Civil Rights Groups Continue to Investigate Racial Voter Intimidation in Florida Election

·        A lawsuit filed in Leon County, Fla. by African American leaders contests the presidential election, charging  George W. Bush was declared certified winner in Florida only after minorities were systematically denied the vote.

 

(Editor’s note: Interview recorded before lawsuit was filed.)

 

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the corporate media have reported on every nuance of the battle for the presidency. Since the Nov. 7 election, the print and electronic press has devoted exhaustive coverage to issues ranging from dimpled chads to the blizzard of lawsuits before Florida and federal courts.

But while the media focuses on the fight for power between George W.  Bush and Al Gore, another critical aspect of this extraordinary election has virtually gone unreported. Since Election Day, national and Florida civil rights groups have received hundreds of reports of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement related to race and ethnicity.  Charges from African Americans, Haitian Americans and Latino voters include claims of disparate treatment and the outright denial of their right to vote.

Civil rights groups have responded by sending teams of lawyers to a number of Florida counties to investigate the charges and to evaluate the possible remedies. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Judith Browne, senior attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based Advancement Project, one of the groups conducting the investigation into voter discrimination. Attorney Browne reports on some of the specific allegations that the Republicans, Democrats and corporate press continue to ignore.

Judith Browne: We got involved by helping the NAACP in its hearing that it held the Saturday after the election and which was organized in response to calls that the NAACP received from around the country, but in particular the massive number of calls from the state of Florida. We went down to investigate, to hear from the people to see what was (happening) on the ground and found that thousands of African Americans had been disenfranchised on Nov. 7.

The kinds of allegations that we were seeing came in various forms. For example, in Miami, where there is a growing Haitian population, many of the Haitian Americans who could not speak English, who speak Creole were not provided with assistance, and when they did have someone there to assist them in Creole, they were denied that opportunity.

The other thing that we were finding is that African Americans were showing up to the polls with their voter registrations cards and identification, which is required in the state of Florida. Many had voted in the primary and all of a sudden, their names were not on the voter list. They were told, “Well, your name is not on the list, you’ll have to go into this line over here to have your status verified.” And inevitably, what would happen is that the line would be so long,, that those people would ultimately be denied the right to vote because they couldn’t get the call through to the board of supervisors (to verify their status).

The other types of allegations that we saw were people who had shown up to their polling place and the polling place had been moved—a typical practice in the Jim Crowe era when the power structure tried to do whatever it could to insure that African Americans could not vote.

The same thing happened in particular in Broward County. One woman went to a polling place she had gone to for several years in the past and during the primary election. On Nov. 7, she shows up to that same high school, and it was not being used as a polling place. She didn’t get notice; she went to four other places to figure out where she needed to vote. By the time she got to the fourth place, they told her, “You’re not on the list here either, and by the way, it’s 7 o’clock, it’s too late to vote anyway.”

Then we have allegations of police intimidation. Those allegations came from Hillsborough and from Leon counties in which police officers had set up checkpoints in African American precincts near the polling places -- in one instance, on a street that was a dead-end leading to the polling place. The police were doing seatbelt checks, checking lights, or—vehicle inspections and license checks. In one instance, state troopers in Leon County admitted that they had not gone through proper procedures to set up this checkpoint—where you have to put notice in the newspaper so that people know there’s going to be a traffic jam, and set up a procedure where you stop every fifth or sixth car. That had not done; the paperwork had not been submitted to do that police checkpoint.

So we’re looking at that issue and saying what is that about? It boils down to an attempt to intimidate voters, to make voters feel uncomfortable about exercising their franchise and making them think twice about going to cast that vote.

Between The Lines: What are your options now? What can be done to either put in question the results of the election in Florida or to prevent recurrence of what happened there the next time around?

Judith Browne: We’re continuing on in our investigation; we are meeting with more and more witnesses, accumulating more and more evidence. The NAACP has committed to filing a lawsuit. As you know, NAACP has already turned over the information they had gathered at their hearing to the U.S. Justice Department and found that the Justice Department did not move quickly enough to vindicate the rights of African American voters.

So at this point, we’re continuing with our investigation. The coalition of civil rights groups will be gathering to determine the next steps.  We’re looking at what the possible remedies could be. One of the things we’re definitely going to focus on is fixing the system for the next go-round because we don’t want to have people turning out to the polls and having this happen again. Everyone should now understand that every vote counts.

Contact the Advancement Project at (202) 728-9557 or visit the Web site of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights at www.civilrights.org

Scott Harris is WPKN Radio’s public affairs director and executive producer of Between The Lines. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly  newsmagazine, Between The Lines, for the week ending Dec. 15, 2000.

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Between The Lines Q&A is compiled and edited by Anna Manzo. To get details on subscribing to the radio program or to publish this column in print or online media, contact us at (203) 544-9863 or send an email to: btlqa-subscribe@topica.com.

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