The long and bitter post-election battle in Florida began as a
simple partisan fight over whether Al Gore or George W. Bush would
be the next president, but it rapidly escalated into something far
more serious. Quite simply, the Florida vote-counting fiasco has
sparked a major public debate over the very nature of our electoral
system and revealed profound problems in the way our nation chooses
its leaders.
Perhaps the most troubling of those problems is the vast disconnect
that has emerged between the right to vote that so many Americans
cherish and the slipshod, amateurish and unequal way those votes
are handled and counted. The nation has been aware for weeks that
185,000 ballots--nearly 3 percent of those cast in Florida--were
disqualified by machine counts that registered either two candidates
chosen for president (overvoting) or none at all (undervoting).
That percentage--higher than the 2 percent average in most national
elections--is reason enough for concern. But not until several weeks
after the election did hard facts emerge on the astonishing number
of black Floridians whose ballots were disqualified.
In a November 17 New York Daily News column, I reported
on the nearly 27,000 votes disqualified in Duval County, noting
that a huge percentage of them came from the mostly black precincts
of Jacksonville. In some black precincts, more than 30 percent of
ballots for president were discarded for overvoting or undervoting.
While only one in 14 ballots in heavily white precincts of Duval
were thrown out, the average was more than one in five in the black
precincts.
And Jacksonville was not alone. A December 1 report in the Fort
Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel revealed that a third of 22,800
disqualified votes in three South Florida counties came from mostly
black precincts. In those areas, the discarded votes averaged at
least 8 percent. That was followed by a December 3 report in the
Washington Post that precincts in Miami-Dade County where
blacks constitute more than 70 percent of voters, nearly 10 percent
of ballots were invalidated; but in counties that were 70 percent
or more nonblack, the average was only 3.4 percent. Backwater rural
communities produced the same amazing figures. In northeast Gadsden
County, a former plantation area where blacks constitute a majority
of the population, more than 2,000 of the county's 16,800 votes
were thrown out.
To Bush loyalists, and cynics in general, these statistics prove
only that many uneducated black voters haven't a clue as to what
they're doing in the voting booth--and if they can't read instructions
and lose their vote, that's their problem. It is clear, however,
that badly designed ballots in some counties made things worse.
Palm Beach's butterfly ballot is already the stuff of legend. In
Duval County, the official sample ballot produced by the county's
Republican canvassing board instructed voters to "vote on every
page" and listed all presidential candidates on a single page. But
the actual ballot, only half the size of the sample, listed the
candidates on two pages and directed, in small print: "Vote appropriate
pages."
"We realized afterward it created a lot of confusion, and we won't
be doing it that way again," says Susan Tucker Johnson, spokeswoman
for Duval's canvassing board. Amazingly, a front-page New York
Times story on that county's problems never mentioned the sample
ballot snafu. The Times report, which was rife with several
other errors, ascribed the confusion by black voters to poor instructions
from Democratic Party activists.
In reality, no one in Florida was prepared for the enormous turnout
of black voters on Election Day. While 540,000 blacks voted in the
1996 presidential election, this year 893,00 showed up at the polls,
a 65 percent increase. That number would have been even greater
were it not for the hundreds and perhaps thousands of blacks denied
the right to vote because their names did not appear on voter rolls
or because they had been mistakenly purged as convicted felons.
And of course, it does not include the 400,000 black men who, because
of a single felony conviction, are banned for life from voting in
the Sunshine State.
But those blacks who managed to cast a vote confronted other problems.
The Washington Post reported that 26 percent of black voters
reside in counties where their vote was verified and counted by
an optical scanner as soon as it was cast, returning it for possible
correction, while 34 percent of whites were in counties with those
machines.
Gadsden County, for instance, has optical scanning machines, but
its votes are counted in one central place after the polls close.
"This counter we got cost about $50,000," says Denny Hutchinson,
supervisor of elections in Gadsden. "It probably would cost 10 times
that much for a counter in every precinct. We haven't been able
to afford it."
But most of Florida's richest counties have optical scanners in
every voting precinct. In those counties it is impossible to vote
for two candidates for the same post because the scanner rejects
the ballot. A lot of "smart" Republicans, in other words, had a
little help from their voting machines.
"The same neighborhoods that have poor schools, poor roads and
poor health care end up having poor voting machines," says Rep.
Alcee Hastings, the South Florida Democrat. While Hastings, who
is black, does not believe there was intentional racism at work
on Election Day, he is quick to add, "Race was a factor, damn right
it was."
The formal literacy tests of the Jim Crow days may be gone, but
some of the ballots have gotten so complicated, Hastings says, that
"you've got to have at least a high school education to decipher
them." What happens to the millions of Americans, many of them black
and Hispanic, who are functionally illiterate, or have only a sixth-grade
education? "They still work every day, they still pay taxes, they
still raise children," he says, "but the election system is not
being fair to them."
We live in a nation where state lotteries and race track betting
booths flawlessly keep track of every pick by their millions of
customers on a daily basis. So the revelation that politicians of
both parties have allowed a third-class and unequal voting system
to flourish--one that can easily be manipulated to subvert the will
of the voters--is a scandal so huge that American elections will
never be the same again.
It is a scandal sure to lead to major reforms of voting procedures
in every state during the next few years, and that could be the
most lasting peoples' victory of the 2000 election. As for Jeb Bush
and those Republicans in the Florida legislature who fought so hard
to prevent every ballot from being counted, something tells me their
days are numbered. The state's 893,000 black registered voters and
all those elderly Jewish voters in Palm Beach are not about to forget
the lesson they learned this Election Day.
None of us will. 
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