The tactics have changed, but the goal remains
depressingly the same: Keep the coloreds, the blacks, the African-Americans
— whatever they're called in the particular instance — keep them out of
the voting booths.
Do not let them vote! If you can find a way
to stop them, stop them.
So here we go again, this time in Florida.
It turns out that the state of Florida is using a private company
with close ties to the Republican Party to help "cleanse" the state's voter
registration rolls. Would it surprise anyone anywhere to learn that the
cleansing process somehow managed to improperly prevent large numbers of
African-American voters from voting in the presidential election?
Gregory Palast, a reporter with the online magazine
Salon, has done a number of articles on this. He noted that the company,
ChoicePoint, and its subsidiary, Database Technologies Inc. (DBT), came
up with a "scrub list" of 173,000 names. These were the names of people
registered to vote in Florida who, according to ChoicePoint, could be knocked
off the rolls for one reason or another.
There was good reason for Florida to be concerned
about the integrity of its voter registration rolls. In 1997 the mayor
of Miami was removed from office because widespread fraud had occurred
in the election. The following year a law was passed requiring counties
in Florida to purge the rolls of duplicate registrations, the names of
deceased persons and felons.
So far, so good. The problems developed when
the state turned to ChoicePoint, which compiles and sells vast amounts
of frequently shaky information about individuals. (ChoicePoint, which
acquired DBT last May, was fired by the state of Pennsylvania for breaching
the confidentiality of driving records.) With this private outfit in the
picture it soon became clear that top Republican officials would be trying
to reap a partisan political advantage from a law designed to correct an
egregious wrong. And that partisan advantage would be realized in large
part by trampling on the voting rights of minorities.
Over the spring and summer ChoicePoint was forced to acknowledge
that 8,000 voters it had listed as felons had in fact been guilty only
of misdemeanors, which would not have affected their right to vote. What
is maddening is that when such an erroneous list of names gets into the
hands of county election officials, as this one did, it is very difficult
— often impossible — to find out what's correct and what's not correct.
That snickering you hear is from Republican
operatives who know that these kinds of foul-ups, because they are based
on criminal records, will disproportionately affect minority voters.
ChoicePoint eventually came up with a "corrected" list of 173,000
names of people it targeted as ineligible because they were deceased, or
were registered more than once, or had been convicted of a felony.
But it was a lousy list, riddled with mistakes.
And in an interview with me yesterday, Marty Fagan, a ChoicePoint vice
president, said there had never been any expectation that the list would
be particularly accurate. Remember now, we're talking about a list that
would be used to strip Americans of the precious right to vote.
Mr. Fagan said the list focused on people who
"might" have been deceased, or might have been listed twice, or "possible
felons." He said it was "important to know" that the information needed
to be "verified" by county election officials.
That was interesting, because ChoicePoint came
up with 58,000 people — people registered to vote — who would fall into
the category he calls "possible felons." How in the world were county election
officials supposed to check out each and every one and find out if they
were felons or not?
They couldn't. They didn't.
The horror stories about perfectly innocent
black voters being turned away from the polls because they had been targeted
as convicted felons started coming in early on the morning of Nov. 7, Election
Day. And they're still coming in.
Blacks turned out to vote in record numbers
in Florida this year, but huge numbers were systematically turned away
for one specious reason after another.
The tactics have changed, but the goal remains the same.
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