I said, 'I want to re-register
now.' The woman told me to wait a few weeks and see if the card came. We
waited. It never came. The week before the election, I went in again. They
said, 'Do you have any proof of how long you've lived in Florida.' I gave
showed them my driver's license. They said that wasn't good enough. I got
mad and left. Then I called the state election's office. They said they
didn't have time to deal with a minor issue like this. It was the first
time I haven't voted in 30 years."

Didier was not alone. In West Palm Beach the votes of more than 2,000
re-cent Haitian immigrants were rejected because of the maze-like ballot
and the lack of Creole interpreters. "There were lots of Spanish
translators to make sure all of the Cubans voted, but none who spoke
Creole", Ken Murtaugh, a poll watcher in West Palm Beach, tells
CounterPunch. "Most of them were utterly confused. Others just walked
away. It was pathetic. They were treated as being subhuman." In other
counties, Haitians were harassed for their voter identification cards or
told that their names couldn't be found on the voter rolls. Others were
threatened with deportation. In one precinct with Creole translators,
election officials ordered the interpreters not to speak to Haitian voters
or risk being tossed from the polling place.




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