- On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America
Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a
nasty civil rights time bomb.
-
- 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--about 54 percent--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--fifty Katherine Harrises--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--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--one in seven--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--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--county by county,
precinct by precinct--in direct proportion to the local black voting population.
-
- Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--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--not counted--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."
-
- So there you have it. In the last presidential election,
approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their ballots
were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November 2004, efficiently,
by computer--because HAVA and other bogus reform measures, stressing reform
through complex computerization, do not address, and in fact worsen, the
racial bias of the uncounted vote.
-
- One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black
smoke. And when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political
careers in the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day.
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- Copyright © 2004 The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040517&s=palast
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