These are some of the disturbing and highly newsworthy charges that deserve more media attention:
--Charles Weaver, publisher of Community Voice, a Fort Myers African
American weekly paper, witnessed "intimidation, harassment and apparent
illegal activity" at a polling place he visited. ''There were illegal poll
watchers, threatening people, telling them, 'I know where you work. You're
going to get fired,''' Weaver told the Inter Press Service (11/14/00). The
same article reported that Tallahassee police set up traffic checks at the
entrance to a polling place in a black neighborhood; that police in Newport
News, Va. stopped people at checkpoints; and some black voters were turned
away from polls in St. Louis for not having voter registration cards, even
though registration cards were not required from white voters.
--In an NAACP public hearing held in Miami (C-Span, 11/11/00), Stacy Powers,
a former police officer who currently serves as news director for Tampa
radio station WTMP, spoke of witnessing numerous voting irregularities in
her election day travels through city neighborhoods. Powers testified that
she saw people being turned away from several polling places in the black
community after being told their names were not on voting lists. When Powers
reminded poll workers that an individual can legally sign an affidavit and
vote even if their name isn't on an official list, she said, she was ejected
from several polling places (Daily News, 11/17/00).
-- Miami's Donnise DeSouza testified that she was denied the right to vote
after being shuttled to several polling places and told her name was not on
the list. When she checked with the elections board the next day, she said,
she found her name was in fact on the list. Many other voters were told
they'd been dropped from the rolls as convicted felons, even though they had
never been arrested, and that names of black college students who registered
this summer never showed up on voter lists, according to the NAACP hearings
(Daily News, 11/17/00).
--According to the New York Times (11/17/00), more than 26,000 ballots were
disqualified in the largely Republican area of Duval County-- four times the
total in 1996. The Times notes that nearly 9,000 of these ballots were cast
in predominately African-American communities around Jacksonville, which
registered support for Al Gore over George Bush at a ten-to-one ratio. (The
November 17 Daily News places the number of rejected African-American votes
in Duval County at more than 12,000, nearly 60 percent of disqualified
ballots).
--Derek Drake, an editor of the black weekly newspaper Central Florida
Advocate, told the London Financial Times (11/16/00) that Haitian Americans
and Hispanics, unlike whites, were often asked for two forms of
identification. "There was either something of a conspiratorial nature going
on or there was mass incompetence," Drake said. In a recent column for the
Los Angeles Syndicate (11/12/00), the Reverend Jesse Jackson noted that
ballot boxes in black communities went uncounted, voters were turned away
after being told there were no ballots left, and Creole speakers were not
allowed to assist Haitian immigrants voting for the first time.
Such exclusionary voting practices are hardly limited to Florida, or to
racial minorities. According to a Federal Election Commission report cited
by the Center for an Accessible Society, more than 20,000 U.S. polling
places fail to meet the minimal requirements of accessibility, depriving
people with disabilities of their fundamental right to vote. (Some of their
stories are documented by the Center's magazine, Ragged Edge Online, at
raggededgemagazine.com .)
In New York City, Columbia University journalism students reported that
citywide voting irregularities included broken ballot booths, the denial of
translation assistance and insufficient instructions given to first-time
Russian voters hoping to support a write-in candidate, and the transposing
of the Chinese characters for "Republican" and "Democrat" on wall posters at
polling places and on columns in ballot machines (City Limits Weekly, 11/13/00).
info from:
FAIR
(212) 633-6700
fair.org
E-mail: fair@fair.org
... Mezz - |
