-Caveat Lector- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57885-2000Dec11.html Let the Count Continue By Jesse L. Jackson and John J. Sweeney Tuesday, December 12, 2000; Page A47 Today the Supreme Court may be poised to find that some or all aspects of a manual recount in Florida violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It's too soon to say that a majority of the justices is bent on keeping all the votes from being counted. But it's not too soon to note the disturbing irony of the Bush campaign and Justice Antonin Scalia pointing to the equal protection clause as the reason not to count tens of thousands of ballots disproportionately cast by African Americans in Florida. The hand count ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was, in fact, the only small remedy for the massive violation of the promise of equal protection that happened in Florida on Election Day. Can anyone deny that hundreds of thousands of Florida voters have already been denied the equal protection of the laws? Wasn't that what happened when voters in predominantly minority communities had to vote using antiquated machines that weren't properly maintained? When they were given misleading ballots with faulty instructions? When they had to brave police checkpoints to get to their polling stations? When polling stations were moved in the middle of the night? When minority voters' registration applications weren't processed and when longtime voters had their names illegally removed from the voting rolls? And don't forget--while the state of Florida's election authorities did everything they could to place obstacles in the way of African American and other minority voters, other election officials in Florida were conspiring with the Republican Party to make sure that no matter what mistakes white Republican voters made on their absentee ballot applications, those voters would still get a ballot. There were dozens of gross injustices in the Florida election. The huge number of undervoted ballots, concentrated in minority precincts across Florida, was the only one for which there appeared to be a partial remedy--and that remedy was the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court on Friday. For all the rest--the police blockades and the midnight moves of polling places, the discriminatory purges--there is going to be no remedy. Now it appears, from the words of Justice Scalia, that the only meaning of the equal protection clause is that there must be no remedy at all for those who have been discriminated against. The final irony is that the equal protection clause was added to the Constitution of the United States after the Civil War for the express purpose of protecting African Americans against the efforts of state officials in Florida and other states of the South to deny emancipated slaves the equal protection of the laws. Now we are poised to have those fine, noble words become the excuse used not only to thwart the will of the people of the United States as to who should be president but to ensure that the efforts of state officials to disenfranchise the descendants of slaves will succeed. There are lots of reasons for the Supreme Court to let the count continue--deference to the Florida courts' interpretation of Florida law and the sanctity of the right to vote and have that vote counted among them. But if it comes down for the justices to the 14th Amendment and the promise of equal protection, one can only hope for the sake of the country that they consider how not counting all the votes mirrors too closely the habits of heart and mind that brought us slavery and segregation--the original sins of our nation that the equal protection clause sought to repair. The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson is president and founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. John J. Sweeney is president of the AFL-CIO. © 2000 The Washington Post Company ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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