Jesse Jackson: Florida Bears Watching

July 20, 2004 Tron Nick

Originally Published by The Chicago Sun Times on 7/20/04 [here]

Florida vote bears watching

July 20, 2004

Will we have a clean election in 2004 or a Florida fix again?

Florida and little brother Gov. Jeb Bush became notorious in 2000 when the state's highest election official, Katherine Harris, also served as the George W. Bush state campaign co-chair and pledged to deliver the state to George. And so she did, supervising a purge of black voters, intimidation on Election Day, malfunctioning machines, butterfly ballots, and finally suppression of the recount altogether with the aid of the five-person Republican majority on the Supreme Court. Now Florida, supplanting Chicago as the symbol of the rigged election, is back in the news.

Gov. Bush appointed the new election supervisor, a former Republican mayor. She hired Accenture, a firm with close ties to the Republican Party, to develop a list of felons to be purged from the voting rolls. Florida is one of the states that don't allow felons who have done their time to regain full citizenship.

In 2000, the felons list purged thousands of African-American names that should have been eligible to vote. In 2004, Jeb was poised to pull off the same gambit, refusing to open the list to scrutiny until a coalition of groups got a court order to open it up. Of the 48,000 people on the list, 28,000 were Democratic and 9,500 Republican. The Miami Herald found that 2,100 on the list were excluded in error, since they had received clemency and the right to vote. Then it turned out that, of the 48,000 on the list, only 61 were Hispanic.

Since Florida African Americans tend to vote Democratic and Florida Latinos tend to vote Republican, it looked like the Florida fix was in once more. Gov. Jeb admitted that there was ''an oversight and a mistake,'' and agreed to pull the list.

Suppression of African-American voting isn't something new. Slaves couldn't vote. Under segregation, white officials invented schemes -- poll taxes, literacy tests -- to deny blacks the vote. The civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act made much of that illegal. But Florida and few other states still strip millions of African-Americans from voting by disqualifying felons. With racial profiling, biased prosecutorial discretion and biased judicial sentencing -- all well-documented -- this is just a modern form of Jim Crow exclusion.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that of the nearly 1.9 million votes thrown out in 2000, more than half were cast by African Americans, even though they made up about 12 percent of the voting population.

And now in name reform, the partisan legislature and governor in Florida (and elsewhere) have made things worse. They've put touch-screen machines in many districts, which have no paper record, no way for a recount, are vulnerable to hackers, and have secret proprietary codes.

The Sun-Sentinel found that the machines failed to record votes eight times more often than optical scanners, while leaving no paper record to check against. In California, the secretary of state outlawed the use of machines that offered no paper record. This is particularly worrisome since the leading manufacturer of the voting machines is Diebold, whose CEO, Wally O'Dell, is a partisan Bush supporter who vowed to ''deliver'' Ohio's key votes to Bush.

But it doesn't take biased codes to get biased results. I'm prepared to bet right now that in Florida, majority-white districts will open the polls on time and enjoy machines that work flawlessly. And majority-black precincts will frequently open late and close early, suffer breakdowns of machines that can't be corrected, and find others ways to keep votes from being recorded.

After 2000, little brother Jeb announced that Florida's election would be a ''model for the rest of the nation.'' That's a threat, not a promise. Web groups are now circulating a petition calling for respected international observers from the U.N., the Organization of American States and the Carter Center to observe our elections and balloting, particularly in the 17 battleground states.

That sounds bizarre, like America is some kind of tin-pan dictatorship. But the ''Florida model'' for elections threatens to undermine public faith in our election system. Outside observers and an aggressive election protection program are vital if we are to get even close to a fair count in 2004.