Nov. 2 Is V-Day for Blacks in Florida

Many of Florida’s 1 million black voters still feel cheated that their votes weren’t counted in the state’s flawed election four years ago. But for some, such as those here in rural Gadsden County, that bitter memory has elicited a surge of activism in the 2004 presidential race.

The Panhandle county, overwhelmingly Democratic and nearly 60% black, has its first African American elections supervisor traveling to schools and churches to demonstrate new ballot-reading machines.

County officials have added 10 polling locations and will send a sample ballot to the home of every registered voter, rather than just publish it in the newspaper.

And Shirley Aaron, a 63-year-old Democratic organizer, is wandering back roads, talking to poor black families who’ve never been approached for their vote. She also attends possum festivals and gospel revivals to tell blacks that this time their vote will count.

“The Republicans stole that 2000 election, and we plan to take it back the American way,” said Aaron, who is white.

The stakes are high for both Sen. John F. Kerry and President Bush. A higher black turnout probably would bolster Kerry’s support because blacks backed Al Gore by a margin of 9 to 1 in 2000.

But in Gadsden County, Florida’s only county with a black majority, the largest percentage of presidential ballots were discarded four years ago. Nearly 2,000 ballots, an estimated 12% of the total, were tossed out. They were among tens of thousands of ballots from African Americans disqualified statewide in that election.

Although they have no proof, many black residents believe partisan election officials and Republican Gov. Jeb Bush disqualified those votes to help his older brother win the presidency. And they have little confidence in new Secretary of State Glenda Hood, a Republican gubernatorial appointee.

There also has been widespread controversy about state voting lists.

In Florida, where more than half the felons are black, officials reviewed voting rolls to identify -- and prohibit -- felons from voting in the Gore-Bush race. But errors led to thousands of black voters being flagged as felons even though they had never committed a crime. Gov. Bush’s office declined to comment, but the state Republican Party said critics were reacting emotionally and not considering the facts.

“We’re sorry these people feel this way, but that’s a far step from reality,” said GOP spokesman Joseph Agostino of concerns about a back-door effort to help Bush win. “The Republican Party’s position has always been that every eligible voter should be able to cast a vote and that every legal vote should count.”

State elections officials say the discounted votes were the result of honest mistakes. They say the state has installed new voting machines in all 67 counties, and that several elections in the state since 2000 have gone off without problems.

“Florida leads the nation in election reform,” said Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s office. “We have new voting machines in place along with numerous vote-early programs.”

To boost voter confidence, several black politicians here have called for outside monitoring. Other activist groups plan to establish legal advice teams and voter hotlines to report suspected illegal activities.

Still, many fear that’s not enough.

“Florida continues to distinguish itself as the No. 1 problem state for voters in 2004,” said Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the monitoring groups. “Unless it takes significant steps, minority voters will once again encounter problems there.”

U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, a Democrat whose northern Florida district includes part of Gadsden County, said that in 2000 she was initially denied the right to vote -- told by officials that an absentee ballot had been sent to her Washington office.

“It’s a daily challenge to make sure these elections are going to be fair this time,” Brown said. “Because we all know that Jeb Bush and his people are willing to do anything to deliver this state to the Republicans.”

In Daytona Beach, activists are wrangling with county election officials over minority polling locations. On Thursday, the NAACP filed a federal voting rights lawsuit against Volusia County, where Daytona Beach is located, alleging that officials there had disenfranchised blacks by having only one early voting site in an area where few minority voters live.

In a county the size of Rhode Island, the only voting site is in a predominantly white community, a location inaccessible by public transportation, 30 miles away from black neighborhoods. County elections officials said there wasn’t time to open new polls.

Frank Bruno, chairman of the seven-member Volusia County Council, tried to allocate $40,000 last week to open at least three new early voting sites in minority areas.

The county has always had the money to do it, he said. But “the elections people never asked for it.”

The council defeated the proposal, however, electing to hire buses that would be used to transport minorities to the polls.

Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe insists money has never been the issue.

“It’s not a matter of $40,000; it’s a matter of who is going to do it,” she said. “Opening offices is humanly impossible at this late date. I’d need 10 extra people, and I can’t just pull them off the street.”

In nearby Duvall County -- where 27,000 votes, most of them from African American neighborhoods, were disqualified in 2000 -- activists also have unsuccessfully sought more early voting polling places.

Now Jacksonville, which in land area is the largest city in the contiguous United States, will have a single early voting site -- miles from any black neighborhoods.

In Gadsden County, anger from 2000 still divides residents in a community where whites and blacks remain polarized and where political control of the five-member county commission alternates between the races.

Shirley Green Knight, the county’s black voting supervisor, says the high percentage of spoiled votes in 2000 was “an honest mistake” because of confusing ballots and a tabulation error with voting machines.

But Knight, who was an elections office employee at the time, received calls from blacks who suspected wrongdoing: “People were saying, ‘What did they do to my vote? They cheated.’ ”

Some residents, both black and white, insist the county’s ballot-casting errors were the result of something else: One in three adults can’t read. They insist that the talk of black voter disenfranchisement comes from a handful of people who see race in everything.

“I don’t blame the ballot or the system, I blame the voters,” said Sterling Watson, a Democrat who is white and who has served on the county commission for 10 years.

He says 88% of county voters completed their ballots correctly. “If you’re a teacher and 9 out of 10 students pass the test, I don’t think the 12% should start complaining.”

But other statistics make people believe there was evidence of systemic racism.

In the 2000 presidential election, a disproportionate number of the 2 million ballots invalidated nationwide were cast by black voters, according to a 2002 study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. As the percentage of black citizens in a county increased, the study found, the spoiled ballot rate correspondingly increased.

About 175,000, or nearly 10%, of the national total of spoiled ballots were cast in Florida -- many by minorities, activists say.

Brenda Holt, a high school algebra teacher who is black and was elected to the Gadsden County Commission in 2003, insists that the 2000 presidential vote was emblematic of black disenfranchisement in a county where nearly all white students attend private schools, leaving blacks to a school system rated among the state’s worst.

“Bush brags how he’s setting up a free election in Iraq while he has yet to clean up the Florida mess,” she said.

One indication that blacks still have a reduced voice in local politics came in 2002 when the then-white-dominated county commission voted against opening 10 new polling places in African American neighborhoods -- even though voting booths for the expansion had already been purchased, Holt said.

After she was elected to the commission, tilting its majority to African Americans, Holt led a vote to establish the new polling places for the Nov. 2 election.

Working with local Democrats, she and voting supervisor Knight have also instituted new measures aimed at bringing out the most black voters ever.

There are programs encouraging local ministers to lead carpools of parishioners to cast early votes following Sunday services, and Florida’s Democratic Party has begun a “souls to polls” effort to visit rural churches and barber shops.

Along with a much-simplified ballot, Knight said the county had vastly reduced the number of discounted votes. Only three ballots were disqualified in the 2002 gubernatorial election and one in a runoff for a U.S. Senate seat in August.

Until last week, Aaron, the Democratic activist, helped run a “Truth Mobile” that traveled Gadsden County, offering fast-food coupons to black residents who registered to vote.

Now that the registration deadline has passed, she wants to make sure those people vote. She is offering rides to the polls, and if people are voting by absentee ballot, she’ll provide the stamp.

“Some shake their heads and say, ‘My vote doesn’t make a difference anyway,’ ” Aaron said. “But we’re very persuasive. We’re winning them over.”