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FACING SOUTH: 2000 Elections specia November 27, 2000 - Issue #1 FACING SOUTH is your source for progressive Southern news and perspectives -- brought to you by the Institute for Southern Studies, a non-profit research and education center and publisher of Southern Exposure magazine. COLOR OF THE ELECTIONS [Part 2] - Racial disenfranchisement was key to the Florida (and national) outcome. In the last issue of FACING SOUTH, we pointed to the growing body of evidence of systematic, deliberate attempts to squelch African American voting in Florida. The media continues to focus on recounts, chads and the Nader factor -- but it's clear that electoral racism played an equally large role in deciding the outcome of the election.
More importantly, the botched election exposed that voting discrimination in Florida was widespread and that racism is institutionally structured into the two-party, Electoral College system.(ColorLines Magazine) GEORGIA: A Racial Gap in Voided Votes -- the nation now knows that many ballots that are cast don't count as votes. In Florida, where the election hung in the balance, many African Americans discovered that their ballots were nullified at a much higher rate than those of whites. That problem extended well beyond Florida. For example, in Atlanta's Fulton County, which also uses the old punch-card voting machines, one! of every 16 of its ballots for president was invalidated, while two largely white and Republican-leaning neighbors using more modern equipment, Cobb and Gwinnett counties, had a rate of 1 in 200. Fla. Vote Rife With Disparities, Study Says Rights Panel Finds Blacks Penalized Florida's conduct of the 2000 presidential election was marked by "injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency" that unfairly penalized minority voters, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has concluded in a report that criticizes top state officials -- particularly Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris -- for allowing disparate treatment of voters. The Wrong Way To Fix the Vote In Florida, a state-run purge removed thousands of legal voters -- more than half of them black -- in the months leading up to last fall's election. Most had no idea what had happened until they showed up at the polls. As the U.S. Civil Rights Commission wrote in a report made public last week, it was this "widespread voter disenfranchisement" -- much more than any hanging chads or butterfly ballots -- that was the "extraordinary feature" of the dubious Florida vote. ...The centralization of state voter registries hands an all-too-tempting monopoly to whichever party controls the office of secretary of state. The highly technical (and, where contractors are involved, commercially confidential) nature of computer-aided purges makes bias in the cleansing of supposed felons, deceased voters and duplicate voters astonishingly easy to carry out and difficult to uncover. How Democrats Can Use Bush v. Gore After two decades of concluding that statistical evidence concerning a whole host of inequities -- e.g., the unequal treatment of death row inmates, unequal funding for elementary schools -- failed to support a claim of unequal treatment under our Constitution, in Bush v. Gore, the court found that tolerating relatively minor variances in the tabulation of "undervotes" was an unconstitutional act by the Florida courts. Did the court, in slamming the door on Al Gore, open a window for future litigants to claim unequal treatment in the electoral process? ...
 ANNOUNCEMENTS: 
{Feb., 2002}
Thur. , Jan. 4th, 2001, 2pm US District Judge: Royce C. Lamberth Court Rm. 21, 4th Floor 333 Constitution Ave., N.W. Washington, D.C. 2001 (202) 354-1010 We Ourselves (The Ambrose Lane Show) : 10am , Fri. Jan. 12, 2001 Asa Gordon & Lawrence Jamison are scheduled for the program JANUARY 16th, 2001 : 7pm - 8:30pm Martin Luther King Jr., Public Library, Room A-5. THE INAUGURAL DAY VOTER RIGHTS MARCH:-:EVENT PHOTOS Asa Gordon will be a speaker at the WEST CAPITAL STEPS DATE: February 12, 2002 TIME: 7pm PLACE: Martin Luther King Library, 901 G Street, N.W., Rm. A-5 (202) 727-121
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