Thi Chi,
That was a very interesting article you posted about how blacks weren't disenfranchised in Florida in the 2000 election. Interesting in that it was written by a conservative Republican who was appointed to the USCRC by Bush and whose appointment was fought against tooth and nail by most of the commission.
You also stated there were no credible facts to support the disenfranchisement. Interesting again how you ignore the myriad articles and several books that have been written on the subject, not to mention the very sentence you highlighted in yellow about the USCRC report that "excoriates" (you do know what that word means, right?) the Florida election officials.
Here's an excerpt from just such an article in the October 04 Vanity Fair:
Amid the media frenzy after the election, one story went untold?the one in the footnote that Scalia had asked Ginsburg to delete from her dissent. In fact, thousands of African-Americans in Florida had been stripped of their right to vote.
Adora Obi Nweze, the president of the Florida State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., went to her polling place and was told she couldn?t vote because she had voted absentee?even though she hadn?t. Cathy Jackson of Broward, who?d been a registered voter since 1996, showed up at the polls and was told she was not on the rolls. After seeing a white woman casting an affidavit ballot, she asked if she could do the same. She was turned down. Donnise DeSouza of Miami was also told that she wasn?t on the rolls. She was moved to the ?problem line?; soon thereafter, the polls closed, and she was sent home. Lavonna Lewis was on the rolls. But after waiting in line for hours, the polls closed. She was told to leave, while a white man was allowed to get in line, she says.
U.S. congresswoman Corrine Brown, who was followed into her polling place by a local television crew, was told her ballot had been sent to Washington, D.C., and so she couldn?t vote in Florida. Only after two and a half hours was she allowed to cast her ballot. Brown had registered thousands of students from 10 Florida colleges in the months prior to the election. ?We put them on buses,? she says, ?took them down to the supervisor?s office. Had them register. When it came time to vote, they were not on the rolls!? Wallace McDonald of Hillsborough County went to the polls and was told he couldn?t vote because he was a felon?even though he wasn?t. The phone lines at the N.A.A.C.P. offices were ringing off the hook with stories like these. ?What happened that day?I can?t even put it in words anymore,? says Donna Brazile, Gore?s campaign manager, whose sister was asked for three forms of identification in Seminole County before she was allowed to vote. ?It was the most painful, dehumanizing, demoralizing thing I?ve ever experienced in my years of organizing.?
For African-Americans it was the latest outrage perpetrated by Jeb Bush?s government. During his unsuccessful bid for governor in ?94, Jeb was asked what he would do for the African-American community. ?Probably nothing,? he answered. In November 1999, he announced his One Florida Initiative, in which, with the stroke of a pen, he ended mandatory affirmative-action quotas by cutting off preferential treatment in the awarding of state contracts, university admissions, and government hiring. Tom Hill, then a state representative, and U.S. congressman Kendrick Meek, then a 33-year-old state senator, staged a 25-hour sit-in outside Jeb?s office. ?[The initiative was done] without any consultation from the legislators, students, teachers, the people who were going to be affected,? says Meek. Jeb wasn?t moved by their presence. ?Kick their asses out,? he told an aide. (He later claimed to be referring to reporters stationed near the sit-in.) Energized, African-Americans marched through Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. They also registered to vote. By Election Day 2000, 934,261 blacks were registered, up by nearly 100,000 since 1996.
In retrospect, the claims of disenfranchisement were hardly phony. In January and February 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the highly divided, highly partisan government-appointed group formed in 1957, heard more than 30 hours of damning testimony from more than 100 witnesses. The report, which came out in June of that year, made a strong case that the election violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The commissioners duly passed their report up to newly installed attorney general Ashcroft. Little was done.
Strong as the report from the Commission was, it did not yet have the full story. The disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida was embedded in many facets of the election?from the equipment used to the actions of key local election officials, to the politically motivated manipulation of arcane Florida law, to the knowing passivity of Jeb Bush himself.
(edited to delete the stories about Gadsden and Duval counties - the post was just tooooo long. see link below for complete text of article.)
If the Gadsden and Duval stories might be characterized as a kind of disenfranchisement by conscious neglect, a much more sinister story began to emerge in the months following the election. Throughout Florida, people?many of them black men, such as Willie Steen, a decorated Gulf War veteran?went to the polls and were informed that they couldn?t vote, because they were convicted felons?even though they weren?t.
?The poll worker looked at the computer and said that there was something about me being a felon,? says Steen, who showed up at his polling place in Hillsborough County, young son in tow. Florida is one of just seven states that deny former felons the right to vote, but Steen wasn?t a felon.
?I?ve never been arrested before in my life,? Steen told the woman. A neighbor on line behind him heard the whole exchange. Steen tried to hide his embarrassment and quietly pleaded with the poll worker, How could I have ended up on the list? She couldn?t give him an answer. As the line lengthened, she grew impatient. ?She brushed me off and said, ?Hey, get to the side,?? recalls Steen. The alleged felony, Steen later learned, took place between 1991 and 1993?when he was stationed in the Persian Gulf.
Steen wasn?t the only upstanding black citizen named Willie on the list. So was Willie Dixon, a Tampa youth leader and pastor, and Willie Whiting, a pastor in Tallahassee. In Jacksonville, Roosevelt Cobbs learned through the mail that he, too, was a felon, though he wasn?t. The same thing happened to Roosevelt Lawrence. Throughout the state, scores of innocent people found themselves on the purge list.
The story got little attention at the time. Only Greg Palast, a fringe[3], old-school investigator, complete with fedora, was on its trail. With a background in racketeering investigation for the government, Palast broke part of the story while the recount was still going on, but he did it in England, in The Observer. None of the mainstream media in the U.S. would touch it. ?Stories of black people losing rights is passé, it?s not discussed, no one cares,? says Palast, whose reporting on the subject appears in his 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. ?A black person accused of being a felon is always guilty.?
This is a long excerpt from a much longer article which also discusses the Supreme Court's role in appointing Bush and the current state of affairs at the Florida polling places. The entire article can be found here:
http://www.makethemaccountable.com/articles/The_Path_To_Florida.htm
