By Tim Wheeler

People's Weekly World

www.pww.org

Gov. Jeb Bush is fuming mad at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for its report charging "widespread disenfranchisement" of Black, Haitian and Puerto Rican voters in Florida during the presidential election last November 7. "The time for meaningless and divisive finger-pointing over last year's election is over," Bush snarled, dismissing the report as "intellectually dishonest."

He made the statement just hours after he announced he will seek re-election in 2002, certain to be a referendum on his role in purging the Florida voter rolls and suppressing the Florida vote count to put his brother in the White House.

Bush's dislike of the report is understandable, but African American longshoreman, Tony Hill, a former state legislator and former secretary of the Florida AFL-CIO, and Tony Fransetta, president of the 106,000 member Florida Alliance of Retired Americans, hailed the hard-hitting document. Both Hill and Fransetta played a major role in turning out the vote of senior citizens and Black voters in Florida, in fact delivering a majority of the popular vote for Democrat Al Gore.

"The Civil Rights Commission heard testimony from more than 100 people in Florida," Hill told the World in a phone interview from his office in Jacksonville.

"We didn't manufacture that testimony. These are real people who had their votes stolen." He cited the role of the Atlanta-based corporation ChoicePoint and its subsidiary Database Technologies (DBT) of Boca Raton, Florida, in preparing the infamous list of 181,157 names to be purged from voter rolls, including 65,776 identified as "felons."

The firm, closely connected to the ultraright, received more than $3.2 million in taxpayer funds, 100 times more than a rival bid, for preparing the list.

It was so shoddy that it incorrectly listed 8,000 people who had moved to Florida from Texas as "felons," when in fact they had only misdemeanors like traffic tickets on their record. Many had no criminal record whatsoever.

"It was up to the State of Florida to make sure that list was accurate, to avoid disenfranchising people. But they did not do it," Hill declared. He pointed out that 20 counties in Florida with a record of denying Black voters their right to vote are subject to monitoring under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

"The Chief Executive Officer of this state - Gov. Jeb Bush - must call the Justice Department to request voting rights monitors," Hill said. "He did not do so. And you're telling me there was no conspiracy? Give me a break!"

Despite the efforts of Bush and Sec. of State Katherine Harris to suppress the Black vote, more than 944,000 African Americans were on the voting rolls by election day and nearly 900,000 voted, the result of an epic registration and "get-out-the-vote" drive led by Hill, the AFL-CIO, NAACP and other groups. "That was an astounding achievement," Hill said.

"It's why a Democrat, Bill Nelson, is in the U.S. Senate today. Our goal in 2002 is to turn out one million Black voters," Hill said.

"We're going to dedicate that drive to Harry and Harriette Moore of Florida, killed Christmas night 1951. They were the first martyrs of the civil rights movement."

Fransetta, speaking from his office in Palm Beach County, said, "In my opinion, the Republican Party had a master plan for removing names from the voter rolls. Everything that happened during the election, during the post-election and up until today has borne that out. They knew exactly what they were doing."

The report, available in full on the commission's website, is based on field hearings in both Miami and Tallahasssee. The report avoided the word "conspiracy." Nevertheless, it provides voluminous proof that thousands of Black and other minority voters were denied their right to vote.

"The Florida legislature's decision to privatize its list maintenance resulted in countless voters being deprived of their right to vote," the report states. "Perhaps the most dramatic undercount in Florida's election was the non-existent ballots of countless unknown eligible voters who were turned away, or wrongfully purged from the voter registration rolls by various procedures and practices."

The report continues, "Statistical data reinforced by credible anecdotal evidence point to widespread disenfranchisement and denial of voting rights. Despite the closeness of the election, it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. The disenfranchisement was not isolated or episodic. State officials failed to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."

The denial of voting rights, the report adds, "fell most harshly on the shoulders of African Americans" who were "nine times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected in the November 2000 elections."

It points to stunning disparities in the disqualification of ballots: in majority Black Gadsden County, for example, one ballot in eight was thrown out. In predominantly white Leon County where the state capital, Tallahassee, is located, only one ballot in 500 were thrown out.

Among witnesses in the Tallahassee hearing was L. Clayton Roberts, director of the Florida Division of Elections, who admitted that "mis-communication" led to the purging of the 8,000 voters who had moved to Florida from Texas.

DBT Vice President, George Bruder, initially lied in his testimony, claiming that neither race nor party affiliation was included in the data base of the purge list. But he changed his testimony when the Commission Chairperson Mary Frances Berry questioned him about a June 9, 2000, letter in which he informed the 67 Florida election supervisors that "race and gender" had been included in the database.

"What I was trying to convey was that while race and gender were a part of the database.we had neither the statutory nor the contractual right to remove a single voter from the registration lists," Bruder said. "That was the function of the county supervisors of elections."

When Commission members confronted Bruder with proof that thousands on the list were falsely identified as "felons," Bruder replied that it contained "false positives." He claimed that DBT had "advised Florida to take steps to reduce these false positives." But officials in the Division of Elections, he said, rejected the advice.

"They favored a more inclusive criteria," Bruder testified. "State officials set parameters that required a 90 percent match in the last name rather than an exact match."

In one memo obtained by the commission, Emmett "Bucky" Mitchell, then assistant general counsel of the Florida Division of Elections, said he wanted to"cast a wide net for the exclusion list," adding, "Obviously, we want to capture more names."

Scores of those improperly excluded voters testified in the hearings, including several who had registered under the "Motor Voter" law when they went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew their drivers' licenses. These witnesses provided documentation that they had filled out the voter registration forms and had been assured by DMV clerks that they were registered. But when they went to vote they were told they were not on the lists.

The commission followed up, checking with the DMV, which provided records showing the exact hour and minute that the applications had been forwarded to the appropriate board of elections.

Another witness was Wallace McDonald of Tampa. In 1959, he fell asleep on a bench while waiting for a bus. Police arrested him for "vagrancy." He voted without any problems until last fall when Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Pam Iorio sent him a form letter that he had been removed from the voting lists as a "felon."

Despite his strenuous protests, he was denied the right to vote. "I could not believe it after all those years since the 1950s without a problem," McDonald told the commission. "Somebody reached in a bag and took out a technicality that you can't vote."