[IMC-US] Submission re Florida election

Mon Nov 1 10:58:18 CST 2004

Florida¹s Palm Beach County Bracing for the Electoral Storm
By Medea Benjamin and Deborah James

Odile Dumas¹ daughter Monique, a student at Howard University in Washington
D.C., was so anxious to vote that back in September she requested an
absentee ballot from Palm Beach County in Florida. On Friday, just five days
before the election, when her ballot still hadn¹t arrived, she called her
mother Odile in a panic. Odile immediately went to the Supervisor of
Elections office to get her daughter¹s ballot and Federal Express it to her.
But the lines were too long and she had to get to work. So she returned on
Saturday and took her place on line. ³My black ancestors were jailed and
killed for trying to vote,² said Odile. ³The least I can do is stand in line
so that my daughter can vote.² Odile¹s patience turned to exasperation,
however, when the 8-hour wait meant that she had missed the deadline for
Federal Express and the wait was all for naught. ³My daughter has just lost
her right to vote,² said Odile. ³Is this the democracy we fought for?²

Odile was not alone in her frustration. Also on line was Shelly Marcus,
trying to get an absentee ballot that her son Joshua, a student at Emory
College, had requested on September 11. ³My son is 18 and this was his first
opportunity to vote for president. I¹m ashamed that once again, Palm Beach
can¹t get it right.² Gregory Berman, who waited on line for 8 hours and 40
minutes to get an absentee ballot for his 90-year-old father in a nursing
home, was furious. ³No one in America should have to wait 8 hours to vote,
and certainly not to get an absentee ballot that the county was supposed to
send out long ago. What you are witnessing here in Palm Beach County is
democracy in crisis‹again.²

Welcome to Palm Beach County, home in 2000 of the infamous butterfly
ballots, ³Jews for Buchanan², and hanging chads. The infamous Supervisor of
Elections Theresa LePore was voted out of office in this past August  but
unfortunately her term doesn¹t end until January. That gives her an
opportunity to muck up one more election as her parting salvo. And before
election day has even arrived, it looks like she¹s succeeding.

In both Palm Beach County and neighboring Broward County, run by a
Democratic Supervisor, there have been a record number of requests for
absentee ballots‹mostly from the elderly, disabled, voters living outside
the county, and people who don¹t trust the new paperless voting machines.
Both counties have been flooded by complaints from people who never received
their ballots. In Broward, when the media reported that 58,000 absentee
ballots seemed to have ³disappeared,² Supervisor Brenda Snipes opened up an
emergency center to field calls, brought in volunteers to call all 21,000
out-of-town voters, and overnighted thousands of ballots with prepaid
overnight return envelopes. Here in Palm Beach County, Theresa LePore¹s
constituents had no comparable support.

Ms. LePore also put obstacles in the way of people wanting to vote early.
One of the solutions to the calamity of the 2000 election was to institute
early voting, an option for voters to go to the polls up to two weeks in
advance. It is estimated that one-third of Florida¹s voters will take
advantage of this new option. Yet after 10 days of voting, out of 744,000
registered voters in Palm Beach County, less than 30,000 had been able to
vote early one of the lowest turnouts in the state. One reason is that
Theresa LePore offered her constituents only eight locations for early
voting in the entire county, making the waiting time in Palm Beach County
longer than anywhere else in the state. ³These long lines are ridiculous,²
said Omar Khan, whose father, a diabetic who was fasting for Ramadan, was
forced to abandon his attempt to vote after hours of standing in the hot
sun. ³Either it is tremendous incompetence or deliberate voter suppression.
In either case, the supervisor is not doing her job.² Liz Grisaru, a
volunteer lawyer with Kerry¹s Voting Rights Protection Team, said that they
had tried to negotiate with Theresa LePore for more early voting locations,
more voting machines, more poll workers, and longer hours, but all of their
efforts were rebuffed. ³The Supervisor has failed miserably in her duty to
the public by not responding to the large volume of voters,² said Ms.
Grisaru.

Another example of Ms. LePore¹s attempts to put up obstacles relates to
newly registered voters. Secretary of State Glenda Hood, herself an old
family friend of the Bushes who is proving to be as partisan as her
predecessor Katherine Harris, directed county officials to nullify
applications if the applicants didn¹t check a box saying they were citizens,
despite the fact that elsewhere on the application they have signed an oath
of citizenship. While Broward and Miami-Dade counties are ignoring this
bureaucratic requirement that disenfranchises new voters, in Palm Beach, Ms.
LePore is following the directive.

And don't forget the issue of direct disenfranchisement of former felons - a
practice which dates back to the times of slavery. This year's list in
Florida, prepared by a private consulting firm that donates heavily to the
Republican Party, disproportionately included African Americans (who vote
Democrat nine to one) yet only 61 Hispanic names (who vote heavily
Republican in Florida). The list was dropped after a lawsuit forced the list
into the light of day, yet the ACLU estimates that 600,000 people in
Florida, predominantly African Americans,  are denied their voting rights
because of their criminal history,

Another explosive issue is the paperless electronic voting machines that
will be used by about half the voters in Florida. Ms. LePore spent $14
million in federal funds provided by the Help America Vote Act on this
supposed solution to the problems of the butterfly ballots and hanging chads
of the 2000 elections. But to be audited in the case of a close election or
contested voting, electronic voting machines must yield a paper trail. Yet
Glenda Hood and Ms. LePore fought to make it illegal to do a paper recount.
Since the introduction of paperless electronic voting in March of 2002, Palm
Beach County has witnessed one election in which the front-runner  who
entered the election with a 17-point lead over his nearest opponent 
finished an upset third. In the following two elections, the number of
people who came to vote - but whose votes were not registered  greatly
exceeded the margin of victory. These inexplicable anomalies sufficiently
outraged local Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler that he unsuccessfully
filed suit against Ms. LePore and the State of Florida to force the adoption
of a paper trail. 

So while hundreds of thousands of citizens in Florida are being prevented
from voting due to problems with absentee ballots, obstacles in early
voting, excessive technicalities barring registration, and felon
disenfranchisement, even those who actually make it to the polls have little
guarantee that their votes will be counted correctly by the voting machines.
If the strategy of the democratic forces is an unprecedented voter
mobilization, the strategy of the Republicans in Florida is clearly voter
suppression and possibly even outright theft.

What we¹ve seen in Florida so far demonstrates a clear lesson. The efforts
of tens of thousands of volunteers to get folks registered and out to vote
are paying off handsomely with massively increased voter participation. The
efforts of monitors documenting irregularities like the Fair Election
International (www.fairelection.us <http://www.fairelection.us/> )
delegation of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org
<http://www.globalexchange.org/> ) and groups like Election Protection
(www.electionprotection.org <http://www.electionprotection.org/> ) to help
voters resolve problems, are indispensable. Yet the specter of a stolen
election looms large, and Floridians are bracing themselves.

³I¹m worried,² said Janis Botsko, a local Democratic activist who has been
working non-stop to register voters, call voters and knock on their doors.
³I think there are going to be a lot of shenanigans. After all, we have the
grand combination of Jeb Bush, Glenda Hood and Theresa LePore. But we also
have a plan to counter their shenanigans, and that is to overwhelm them with
huge numbers of voters. There will be such a groundswell that they won¹t be
able to get away with it.²

And if that doesn¹t work, these angry voters will not sit by quietly. Many
have already signed the No Stolen Elections Pledge (see www.nov3.us
<http://www.nov3.us/> ) and are setting up their emergency protest sites at
federal buildings and elections offices, just in case. ³Here in Florida
we¹ve learned to prepare for hurricanes,² said West Palm activist Brian
Hefner. ³And if that¹s what happens on November 2, this time we¹ll be
ready.²

Medea Benjamin and Deborah James are in Florida observing the election with
CodePink (www.codepinkalert.org). They are also part of the No Stolen
Election campaign (www.nov3.us <http://www.nov3.us/> ).

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