Quote from Nolan-Vinny-Sam:
First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000
presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in
coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election
supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly
ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those
on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent.
Notably, more than half â about 54 percent â are black or Hispanic.
You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's
no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's
operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only
blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar
search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every
state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of
computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of
state â fifty Katherine Harrises â to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.
The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000
of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP
lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise
from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly
scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to the
courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the computerized
lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably tagged totals
91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught up with Steen
outside his office at a Tampa hospital. Steen's case was easy. You can't
work in a hospital if you have a criminal record. (My copy of Harris's hit
list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close enough to cost Willie
Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case to the court as a
prime example of the voter purge evil.
The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won
his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under suspicion?
What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb called him? Steen,
unlike our President, honorably served four years in the US military.
There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his record: Steen remains an
African-American.
If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First, there's the
chance your registration card will simply be thrown out. Millions of
minority citizens registered to vote using what are called motor-voter
forms. And Republicans know it. You would not be surprised to learn
that the Commission on Civil Rights found widespread failures to add
these voters to the registers. My sources report piles of dust-covered
applications stacked up in election offices.
Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a felon. In
Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub sheets, some
600,000 residents are legally barred from voting because they have a
criminal record in the state. That's one state. In the entire nation 1.4
million black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of the
nation's black male population.
At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of 1965
guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote â but it did not
guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in seven
cases, they aren't.
Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has
the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the
highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in
eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is
white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a
spoilage rate of one in 500).
How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do
it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his
name. Their votes did not count.
Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the
Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled
ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the
commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes
â one in seven â were "invalidated," i.e., never counted. By contrast,
only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled.
Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused to
count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra applied
to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000, of the
votes "spoiled" were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90 percent
chose Gore. The nonblack vote divided about evenly between Gore and
Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these ballots, Al
Gore would have racked up a plurality of about 87,000 votes in Florida
â 162 times Bush's official margin of victory.
That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election, 1.9
million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical reasons,
like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on. The
reasons for ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious shading to the
ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of Harvard experts
discovered that just as in Florida, the number of ballots spoiled was â
county by county, precinct by precinct â in direct proportion to the local
black voting population.
Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's â both in the percentage of
voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots
don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to
have their vote spoiled â not counted â as a white voter," explains
political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report.
"National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the
proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears that
about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes,
were cast by nonwhite voters."
Ok. Good long memorial weekend to all

[/B]