-Caveat Lector-
radman says:
(Sorry for the length, folks. I wanted to be sure all the relevant info was
included.)
Amelia says:
> Well, I have four words on the issue of Jesse and the disenfranchised
> voters--PUT UP OR SHUT UP! <snip>
> tell the Attorney General and being a Democrat he will bring charges
> against all guilty parties.
radman says:
To start with, the Democrats couldn't care less about blacks. Please see:
1) "GORE WON'T SAY IT BUT: U.S. ELECTIONS ARE RACIST", and,
2) "A Racist Elephant in Our Living Room", both below.
Amelia says:
> Of course one can find voters whose rights were violated if one is
> fabricating them. Produce one name and address of a credible registered
> voter who will swear then were denied the right to vote in an illegal
> manner. Come on, let's hear it! <snip>
> It did not happen. Repeat, IT DID NOT HAPPEN, folks. <snip>
> So if any of you have information of people who want to pursue charges
> that their voting rights were violated, let's hear all about it.
radman says:
Public knowledge:
"The US Department of Justice inquiry, led by the department's civil rights
division,
... is focusing on allegations by black
community leaders that in the run-up to the election minorities were
targeted by
police intimidation and administrative measures which had the effect of
disproportionately disenfranchising black voters."
and,
"...the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) ... announced that it would bring its case to court on the
strength of 300 pages of testimony and 486 plaintiffs."
For the complete list of allegations, see:
<http://www.civilrights.org/policy_and_legislation/pl_issues/affirmative_action/memo1017.html>,
and which also includes:
"PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF VOTING IRREGULARITIES" by Donisse DeSouza.
For more *names*, you can contact:
BARBARA ARNWINE, [c/o Diane Gross], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
http://www.lawyerscommittee.org
Arnwine is executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights
Under Law, which has dispatched a team of civil rights lawyers to conduct
an investigation into allegations of disparate treatment of voters, voter
intimidation, and practices leading to the disenfranchisement of
African-Americans and other voters throughout Florida.
-or-
Susan Guberman-Garcia, Attorney at Law.
Phone 510-792-2639 Fax/Voicemail 510-405-2016
Email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: calculated scheme to deny voting rights to people of color
"I spent several hours this morning watching the NAACP public hearing
on the Florida vote on C-SPAN.
Having done so, it is very clear to me that there was a systematic and
calculated effort to lessen the Gore vote by denying the franchise to
as many African Americans as possible. <snip>
"The witnesses
included voters who were denied the right to vote, NAACP activists
who worked the get-out-the-vote effort all day, NAACP phone-standby
volunteers who worked the phones fielding election-day
complaints, poll workers and news media people. The witnesses
were all credible and impressive, their information detailed and often
accompanied by notes with names, dates, places. I would
not hesitate to call any of these people as witnesses
if I were handling a lawsuit on their behalf." <snip>
And, please read: 3) "Real Vote Victims: Minorities", and
4) "Allegations of voting rights violations need investigation", both below.
(Even more *names* are also cited in numbers 3 & 4.)
Amelia says:
> And the same goes for the phoney "Republican riot" that stopped the
> count in Palm Beach County. That never happened either so please
> provide names of the committee member who were intimidated by the mostly
> members of the press refusing to allow the count in secret.
radman says:
Please read: 5) "Winning By Intimidation", and,
6) "Anatomy of a right-wing riot", both below.
Pull quotes from "Winning By Intimidation":
"The mob chased down Joe Geller, chairman of the local
Democratic Party, because they falsely believed he had tried to
steal a ballot. He required a police escort to escape. Louis
Rosero, a Democratic aide, says he was punched and kicked by the
Republican goons. Others were trampled to the floor as the mob
tried to break down the doors of the room outside the office of
the Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections where the votes were being
counted." <snip>
"When it was over, the rule of the mob was triumphant.
The three canvassers voted to walk away from the recount whose
tally would likely have led to Al Gore's victory over George Bush
in Florida and in the presidential election. One of its members,
David Leahy, acknowledged the protests were a factor in his
decision. The other two, perhaps fearful of their safety,
declined all interviews. As the mob celebrated its victory, its
Republican Party masterminds transferred their mobile home/base
of operations to Broward County, where they employed the same
tactics against that county's canvassers on Friday."
Amelia says:
> Until then, there charges are basically unfounded rumors and lies. Show
> your sources and proof--not articles and opinions but actual people who
> will swear that these things happened TO THEM. They did not happen and
> to repeat that they did is disinformation and strictly typical
> Democratic spin cycle blathering. It does get old on and on based on
> nothing.
radman says:
Your ignorance is rather ugly. I've put up, now you can shut up.
Sincerely, the radman
(BTW, most of this info has been posted to CTRL previously.)
====================================================
1)
GORE WON'T SAY IT BUT: U.S. ELECTIONS ARE RACIST
By Monica Moorehead
The big-business media have strained to put a positive spin
on the weeklong stalemate in the outcome of the 2000
presidential elections. But the mouthpieces of the ruling
class have not been able to disguise the inherently
undemocratic nature of the capitalist elections.
In fact, the Bush-Gore stalemate has helped to unearth the
deeply entrenched racist discrimination suffered by Black
communities and others in Florida who were attempting to
exercise their democratic right to vote. Thousands of
undocumented immigrant workers were excluded from this
process as well.
Reports of African Americans, Haitians and others being
denied their voting rights reveal another blatant form of
racial profiling--resulting in a scandal of monumental
proportions. The mainstream media haven't begun to do
justice to the roots of this inequity, which will have a
lasting social impact no matter which capitalist politician
wins the presidency.
The Nov. 11 New York Times reported that local African
American and Haitian leaders are demanding a revote in
Florida. This is not an unreasonable demand--if for no other
purpose than to publicly expose the racist practices of the
state and local boards of elections. Consider the reasons.
Many African Americans stated that their names did not
appear on the lists of registered voters. Polling places
were so understaffed that there were not enough volunteers
to deal with all the problems and discrepancies.
State Representative Alcee L. Hastings, who is Black,
commented that the voter turnout in a number of African
American communities was as high as 85 percent and that
staffing in a number of polling areas was grossly inadequate
to deal with these large numbers.
According to the Nov. 12 Palm Beach Post, almost half of the
over 28,000 ballots thrown out in Palm Beach County were
from areas heavily populated by Black and elderly voters.
This amounted to 16 percent of the ballots cast by people of
color and 10 percent of the ballots cast in precincts where
most voters are over 65.
Roadblocks were set up by police in Volusia and Hillsborough
counties to intimidate and harass Black voters.
In Miami, four ballot boxes full of votes were "found" after
the elections. These votes came from neighborhoods heavily
populated by people of color.
BLACK STUDENTS TURNED AWAY, STAGE SIT-IN
Bethune-Cookman and Florida A&M are two important
historically African American colleges in Florida. Both held
significant and successful voter registration drives. But
when students showed up to vote, they were told that their
names were nowhere to be found on the rolls.
Those students who forced the issue wound up having to
present their driver's license or some other photo
identification. Other students became so frustrated that
they ended up not voting.
Student Ursula Harvey stated that she was turned away from a
polling place where she had voted two years earlier. Harvey
was told that she had to go 120 miles to another polling
place, which she was unable to do.
While trying to argue her point, she held up a picture of a
1960s voting-rights demonstration. The photo showed Southern
racists physically assaulting Black demonstrators.
Five hundred predominantly African American students from
Florida A&M, Tallahassee Community College and Florida State
University held a 22-hour sit-in at the State Capitol in
Tallahassee Nov. 9. Their main demand was to talk with State
Attorney General Katherine Harris, who did not have the
decency to meet with the students to hear their grievances.
Harris actively campaigned for George Bush.
The Haitian community has joined the chorus of outrage over
how they were treated on Election Day. Many Haitians said
there were no Creole interpreters to assist them in some
Miami polling stations. In others poll watchers were not
allowed to assist them. A number of Haitians were threatened
with deportation while seeking help at the polls.
Haitian voters, like African Americans, were unceremoniously
dismissed if they did not have their voter registration
cards or if their names were missing from the rolls.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed due to the pressure
that the Black masses put on the federal government at the
height of the civil-rights struggle. This civil-rights
legislation was part of Black people's ongoing battle to
finish the democratic revolution that began after the Civil
War with Reconstruction.
Over the years, the state and federal courts have eroded the
effectiveness of the 1965 act, especially in the area of
proportional representation. Voting districts with a
majority of people of color have been more likely to elect
nationally oppressed representatives. This right has been
severely restricted by the courts, which have allowed
officials to redraw the districts to guarantee a majority of
white voters.
Close to one in three African American men in Florida have
lost their right to vote because they've been branded with
the title "convicted felon." In many ways Florida is a
modern-day plantation with Gov. Jeb Bush as head slave
master.
FEDERAL GOV'T PART OF THE PROBLEM
The NAACP is holding hearings in Miami to take testimony
from those who were denied the right to vote. So far
hundreds have spoken out. The NAACP and others hope the
federal government will carry out an investigation of this
scandal. That is unlikely to happen unless a groundswell of
protest can be organized and sustained over a period of
time.
It's important to understand that the federal government is
part of the problem, not part of the solution. The federal
government is the big component of the capitalist state. It
wants to downplay any irregularities within the electoral
process, especially where racism is concerned.
The federal government--like the Gore and Bush camps--wants
to see this election resolved as quickly as possible because
it is more concerned about the political and economic
stability of the capitalist system. A mass struggle focusing
on racism, separate from the bankrupt program of Democrats
and Republicans, would be a threat to this stability.
Gore understands that the majority of African American
people in Florida supported him over Bush. The fact that he
has not spoken out against this intense level of
disenfranchisement indicates his gross insensitivity and
dismissal of the rights of oppressed people.
The bottom line is that voting for Gore or Bush does not
offer any real solution to the needs of working and poor
people. Equally important is the duty of every activist to
defend the right to self-determination of the most oppressed-
-including the right to one person, one vote. Fighting for
this right is key to building class solidarity.
It remains to be seen where this struggle for the democratic
right to vote will lead. Every anti-racist activist should
look for signs that this struggle for bourgeois-democratic
rights will help spark an independent revolutionary struggle
by the entire multinational working class for real political
and economic rights.
====================================================
2)
A Racist Elephant in Our Living Room
By Laura Flanders
There's an elephant in our electoral living room that Democratic leaders
want to hide. In all the talk about cranky voting machines, chads and
butterflies, this is one topic the Gore camp has not touched. It will hurt
them. It has already. In this case, the pachyderm is institutional racism,
and in an election of losers it has come out on top.
Consider the big picture: in election 2000, 90 percent of African Americans
voted for Gore, as did 63 percent of Latinos and 55 percent of Asians
(exit-poll data on Native Americans is unavailable but they've historically
voted Democratic.) The popular vote - that national, pro-Democrat
majority -- is disproportionately people of color. Thanks to the winner-take
all, Electoral College system, it counts for naught.
In the contested state of Florida, the Black vote was up a huge 65 percent.
In a state where thirty-one percent of all Black men may not vote because of
an 1868 ban on felons, Blacks contributed 16 percent (up from 10 percent) of
the turnout, and nine out of ten voted Democratic. Again,
disproportionately, their votes won't count.
On day one after the election, there was a story in the Florida papers about
an unauthorized police roadblock, stopping cars not a mile from a Black
church-turned- polling-booth. NAACP volunteers reported being swamped with
complaints from registered voters who had found it impossible to vote. They
heard stories of intimidation at and around polling places; demands for
superfluous ID; people complained about a pattern of singling out Black men
and youths for criminal background checks, and in call after call, would-be
voters complained they'd been denied language interpretation, and other help
at the polls.
By now it's clear that overwhelmed election workers made a mass of mistakes
but those mistakes were laced through with some clear intent to suppress
some votes. A full three weeks after the election The New York Times finally
took a serious look and reported that -anticipating a large turnout in a
tight race -- Florida election officials had given laptop computers to
precinct workers so they could have direct access to the state's voter
rolls, but the computers only went to some precincts, and only one went to a
precinct whose people were predominantly Black. The technology gap in the
no-laptop precincts forced the workers there to rely on a few phone lines to
head office. Voters whose names did not appear on the rolls were held up
while workers tried to get through on the phone, for hours, or until they
gave up.
For those who voted, there was another technology glitch. 185,000 Floridians
cast ballots that did not count. Theirs were the ballots that had been
punched too few or too many times, or were otherwise flawed. Flaws too, seem
to have followed race lines. In an election that turned on a few hundred
votes, Floridians whose ballots failed to register a mark for President were
much more likely to have voted with computer punch cards than optical
scanning machines. In Miami Dade, the county with the most votes cast,
predominantly Black precincts saw their votes thrown out at four times the
rate of white precincts: according to the Times, 1 out of 11 ballots in
predominantly black precincts were rejected, a total of 9,904.
Urban, multi-racial Palm Beach, home of the infamous butterfly ballot, and
Duval, where candidates' names were spread across two pages despite what the
published ballot had shown, produced thirty one percent of Florida's
discarded ballots (but only twelve percent of the total votes cast.) In
Duval, which has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the nation, more
than 26,000 votes were rejected, 9,000 from precincts that were
predominantly Black.
Many Floridians who found themselves "scrubbed" off the voting rolls weren't
purged accidentally, reports Gregory Palast for Salon.com. Florida Secretary
of State Katherine Harris paid a private firm, ChoicePoint, $4 million to
"cleanse" the voting rolls, and the firm used the state's felon-ban, to
exclude eight thousand voters who had never committed a felony. ChoicePoint
is a Republican outfit. Board members include former New York Police
commissioner Howard Safir and billionaire Ken Langone, chair of the
fundraising committee for Mayor Giuliani's aborted New York Senate bid. The
erroneous data wasn't their doing, ChoicePoint complains, the names came,
raw, from the state of Texas. They were supposed to be reviewed locally, but
they were distributed un-reviewed. African Americans dominate. (The 8,000
wrong names were "a minor glitch" ChoicePoint told Palast; a glitch fifteen
times the size of the Texas Governor's lead.)
As for that election morning police checkpoint, near Tallahassee, Robert
Chamber, a Black resident, told the Guardian UK he knew what it was about:
"putting fear in people's hearts…." The Florida panhandle is home to the
largest concentration of neo-confederate white supremacist groups in the US.
But this problem is no neo-nazi plot - it's racism of the institutional, not
the exceptional kind, and even more devastating than the statistics has been
Democratic leadership's silence. While African Americans in huge numbers
know there was massive voter fraud, harassment and intimidation a la Jim
Crow, the Democratic Party's white top-dogs have resolutely refused to talk
about voting rights, race or racism - Why? For fear it will hurt them in the
court of public opinion? Among white swing voters and southern Democrats?
Already hurting in all of those places, they're trifling with one of the few
solid voting blocks they've got left, (Blacks, Latinos, Jews.)
The NAACP came out strong, the weekend after the election, holding public
hearings and gathering 300 pages of legally sworn testimony from 486 people
who say they were denied their right to vote. With the Congressional Black
Caucus the NAACP wrote to Janet Reno seeking a Justice Department
investigation into possible violations of the Voting Rights Act. That was
back on November 14th. Since then, the Gore campaign has filed dozens of
lawsuits - not one deals with violations of voting rights. The Justice
Department has initiated what officials go out of their way to characterize
as a preliminary inquiry, not an investigation. (Alligator-wrestler Reno is
scared to stir the waters in her home-state, where she's hoping to retire
any day now, some say.)
The Gore team has chosen to try to eek some votes out of three counties with
manual counts, and to make much of butterflies and chards, but nothing of
race. (Recently, Gore told a reporter he was "very troubled" by the "serious
allegations." That's it.) His racist denial of the seriousness of racism
makes nonsense out of US politics.
The Electoral College is a tool of racism. As Yale's Akhil Reed Amar wrote
in the New York Times, "the College was designed at the founding of the
country to help one group - white Southern males - and this year, it has
apparently done just that."
In the years after the forced-end of slavery, former slave states like
Florida imposed those felon-disenfranchisement laws, precisely to disempower
freed-but-impoverished Blacks. The political parties crafted the statewide
primary system into what amounted to a white-man's private club to keep the
newly enfranchised under the old establishment's control. Then came literacy
tests and poll taxes - voters had to keep their tax-receipts on file -
anything to keep electoral power in white hands. For an idea of what those
tackling literacy tests faced, consider: under Jim Crow, Florida required
that textbooks used by the public school children of one race be kept
separate from those used by the other -- even in storage.
After the 1965 Act was passed, states did everything they could to dilute
Black influence. Winner-take all systems, or absolute majority vote
requirements were embraced to keep black candidates from winning over split
fields of white candidates in local races - in just the same way as
winner-take-all works in the presidential contest. More offices were filled
by appointment. Legislative and congressional district lines were redrawn to
keep black voting strength submerged.
None of this requires looking back very far: the same House Speaker, Tom
Feeney, who wants the Florida legislature to select a Bush slate of Electors
no matter what the vote-counters count, suggested reintroducing literacy
tests just two weeks ago: "Voter confusion is not a reason for whining or
crying or having a revote," said Feeney. "It may be a reason to require
literacy tests." (Palm Beach Post, 11/16.)
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who will may well be the final
arbiter of which votes get counted and which (white) man gets the White
House, is William Rehnquist, a segregationist from way back.
In 1962, Republican activist William (then "Bill") Rehnquist was the leader
of Operation Eagle Eye, a flying squad of GOP lawyers that swept through
polling places in south Phoenix to question the right of minority voters to
cast their ballots. As Dave Wagner reported in the Arizona Republic last
year, Rehnquist defended keeping African Americans out of stores and
restaurants in Phoenix. In 1964, at the Bethune Precinct, (which was 40
percent Hispanic and 90 percent Democratic) Rehnquist and Operation Eagle
Eye activists challenged every Black and Mexican voter's ability to read the
Constitution of the United States in the English language (then a
requirement.)
The result, according to one witness, was "a line a half-block long, four
abreast…They wanted people to become frustrated and leave." In his testimony
to a US Senate hearing on his appointment to the Supreme Court, Rehnquist
denied that he officially challenged anyone's right to vote. Just as today's
defenders of Bush, argue that voter error, not bias, disproportionately
shrank the counted vote, Rehnquist argued that he broke no rules, he was
just following the law.
Trying to wage politics in the US while tiptoing around racism is like
sidestepping an elephant. It's dangerous, it's not smart, and it won't work.
What suppresses the Black and minority vote suppresses the Democratic and
liberal-progressive vote. The majority of white male voters haven't polled
Democratic since 1964 and only women of color create the gender gap for
Gore. Yet the unequal distribution of resources and bias that created a
practically apartheid voting system in Florida was sustained by the
Democratic Party - who approved of the process, try as they might to blame
the Governor's cronies. And Democratic pro-drug war, pro-death penalty,
pro-felon disenfranchisement policies stoked the racist atmosphere in which
this election was held.
The conditions are ripe for a pro-democracy movement. A moment, at least:
this is it. Some things have changed in the nation since 1964, and when the
public has heard (or seen on CSPAN) the witnesses who gave the NAACP
testimony, they have been shocked. Voter protests in Florida have built a
multi-racial coalition that is advocating the kind of electoral reform the
whole nation could get behind. Among their demands: a non-partisan election
commission, standardized voting procedures and federal enforcement of the
Voting Rights Act. Add to that, the longer-term structural changes some
advocate: instant run off voting, or some form of proportional
representation, so that small parties (and minority constituencies) could
build support for their issues without throwing elections to their foes.
The public has seen the Electoral College in its worst light: for the first
time, the tyranny of a minority may contradict the popular will. Perhaps
something will come of the shared experience of disenfranchisement. But not
if we don't talk about what's at the root of it: racism. Not "the system,"
but this particular, racist one. And those who've been marginalized must
occupy the center. People of color are central to why our electoral system
is set up this way; likewise, they must be at the heart of any movement for
real democracy. We can get rid of the racism, but only if we all shove that
elephant out at once.
====================================================
3)
Real Vote Victims: Minorities
by Juan Gonzales
Columnist, NY Daily News
What will it take for the American public to realize that
Florida's presidential election last week was tarnished by
something far worse than a confusing and possibly illegal
butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County?
Black and Hispanic leaders have insisted ever since Election
Day that gross violations of the Voting Rights Act occurred
all over the state, yet the Justice Department and the media
keep ignoring the allegations.
Congress passed the act specifically to dismantle the Jim Crow
laws - including poll taxes and literacy tests - that kept
blacks from voting in the South for most of the 20th century.
Yet here is a presidential election that may be swayed because
federal law was violated in one state.
Section 11(a) the Voting Rights Act says: "No person acting
under color of law shall fail or refuse to permit any person
to vote who is ... otherwise qualified to vote, or willfully
fail or refuse to tabulate, count and report such person's
vote."
Nothing like that happened in Florida, you say?
Well, listen to these accounts.
Stacy Powers is a middle-age white woman, a former cop who is
the news director of WTMP, an AM radio station in Tampa.
On Election Day, she traveled around city neighborhoods
providing regular news reports to her station.
What she saw, Powers said, made her want to cry.
She said she entered several polling places in the black
community where people were being turned away and told their
names were not on voter lists. She tried to intercede with poll
workers, reminding them that a person can file an affidavit
and vote even if they don't appear on the list. She was rebuffed,
Powers said, and ejected from several polling places.
Later in the day, Powers saw several police cars running a traffic
check at the entrance to a polling place in another black
neighborhood. She said she watched in disbelief as two officers
searched an elderly African-American man.
Powers told her story at a public hearing held by the NAACP this
weekend in Miami, and she repeated it to me this week.
She was only one of more than a score of witnesses who told how
they had been prevented from voting. A Miami woman, Donnise DeSouza,
was told she was not on a voting list even though her newly
registered son was. She was sent to various polling places to find
her name and never was allowed to vote. The next day, she checked
with the elections board and found that her name was indeed on the
list.
Others said they were told they had been dropped from the rolls as
convicted felons, even though they'd never been arrested. Black
college students testified that they had registered this summer
but their names did not appear on voter lists.
In Tampa, a black Republican named Joe Robinson has filed a suit
contesting the results in Hillsborough County. He alleges that 1,209
absentee ballots were rejected by the county's three-member
canvassing board the day before Election Day. His suit calls for all
disqualified ballots to be inspected.
Then there is the amazing story of Jacksonville and surrounding
Duval County.
We all know about the 19,000 ballots in Palm Beach County, where
people mistakenly voted for two presidential candidates.
Well, in Duval, a Republican area, nearly 27,000 were disqualified,
22,000 of them for overvoting for President. Of those 22,000, more
than 12,000 came from four districts that are virtually all black.
The four districts, with less than one-third of all the voting
precincts in the county, had nearly 60% of the disqualified votes.
In some black precincts, more than 30% of the votes were
disqualified, said Mike Langton, head of the Gore campaign in
northern Florida.
Langton said canvassing board officials never told him about all
the disqualified votes. He learned of them when he was contacted
by a reporter a few hours before the deadline to ask for a manual
recount.
By then, the Gore campaign had already announced that it was
focusing its manual recount request on four other counties.
Isaiah Rumlin of the Jacksonville NAACP said the mix-up was caused
because the presidential candidates were printed on two pages, but
the instructions at the front of the ballot told people to vote on
every page.
Duval County had one of the highest ballot disqualification rates
in the state, 9.3%. That's triple the voided-ballot rate of the
last presidential election.
There have been so many complaints of voting-rights violations that
the Congressional Black Caucus yesterday urged Attorney General
Janet Reno to begin an investigation.
"This is a corrupted, tainted process, an attempt to steal an
election," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday during a press
conference in Manhattan.
The South of Jim Crow days has not totally changed, Jackson said.
Blacks, Hispanics and even Jews must still defend the right not
only to vote, but to have their votes counted.
While the Gore and Bush campaigns lock horns in the courts, Jackson
called for demonstrations at federal buildings across the country
- beginning today at noon in Foley Square - to demand that all of
Florida's votes be counted.
====================================================
4)
Allegations of voting rights violations need investigation
From: FAIR-L <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
November 17, 2000
Since November 7, major media outlets have devoted enormous attention to the
aftermath of the presidential election in Florida. But one critical aspect
of this story has received relatively little attention: the allegations of a
pattern of voting irregularities and discrimination against
African-Americans and other minority groups that may violate the 15th
Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Upon request from major civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the
Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Justice Department is
deciding whether to pursue a federal investigation into allegations of
significant harassment of minority voters in Florida and elsewhere
throughout the country. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 makes it illegal to
intimidate, threaten, coerce or prevent any individual from exercising his
or her right to vote.
These are some of the disturbing and highly newsworthy charges that deserve
more media attention:
--Charles Weaver, publisher of Community Voice, a Fort Myers African
American weekly paper, witnessed "intimidation, harassment and apparent
illegal activity" at a polling place he visited. ''There were illegal poll
watchers, threatening people, telling them, 'I know where you work. You're
going to get fired,''' Weaver told the Inter Press Service (11/14/00). The
same article reported that Tallahassee police set up traffic checks at the
entrance to a polling place in a black neighborhood; that police in Newport
News, Va. stopped people at checkpoints; and some black voters were turned
away from polls in St. Louis for not having voter registration cards, even
though registration cards were not required from white voters.
--In an NAACP public hearing held in Miami (C-Span, 11/11/00), Stacy Powers,
a former police officer who currently serves as news director for Tampa
radio station WTMP, spoke of witnessing numerous voting irregularities in
her election day travels through city neighborhoods. Powers testified that
she saw people being turned away from several polling places in the black
community after being told their names were not on voting lists. When Powers
reminded poll workers that an individual can legally sign an affidavit and
vote even if their name isn't on an official list, she said, she was ejected
from several polling places (Daily News, 11/17/00).
-- Miami's Donnise DeSouza testified that she was denied the right to vote
after being shuttled to several polling places and told her name was not on
the list. When she checked with the elections board the next day, she said,
she found her name was in fact on the list. Many other voters were told
they'd been dropped from the rolls as convicted felons, even though they had
never been arrested, and that names of black college students who registered
this summer never showed up on voter lists, according to the NAACP hearings
(Daily News, 11/17/00).
--According to the New York Times (11/17/00), more than 26,000 ballots were
disqualified in the largely Republican area of Duval County-- four times the
total in 1996. The Times notes that nearly 9,000 of these ballots were cast
in predominately African-American communities around Jacksonville, which
registered support for Al Gore over George Bush at a ten-to-one ratio. (The
November 17 Daily News places the number of rejected African-American votes
in Duval County at more than 12,000, nearly 60 percent of disqualified
ballots).
--Derek Drake, an editor of the black weekly newspaper Central Florida
Advocate, told the London Financial Times (11/16/00) that Haitian Americans
and Hispanics, unlike whites, were often asked for two forms of
identification. "There was either something of a conspiratorial nature going
on or there was mass incompetence," Drake said. In a recent column for the
Los Angeles Syndicate (11/12/00), the Reverend Jesse Jackson noted that
ballot boxes in black communities went uncounted, voters were turned away
after being told there were no ballots left, and Creole speakers were not
allowed to assist Haitian immigrants voting for the first time.
Such exclusionary voting practices are hardly limited to Florida, or to
racial minorities. According to a Federal Election Commission report cited
by the Center for an Accessible Society, more than 20,000 U.S. polling
places fail to meet the minimal requirements of accessibility, depriving
people with disabilities of their fundamental right to vote. (Some of their
stories are documented by the Center's magazine, Ragged Edge Online, at
http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/1100/1100votestory.htm .)
In New York City, Columbia University journalism students reported that
citywide voting irregularities included broken ballot booths, the denial of
translation assistance and insufficient instructions given to first-time
Russian voters hoping to support a write-in candidate, and the transposing
of the Chinese characters for "Republican" and "Democrat" on wall posters at
polling places and on columns in ballot machines (City Limits Weekly,
11/13/00).
As Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News noted (11/17/00), "Congress passed the
Voting Rights Act specifically to dismantle the Jim Crow laws -- including
poll taxes and literacy tests -- that kept blacks from voting in the South
for most of the 20th Century." Major media should investigate the
allegations of fraud, harassment, intimidation and voter profiling in
Florida and throughout the country, to determine whether or not the 2000
election included civil rights violations akin to latter-day Jim Crow voter
discrimination.
====================================================
5) Winning By Intimidation
<http://www.msnbc.com/news/494375.asp> (link expired)
A Republican riot squad in Miami shows GOP will try to win at all cost
By Eric Alterman
Nov. 24 — It's getting harder and harder to believe one's eyes
and ears as George Bush, James Baker and the Republicans grow
ever more brazen in their effort to seize the presidency with or
without a lawful mandate. As amazing as this sounds, it is
distinctly possible that the 2000 election will be decided by a
bunch of riotous thugs, operating under the direct control of the
Republican Party.
What was an uninspired campaign for the presidency has become an
absolutely critical fight for democracy. Gore and Lieberman must
ignore pundits and party hack who say they must surrender.
THE MOST SIGNIFICANT OUTRAGE occurred Wednesday, when
ABC News correspondent Bill Redeker discovered that Republican
operatives, working out of a Florida-based mobile home, had sent
in busloads of hooligans to shut down by force the court-ordered
Miami-Dade recount at the Stephen P. Clark Government Center.
Republican operatives also set up telephone banks to urge their
footsoldiers to join in the riot. Miami's most important
Spanish-language radio station, Radio Mambi, issued a summons to
all pro-Republican Cuban-Americans to come stir the pot further,
with charges of anti-Latino racism against the canvassing board.
INTIMIDATION AND FORCE
The mob chased down Joe Geller, chairman of the local
Democratic Party, because they falsely believed he had tried to
steal a ballot. He required a police escort to escape. Louis
Rosero, a Democratic aide, says he was punched and kicked by the
Republican goons. Others were trampled to the floor as the mob
tried to break down the doors of the room outside the office of
the Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections where the votes were being
counted.
MOBILE TERROR
When it was over, the rule of the mob was triumphant.
The three canvassers voted to walk away from the recount whose
tally would likely have led to Al Gore's victory over George Bush
in Florida and in the presidential election. One of its members,
David Leahy, acknowledged the protests were a factor in his
decision. The other two, perhaps fearful of their safety,
declined all interviews. As the mob celebrated its victory, its
Republican Party masterminds transferred their mobile home/base
of operations to Broward County, where they employed the same
tactics against that county's canvassers on Friday.
Some conservative pundits have gone so far as to celebrate
the triumph of mob rule over democracy and rule of law. Paul
Gigot, a commentator for PBS's "NewsHour" and the Wall Street
Journal editorial page, praised what he termed the "bourgeois
riot." Gigot reporting from the scene, witnessed John Sweeney, a
visiting GOP monitor, telling an aide, "Shut it down," and
thereby inspiring what he called the "semi-spontaneous
combustion" that forced the counters to "cave in."
A loyal conservative, Gigot was either unwilling to
mention or unaware of the fact that the riot had been
pre-arranged by Republican operatives nearby. Nevertheless, he
got the sequence he observed right. "The Republicans marched on
the counting room en masse, chanting 'Three Blind Mice,' and
'Fraud, Fraud, Fraud' … let it be known that 1,000 local
Cuban-American Republicans — [a group to whom violence as an
instrument of political intimidation is not exactly unknown]—
were on the way."
WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE?
Sen. Joe Lieberman calls on what he calls GOP-led protesters in
Florida to back down.
What's amazing in the few reporters other that ABC's
Redeker, that have covered this explosive story is the lack of
outrage at these tactics? Not until Joe Lieberman came out on
Friday afternoon and denounced this dangerous development did the
networks and most newspapers even notice the story. Most of the
press reports seemed to believe that the Miami-Dade counters had
simply changed their minds for no reason at all.
In fact, Wednesday's Republican-sanctioned riot is merely
one facet of a campaign that has been remarkably unabashed in its
willingness overturn democratic practices and ignore the rule of
law in pursuit of victory. House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey
has announced that the Republican-controlled House of
Representatives reserves the right to overturn the entire
election should it decide it does not like the result. "We in the
House must be aware of one fact: In the end, when the final
analysis is brought to the House, it is our duty to accept or
reject that," Armey told the Associated Press. " He is joined in
these anti-democratic threats by Senate Majority Leader Trent
Lott, who has indicted the Florida Supreme Court for allegedly
ignoring "the most fundamental principles of our democracy,"
promising, "This cannot stand."
IRRESPONSIBLE THREATS
Meanwhile the Bush campaign at the very top has been
encouragingly exactly these kinds of irresponsible threats. On
the night of the Florida Supreme Court's unfavorable (from its
standpoint) decision, James Baker greeted reporters and
intimated, "One should not now be surprised if the
[Republican-dominated] Florida legislature seeks to affirm the
original rules." As E.J. Dionne observed in The Washington Post,
"Baker's statement could mean anything from an ex post facto law
overturning the court ruling to a legislative decision to ignore
the vote counting altogether and unilaterally send a Bush slate
to the Electoral College. The message: Nice little electoral
system you have here. Too bad if anything happened to it."
STAY AND FIGHT
Democrats charge that the demonstrators in Broward County have
been carefully organized by Republican operatives. NBC's Kerry
Sander reports.
While Al Gore won the popular vote nationwide and would
easily have won the Florida vote were it not for the vagaries of
the "butterfly ballot," he is clearly fighting from a
disadvantage in this odd electoral aftermath. His party and many
of his supporters are of two minds as to whether they even want
him to win the presidency. He is being portrayed by the
Republican-leaning punditocracy as a sore loser who does not know
when to quit. This despite the fact that Gore has abjured many of
the avenues open to him through which he might fight the
Republicans' fire with fire, and has called on his opponent to
make a joint public appearance and to tone down the rhetoric on
both sides.
But Bush and Republicans want none of this. They can win,
they have decided, because they alone are willing to do what's
necessary: This includes mob intimidation, public attacks on the
judiciary, and, if it comes to this, a willingness to discard the
people's vote should it eventually be counted in their opponent's
favor.
What was an uninspired campaign for the presidency has
become an absolutely critical fight for democracy. And it is for
that reason rather than his own political prospects that Al Gore
must ignore the calls from the pundits and the party hacks that
he and Joe Lieberman surrender. History has finally given the
hyper-cautious Gore a chance to become an authentic American
hero. All he has to do to become one is take his own advice: Stay
and Fight.
----
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular
contributor to MSNBC.
====================================================
6)
Anatomy of a right-wing riot
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/riot-n25.shtml>
The Republican mob attack in Miami-Dade
By Kate Randall
25 November 2000
More details have come to light concerning the events on Wednesday at the
Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board that led to the board's decision to halt
manual recounting of ballots in the presidential election. The board's
sudden announcement that it was abandoning the recount meant that hundreds
of votes, mostly for Democratic candidate Al Gore, would not be included in
the official state-wide tally.
The protesters who mobbed the board's proceedings were not, as had been
generally portrayed in the media, a collection of "outraged citizens" and
rank-and-file Republicans who came together in a spontaneous outburst of
indignation. The mini-riot was a carefully orchestrated operation designed
by the Bush camp to halt the manual recounting of ballots that had been
authorized only one day before by the Florida Supreme Court.
According to a report on ABCNews.com, the participants were not for the
most part local party activists, but rather Republican Party operatives who
have been functioning out of a large mobile home in Miami, some having come
from as far away as Washington DC and New York City. These individuals
were tight-lipped when questioned by a CNN reporter about who was in charge
of their activities.
On Tuesday night Bush campaigners began phoning Republican Party members,
urging them to join the out-of-state operatives in an anti-recount protest
the next morning at Miami's County Hall. At 8 a.m. Wednesday, a meeting of
the board of canvassers voted to abandon a full hand recount of
Miami-Dade's 654,000 ballots and proceed instead with a hand count of
approximately 10,000 "undervotes" ballots for which no presidential choice
had been registered in the original machine count. Since most of these
ballots were from Democratic precincts, the board's action outraged the
Bush camp, which proceeded to organize a violent provocation.
A crowd of about 150 pro-Bush protesters gathered outside the room on the
18th floor of County Hall where the board of canvassers was meeting to
begin the recount. In an effort to expedite the counting process, the board
decided to move its proceedings, and the disputed ballots, to a room on the
19th floor where the general public would be excluded, but two
representatives from both the Republican and Democratic parties would be
allowed to observe.
At that point, according to a November 24 column by Paul Gigot in the Wall
Street Journal, New York Rep. John Sweeney, a Republican "monitor" on the
scene, gave the order to "shut it down." The throng of Republican
protesters moved to the 19th floor and began pounding on the doors of the
county elections department, chanting, "Stop the count, stop the fraud!"
Numerous incidents of violence on the part of the demonstrators were
reported. The crowd chased down Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman Joe
Geller, screaming that he was stealing a ballot. (It turned out he was
carrying a sample ballot.) The mob attempted to rush the doors to the 19th
floor elections office, and several people were trampled and manhandled in
the process. Luis Rosero, a Democratic aide, told the New York Times that
he was punched and kicked in the scuffle.
Key in mobilizing personnel for the Republican onslaught was the
Spanish-language radio station, Radio Mambi. In an effort to whip up a
lynch-mob hysteria, Republicans accused the Miami-Dade election officials
of deliberately excluding Hispanic precincts, areas politically dominated
by right-wing Cuban exiles that had voted overwhelmingly for Bush.
Radio Mambi reporter Evilio Cepero played a key part in fomenting the
violence, chanting over a megaphone "Denounce the recount!", "Stop the
injustice!" His calls for people to come down to the demonstration were
repeatedly broadcast over Radio Mambi, and he telephoned interviews with
Republican Party politicians that were relayed by the station.
According to Gigot's column in the Wall Street Journal, Republicans on the
scene told the besieged election officials that "1,000 local Cuban
Republicans" were on their way to the demonstration. The prospect of facing
a mob of anti-Castro fascists, who earlier this year illegally held young
Elian Gonzales in defiance of government orders to return him to his
father, and whose leading figures have been linked to terrorist actions
against Cuba, undoubtedly unnerved the canvassing board members, who had
good cause to fear for their lives.
Gigot, who in addition to penning a weekly column for the Wall Street
Journal is a regular commentator on the Public Broadcasting System's
Newshour television program, enthuses in his Journal article over the
success of the mob attack: "The canvassers then stunned everybody and
caved. They cancelled any recount and certified the original Nov. 7
election vote.... Republicans rejoiced and hugged like they'd just won the
lottery."
This provocation, utilizing an openly fascistic element within Miami's
Cuban-American population, underscores the threat to democratic rights
represented by the ultra-right forces that have come to dominate the
Republican Party. The Republicans' reliance on traveling thugs operating
out of a mobile home, employing violence and mob tactics to thwart a
court-sanctioned recount of ballots, is indicative of the methods the party
is employing in its attempt to hijack the presidential election.
In a belated response to Wednesday's events, Democratic vice presidential
candidate Joseph Lieberman on Friday issued a meek appeal for the
Republicans to curb their operatives' activities in Florida: "These
demonstrations were clearly designed to intimidate and to prevent a simple
count of votes from going forward," he said. "This is a time to honor the
rule of law, not surrender to the rule of the mob."
Lieberman's plea was the latest in a series of futile appeals from the Gore
camp for the Republicans to rein in their forces. Meanwhile, the Democrats
have discouraged any mobilization of popular opposition to Republican
sabotage of the court-mandated recount.
The Democrats are far more concerned with obscuring the fascistic character
of the so-called "base" of the Republican Party, and the danger it
represents, than organizing a defense of democratic rights, even if this
means acceding to an illegitimate seizure of the White House.
One of the crassest expressions of Democratic pandering to the Republican
right was Gore's role in the Elian Gonzales affair, when he publicly broke
with the policy of his own administration to back the efforts of the Cuban
exile groups in Miami to prevent the boy from being returned to his father.
Ironically, but not unexpectedly, these same forces are now providing the
shock troops in the Republican campaign to hijack the election.
The media has played a predictably foul role in covering for the Republican
Party operatives. Initially there was a certain note of alarm in reports
about the events at the Miami-Dade canvassing board. The networks showed
footage of the mob rampaging through the county building and banging on
doors. But the story was relegated quickly to the back burner.
There was virtually no attempt to reveal who and what was behind the mob
tactics. One MSNBC commentator argued that the protesters were simply
exercising their "democratic rights." The connection between the Republican
assault and the decision by the Miami-Dade canvassers to abandon the
recount was barely noted.
====================================================
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