|
Blacks deterred from voting 2000 elections { May 24 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artikkel?SearchID=73173631826257&Avis=SH&Dato=20040524&Kategori=ZNYT02&Lopenr=405240691&Ref=ARhttp://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artikkel?SearchID=73173631826257&Avis=SH&Dato=20040524&Kategori=ZNYT02&Lopenr=405240691&Ref=AR
Article published May 24, 2004
Reassurance for Florida Voters Made Wary by Chaos of 2000
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
New York Times
SAWDUST, Fla., May 20 The party had barely begun when Shirley Green Knight arrived with her optical-scan voting machine, lugging it out of a pickup truck and stationing it between the D.J. and the food tent. The sight was no longer strange to the people of Gadsden County, where Ms. Knight, the elections supervisor since 2001, attends most communal gatherings with the machine and a gently pleading message: Your vote will count this time, so please, please come out.
Gadsden County, a quiet stretch of tomato fields and piney woodlands hard against the Georgia border, had the highest rate of disqualified ballots in Florida in 2000: 12 percent of those cast in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Almost 2,000 county residents voted in vain that year, and cynicism still courses through the heavily Democratic county of 45,000, as regular as summer rain.
"All my life I have never seen the TV stations declare a winner, then change their minds," said Greg Johnson, a fourth grade teacher in Quincy who still wonders if his ballot landed in the scrap heap. "The Supreme Court decided that election, not us. I like politics, but people in power can get away with stuff and I'm just not sure this time."
As Election Day 2004 draws near in a battleground state whose 27 electoral votes could prove crucial to the victor once again, a movement is rising in poor black communities to register and to educate, reassure and entreat. A top goal is to change the mindset of people like Mr. Johnson, who still harbor deep suspicions about everything from the accuracy of voting equipment to how polling places are chosen and what role Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, will play in Florida's outcome.
"It's no longer as simple as saying, `You're of age, you're a citizen, you're duly eligible to vote,' " said Andrew D. Gillum, an organizer with the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in Tallahassee, where he is a city commissioner. "Instead we're having to convince a lot of people who are thinking, `Why bother, it won't matter anyway.' "
People for the American Way is training volunteers to fan across the state's northern swath, registering and reinvigorating black voters from Jacksonville to Pensacola. Its African American Ministers Leadership Council is recruiting church members for "Jericho walks," nonpartisan door-to-door efforts not only to register black voters, but also to quell their fears of disenfranchisement and to dispel myths that have circulated since 2000.
The Southern Florida A.F.L.-C.I.O. and other labor unions are also concentrating on black neighborhoods with mailings and registration drives, pushing the concept of early voting for people who work long hours and might otherwise skip it. And black politicians are working to build excitement about the election in their communities, with many tapping into many black Floridians' dislike of Governor Bush.
Despite the lingering suspicion among blacks, intentional disenfranchisement was never proved, and blatant voter intimidation now seems to have been far more limited than first reported. In Gadsden County, as in Palm Beach and Duval, the root problem was a confusing, badly designed ballot not a butterfly, as Palm Beach's winged disaster was called, but a "caterpillar ballot" that spread the presidential candidates among two columns, so that many voters mistakenly marked two names.
Gadsden is the only majority-black county in Florida and one of the poorest, with high unemployment and illiteracy rates and, in 2000, an outmoded voting system that had been in place for decades. Its demographics are similar to parts of Duval, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and other counties that had high rates of ballot spoilage: an investigation by The Miami Herald and USA Today found that 83 of the 100 precincts with the largest numbers of discarded ballots were majority black.
Anger, shame and fear roiled those precincts afterward, fueled by reports of police roadblocks near black polling places, poll workers turning black voters away and the mysterious disappearance of registered black voters from the rolls. As the extent of Gadsden's problem was discovered, television cameras descended, conspiracy theories brewed, and Gadsden County became an object of national ridicule that haunts it still.
"My friends out of town say, `You all are the reason we have Bush in office,' " said Rutha Black of Quincy, who attended the party where Ms. Knight, the elections supervisor, set up shop on Thursday, celebrating the day the Emancipation Proclamation was formally read in Florida in 1865.
Blacks in Gadsden said their electoral distrust was compounded by a sense that whites, who have dominated local politics for most of the last century despite being the minority, do not make decisions in their best interest. Ms. Knight lobbied the mostly white county commission to add more polling places when she took office, since some residents had to drive 20 miles to reach theirs. But the commission resisted until a black candidate unseated a white member and swung the vote.
Representative Kendrick B. Meek, a Miami Democrat who is chairman of Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in Florida, said that reassuring black voters was also a top priority for the campaign, as is educating them about how to use the new voting equipment. Most counties now use either touch-screen or optical-scan voting with precinct-level tallying, which they say leaves far less room for error.
Statewide turnout among registered blacks soared to 72 percent in November 2000, by some estimates an increase of nearly 50 percent over 1996. An intensive field operation by labor, advocacy groups and black lawmakers like Mr. Meek helped, as did the fact that Jeb Bush had just ended affirmative action in state education. But in 2002, when Governor Bush faced re-election, black turnout plummeted to 43 percent. He defeated the Democratic candidate, Bill McBride, in a landslide, after the Democratic Party wrongly assumed residual anger from 2000 would mobilize the faithful by itself.
Republicans, who are also courting black voters in some parts of Florida, say the Democrats and their supporters are recklessly rekindling bad feelings that were based on mostly false allegations. They say rumors of black voter intimidation in 2000 remain grossly exaggerated: a Florida Highway Patrol investigation of an unauthorized police checkpoint near a precinct in a black neighborhood outside Tallahassee, for example, found no evidence that it delayed or prevented blacks from voting.
"There is a tendency to exploit our community on the assumption that they won't go find out the facts for themselves," said Andre Cadogan, chairman of the newly formed Black Republican Caucus of Palm Beach County. "One would have to wonder, is it just to inflame a community and distract them from going out there and voting on the issues?"
The real problems in 2000, people like Mr. Cadogan say and several investigations have echoed were faulty equipment and voter error, issues that elected officials and advocacy groups have been addressing, with varying energy and success, ever since. In the 2002 primary, Miami-Dade and Broward counties experienced widespread problems with new touch-screen voting machines, partly because of poorly trained poll workers.
On the other hand, only a few glitches marred this year's Democratic presidential primary in most Florida counties, an improvement due largely to diligent elections supervisors like Ms. Knight, who replaced someone who had held the office for 20 years. Retraining poll workers, sending out sample ballots and toting her demonstration voting machine to church fellowship halls, town carnivals, high school classrooms and anywhere she can appeal to large groups has paid off: Gadsden had a 40 percent turnout in its municipal elections last year the highest in its history and 58 percent in the 2002 general election, much higher than the state average.
Ms. Knight, Gadsden's first black elections supervisor, counted only 14 "overvotes," in which more than one candidate was marked for the same office, in 2002, and only 2 in the March primary. She is aiming for a 70 percent turnout and a zero error rate in November.
"Every population has gotten the feel of that machine," said Ed Dixon, a Gadsden County commissioner. "Sometimes it's awkward when Shirley shows up at these events, but people say, `If she's taking it way out here then there must not be anything to hide.' "
Yet suspicion about the new machinery is one problem groups like Mr. Gillum's People for the American Way are encountering as they canvass black neighborhoods, especially in rural North Florida counties where black voter outreach has often been nonexistent. Many, he said, also deeply distrust Florida's process of removing felons, who lose their voting rights when convicted, from the rolls. Each county gets lists of potential felons from a central database, and is supposed to determine whether the information is accurate.
But in 2000, the counties mistakenly purged an unknown number of legitimate voters from the rolls because of faulty data.
Ms. Knight said she would go out of her way to check the list of over 200 potential felons her office received from the state, even if it meant knocking on doors herself. But toward dark on Thursday, as the D.J. reminded partyers to register between dance hits, she finally put her clipboard down, smoothed her red, white and blue scarf and found a plate of food.
"What a day," she sighed, and eased herself off duty for a while.
|
|
