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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 21, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Voting rights struggle still looms large
By Monica Moorehead
Last week, as I was reading a newspaper while riding the train into Manhattan, four African American women pointed to a front-page picture of Gov. George W. Bush. They yelled in one angry voice, "He stole the election from us."
Their reaction reflects the deep feelings and indescribable frustration of millions of African Americans across the country. In Florida Black people's democratic right to vote was trampled on by the Republicans and downplayed by the top leaders of the Democratic Party.
The outburst by these women expressed the common sentiment that if the rights of Black people in Florida are violated, then all Black people's rights have been violated.
The big-business media have focused a lot of attention on the oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court over whether or not to have a manual ballot count in Florida. But where is the genuine concern over the real issue behind this debate--the political disenfranchisement of thousands of Black people, along with Jewish and elderly voters?
The Black community is demanding answers to many questions, like: Why did so many polling places in predominantly Black areas have out-of-date voting machines that were prone to make errors? Why was there an increased police presence in these same areas on Election Day?
Why was there such an obvious absence of experienced polling volunteers to assist first-time voters in the African American and Haitian communities? What were the origins of the "ex-felons" list? And the questions go on and on.
Reports in the U.S. and international alternative media have helped to show that the Florida Republicans, led by George W.'s brother Gov. Jeb Bush, conspired to steal the election from Democrat Al Gore. The Republicans knew that Black voters would come out in large numbers to vote for Gore based on a huge NAACP voter-registration drive.
According to the Dec. 3 Washington Post, some 893,000 Black people cast ballots in Florida on Nov. 7--a 65-percent increase compared to 1996. Forty percent of them were new voters.
The Republicans understood that Black people in Florida would use the ballot to express their utter disdain for a racist governor who is pro-death penalty, pro-police brutality and anti-affirmative action by voting for a Democrat. In other words, the Black vote would be more of a symbolic anti-Bush vote than a pro-Gore vote.
Racist 'scrub list'
Bob Herbert, in a Dec. 7 New York Times column, reported that the Republicans hired ChoicePoint, a private corporation with close ties to the Republicans, and its subsidiary, Database Technologies Inc., to come up with a so-called "scrub list" of 173,000 names. Florida Attorney General Katherine Harris, co-chair of the Bush campaign in the state, eventually turned the list over to county election officials.
These were names of Black voters who could easily be invalidated. All the poll officials had to do was claim that they were "ex-felons," deceased or registered more than once. One out of three Black men in Florida do not have the right to vote due to prior felony convictions. Florida has the highest number of disenfranchised Black men in the country.
ChoicePoint has admitted that it issued an erroneous list last spring and summer of 8,000 voters who were supposedly ex-felons. As it turned out, these voters were only convicted of misdemeanors that should not have legally excluded their right to vote.
Once this list was exposed, why was there no independent investigation into the illegal, sordid practices of ChoicePoint? Why were they allowed to submit another list for the presidential election after they were exposed as being in the Republicans' pocket?
As a result of this racist conspiracy, one in five ballots in heavily Black precincts were thrown out. In some areas, one in three ballots were thrown out, compared to one in 14 ballots in white areas.
Civil-rights groups like the NAACP and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists have called for a federal investigation into the Florida voting-rights irregularities. So far U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and other government officials have ignored their demands.
In fact, the bosses of ChoicePoint and DBT, along with Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and others, should be put on trial for conspiracy to steal the election. That trial should take place in the various Black communities throughout Florida and be televised.
The 2000 presidential election debacle should be a reminder to every revolutionary and progressive activist that the struggle against racism, along with the struggle for bourgeois-democratic rights for the most oppressed, is an ongoing battle. The question of voting rights continues to be a life-and-death issue for Black people, immigrants and other marginalized communities.
The people of Florida have not forgotten that Harry Moore, chair of the state NAACP, and his wife were killed in 1951. Their house was bombed during a voter-registration drive he led.
Moorehead was Workers World Party's 2000 presidential candidate.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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