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03/12/2001 - Updated 02:31 AM ET
Rights panel suspects bias in Florida vote debacle
By DeWayne Wickham
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' preliminary report on Florida's badly
flawed presidential voting was short and to the point. The sworn testimony of
more than 100 witnesses at the panel's two fact-finding hearings and weeks of
probing by commission investigators were summed up in a single sentence of
the four-page statement the body issued last week.
At this phase of its investigation it appears "that the evidence may
ultimately support findings of prohibited discrimination," the commission
concluded. Not surprisingly, the reaction from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, on
whose desk the buck for the election mess stops, quickly dismissed the
panel's finding.
Read more
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Features Who is DeWayne Wickham
Wickham's columns for Gannett News Service
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In a statement released by his office, Bush said he has "yet to be presented
with any evidence of intentional discrimination" in the voting that took
place in his state's 67 counties.
The good news buried beneath this pile of blame and buck dodging is that
we're in the home stretch of the search for answers to the gnawing question
of what went wrong in Florida. The commission's final report, which is
expected to be released this summer, likely will bring to an end the last of
the federal and state investigations spawned by widespread accusations of
voting irregularities and disenfranchisement in Florida during the
presidential election.
Answer still far off
The bad news is that it doesn't look as if we're any closer to an answer that
will dispel the widely held belief that it took an act of grand larceny to
foist George W. Bush into the White House, or rebuff the counter that those
who level this charge are a bunch of world-class sore losers.
The arguments over whether Bush or Al Gore won Florida � a victory that would
have given either candidate enough Electoral College votes to be president �
have only become more heated recently as media reports on the results of
unofficial recounts of contested ballots produce conflicting conclusions of
what might have resulted from a more complete tally of ballots cast in the
Sunshine State.
Last month, The Miami Herald and USA TODAY announced that an analysis of
undervotes in Miami-Dade County revealed that had Gore gotten the hand
recount of votes in that county, Bush still would have been declared the
winner in Florida. This report left Republicans giddy and Democrats
questioning the process.
On Saturday, the roles reversed when The Palm Beach Post reported that its
review of uncounted ballots in Palm Beach County showed that Gore would have
picked up enough votes to overtake Bush's slim victory margin in Florida, if
every ballot with a hanging chad, pinhole or dimple in that county had been
counted.
Panel looks to future
Wisely, the Civil Rights Commission is focusing on the future, not the past.
"In the final analysis, new recounts of old ballots are an academic
exercise," the panel said in its preliminary report, which was adopted by a
6-to-2 vote. "Voting is the language of our democracy and regrettably, when
it mattered most, real people lost real opportunities to speak truth to power
in the ballot box."
The commission believes that Florida officials may have consciously or
unconsciously brought about acts of illegal voter discrimination through its
use of a database of disqualified voters. The list was supposed to be used to
keep convicted felons from voting and to block votes cast by people
registered in more than one county or in the name of a deceased person.
A spokesman for ChoicePoint � the company that compiled the list � said
Florida officials directed it to include all possible combinations of names
that might help election officials ferret out ineligible voters. That list,
the commission said, kept hundreds of eligible people from voting in the
presidential election.
Preventing a repeat of this grievous error and ratcheting up the pressure on
Florida's reluctant legislature to appropriate money that counties with
aging, faulty voting machines can use to modernize their election system are
the best things that can come out of the commission's ongoing inquiry.
Getting these things done won't settle the nettlesome question of whether
last year's presidential election was won or stolen, but it will go a long
way toward ensuring that Florida won't be the epicenter of another election
debacle.
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