One person, one vote?
Police intimidate Black voters in Florida
By Monica Moorehead
The "one person, one vote" struggle, raised decades ago by
the civil rights movement, continues in both urban and rural
areas, north, south, east and west. But more often than not,
those who are systematically denied this right in
disproportionate numbers are located in the Deep South.
The main battleground for this ongoing struggle happens to
be none other than Florida, the state where, in the year 2000,
thousands of Black voters and others had their votes stolen so
George W. Bush could get to the White House. This scandal took
place with no serious intervention from white leaders in the
Democratic Party, including then-presidential candidate Al
Gore.
Not too much has changed in four years and may, in fact,
have gotten worse. Several months ago, it was reported that
Florida officials--especially Glenda Hood, who replaced the
infamous Katherine Harris as secretary of state--had used
fraudulent methods to remove former felons from the voting
rolls.
Florida leads the country in barring convicted felons, the
majority of whom are Black and usually vote Democrat in that
state, from the right to vote. Felons who served out their
prison terms and eventually won back their right to vote
through an appeals process were still illegally kept off the
voting registration rolls.
In a series of columns, Bob Herbert of the New York Times
reports that Florida police, acting hand in hand with state
officials, have been carrying out a systematic campaign of
intimidating elderly Black voters, especially in Orlando.
The police visited members of the Orlando League of Voters,
using the excuse that they were investigating "absentee ballot
fraud" during the mayoral election in Orlando in March. State
troopers went into the homes of these active voters and then
purposely took off their jackets to expose their weapons while
asking insinuating questions.
Herbert wrote on a discussion he had with Geo Morales from
the Department of Law Enforcement about this investigation. "I
asked Mr. Morales in a telephone conversation to tell me what
criminal activity had taken place. 'I can't talk about that,'
he said. I asked if all the people interrogated were black.
'Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking
at--yes,' he said. ... 'Most of them were elderly.'
"When I asked why, he said, 'That's just the people we
selected out of a random sample to interview.'" (New York
Times, Aug. 16)
This past May, says Herbert, the same department admitted
that there was no basis for conducting this allegation of
fraud. This admission was too little, too late, since the fear
of being arrested had been instilled within many of these same
voters by the police. (Aug. 20, "Voting While Black") This type
of racist terror by the police will surely have an impact on
the Florida vote on Nov. 2 and beyond.
Elections by themselves don't change material conditions;
only mass movements have achieved better living conditions for
working and poor people, including raising political
consciousness.
However, with the presidential elections less than a month
away, the "Anybody But Bush" phenomenon continues to
momentarily put the brake on mass organizing around many
important issues--most notably the anti-war struggle to get the
U.S. out of Iraq.
But workers from all over the country will be descending on
Washington, D.C., on Oct. 17 to support the demands of the
Million Worker March, including those who will eventually hold
their noses and cast their vote for the "lesser evil"
candidate, John Kerry.
The MWM will be a welcome breath of fresh air, with its
timely and correct call to build an independent workers'
movement and its call to bring the troops home now.
Reprinted from the Oct. 14, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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