Balkinization: More on Black Disenfranchisement in Florida in 2000

More on Black Disenfranchisement in Florida in 2000

Bruce Hayden's comment on my previous post denies there was any disenfranchisement of blacks in Florida in 2000. His comments suggest that he is thinking about faulty voting machines, voter incompetence, and the butterfly ballot.

But the black disenfranchisement I'm referring to happened well before the election occurred. This from my 2001 article:

Concerned about alleged voter fraud in the 1997 Miami mayoral election, Florida state officials hired Database Technologies, a private firm with Republican connections, to purge the voter rolls of suspected felons. “Suspected,” it turned out, is the key word, because a substantial number of the purged voters turned out to be guilty of nothing more than the crime of being African-American. Although Database Technologies repeatedly warned that their methods would produce many false positives, Florida officials insisted on eliminating large numbers of suspected felons from the rolls and leaving it to county supervisors and individual voters to correct any inaccuracies. Clay Roberts, director of the state’s division of elections, explained that “[t]he decision was made to do the match in such a way as not to be terribly strict on the name.” Indeed, the list was so inclusive that one county election supervisor found that she was on it. It is estimated that at least fifteen percent of the purge list statewide was inaccurate, and well over half of these voters were black. When these unsuspecting voters arrived at their precincts on November 7 in order to exercise their “fundamental political right” to the franchise, they were turned away. Any protests were effectively silenced by the bureaucratic machinery of Florida law. As the U.S. Civil Rights Commission put it, “[p]erhaps the most dramatic undercount in Florida’s election was the nonexistent ballots of countless unknown eligible voters, who were turned away, or wrongfully purged from the voter registration rolls by various procedures and practices and were prevented from exercising the franchise.” Those voters, wrongfully excluded from the rolls, were almost certainly more than enough to overcome George W. Bush’s 537 vote margin in Florida.

The article contains citations to all of the relevant newspaper coverage. You can read more about this story here and here. Charges of voter fraud in Florida led to successful lawsuits against the state which were settled in 2002. See details here and here.

Posted 10:47 PM by JB [link]