Washington Post
October 13, 2004
Pushing to Be Counted in
Fla.: Groups Say That Blacks May Not Be Heard at Polls
By Jo Becker
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Nearly a dozen African American ministers and civil rights
leaders walked into the Duval County election office here, television cameras in
tow, with a list of questions: How come there were not more early voting sites
closer to black neighborhoods? How come so many blacks were not being allowed to
redo incomplete voter registrations? Who was deciding all this?
Standing across the office counter under a banner that read "Partners in
Democracy" was the man who made those decisions, election chief Dick
Carlberg. Visibly angry, the Republican explained why he decided the way he had:
"We call it the law."
Black leaders said the scene at the supervisor's office last week was
reminiscent of a blocked schoolhouse door at the height of desegregation. They
charge that GOP officials are deliberately using the law to keep black people
off the rolls and hinder them from voting.
Four years ago, ballots cast from black neighborhoods throughout Florida were
four times as likely to go uncounted as those from white neighborhoods. Nowhere
was the disparity more apparent than in Duval County, where 42 percent of 27,000
ballots thrown out came from four heavily Democratic black precincts.
Despite attempts by Florida officials to prevent a repeat of the controversy
that dogged the last presidential election, black leaders said they are
concerned that this year new registrations are being rejected for technical
errors and that limited accessibility to early polling places could lead to more
disputes, roiling Florida and the nation long after Election Day.
Florida, with 27 electoral votes, is again a hotly contested battleground.
Democratic organizations, black churches and civil rights groups have embarked
on an aggressive get-out-the-vote effort in minority neighborhoods in Duval
County and elsewhere in the state.
From the 2000 election to August 2004, nearly 200,000 black voters were added to
the rolls in Florida, a 21 percent increase in large part because of
registration drives by groups including America Coming Together. Registration by
white voters increased almost 6 percent.
Black people overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.)
has made turning out that vote a key part of his Florida strategy. He and his
running mate, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), have made three campaign trips to
Jacksonville alone.
But black leaders said they are worried that the campaigning will not matter if
black voters are disenfranchised.
In Duval County, 31,155 black voters had been added to the rolls by the end of
last week. That is more than the total number of ballots nullified here four
years ago, in a race that George W. Bush won by 537 votes.
But hundreds more could show up at the polls only to find they cannot vote. The
office has flagged 1,448 registrations as incomplete, and as of last week had
yet to process 11,500 more.
A Washington Post analysis found nearly three times the number of flagged
Democratic registrations as Republican. Broken down by race, no group had more
flagged registrations than blacks.
This, in a heavily GOP county where records show that the number of blacks added
to the rolls since 2000 approximately equals the number of non-Hispanic whites.
Some registrations were missing critical information, such as a signature.
Others had different problems, with some people listing post office boxes
instead of street addresses or putting street addresses on the wrong line.
Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood, a Republican appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, the
president's brother, recently ruled that for registrations to be deemed
complete, new voters must not only sign an oath attesting to their citizenship,
but also check a box that states the same. Unlike many counties, which have
chosen to ignore the directive, Duval County chose to enforce it.
Carlberg, who is acting election chief because his superior is ill, told the
ministers that the office did the best it could to contact applicants who
submitted incomplete forms, but the law says that "if they aren't complete
now, they're not going into the system."
Carlberg's office, as well as Hood's, said the real blame belongs with the
Democratic-leaning groups that targeted minority voters and then turned in
sloppy and incomplete registrations. The disproportionate number of black
Democratic registrations flagged, said Carlberg spokeswoman Erin Moody, is a
function of "who those groups are targeting."
But during the 10-minute confrontation at Carlberg's office last week, the
ministers argued that the election official had stalled in processing new
registrations until it was too late to fix them by the Oct. 4 cutoff. "You
kept them in a box in a cage," charged Edward Exson of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference.
The 2000 election sent a record number of black people to the polls in Florida.
But these new, inexperienced voters were more likely than their white
counterparts to live in areas with outdated, error-prone machinery that did not
give voters a chance to correct problems.
In Duval County, the situation was compounded by the election office putting out
instructions reminding people to "vote all pages," which led to
thousands of invalidated "overvotes" because the list of presidential
candidates was spread over two pages.
Since then, the outdated machinery has been replaced, but suspicions linger.
"The big question is: Will our vote count?" Deborah Hargrove, 53, told
Susan Hunter, a canvasser for America Coming Together who knocked on her door
last week. "Who's to know if they are just going to throw it away in the
garbage can?"
But as Hunter handed out fliers to voters such as Hargrove detailing their
rights, she also encountered a fierce determination. Many of the retirees in
this neighborhood remember when blacks were attacked by white men armed with
axes and bats after they tried in 1960 to sit at Jacksonville's whites-only
lunch counters in what became known as Ax Handle Saturday.
"I'm gonna vote as long as I live," Sally Brown, 73, vowed when Hunter
knocked on her door. "They're not going to make me stop."
One of the major changes enacted since 2000 is aimed at making voting easier by
requiring local election officials to allow voters to cast ballots up to 15 days
before the election. The law does not specify how many early voting sites there
must be.
The ministers who went to Carlberg's office last week had plans to bus their
congregations to those sites after Sunday services this month as a way to help
those juggling jobs or without a car.
Orange County, which has approximately the same number of registered voters as
Duval, has opted to open nine early voting locations. Duval will have one, even
though Jacksonville is geographically the largest U.S. city, covering 840 square
miles. It will be at Carlberg's office, miles from most of the majority black
precincts. The same is true in Volusia County, where the GOP supervisor has
angered black ministers there by refusing to open the site on Sundays.
Carlberg would not detail his reasoning with the ministers when they gathered at
his office last week.
Afterward, the Rev. James Sampson, president of the Baptist Ministerial
Conference in Duval, declared that "the spirit of George Wallace" is
"alive and well."
Carlberg noted that the black leaders arrived unannounced with a contingent of
reporters and refused his invitation to meet privately. "It should have
been conducted in a nonmedia environment," he said in an interview.
"Someplace where we could sit down and discuss the issues in a gentlemanly,
civilized fashion."
In a follow-up letter to the ministers, Carlberg said that additional sites
cannot be added this close to the election. The office does not have time to
train staff or install equipment, he said.
But in Volusia County, which has been sued in federal court over the same issue
by the NAACP, spokeswoman Deanie Lowe said the election office is looking into
adding three sites.
Others complain that while election officials here have been slow to process new
registrations and are doing little when it comes to early voting, they have been
quick to send out letters informing felons that they have lost their right to
vote.
Florida is one of seven states, including Virginia, that bar felons from voting
if they fail to appeal. Studies show that the laws disproportionately
disenfranchise black men.
Earlier this year, Hood's office developed a list to help supervisors purge
felons from the rolls. A similar 2000 list disenfranchised eligible voters, and
media organizations sued to make this year's list public. Local newspapers found
that it included the names of 2,000 felons whose rights had been restored, many
of them black, and did not identify ineligible Hispanics, who lean Republican.
Hood's office was forced to abandon the list, leaving each county to decide how
to purge felons from the voting rolls. Carlberg's office purges an average of
140 felons a month.
Michael D. Frederick, 38, showed Hunter the letter he received from Carlberg's
office after a felony battery conviction, along with his tattered voter
registration card.
"They couldn't wait to send this to me," he said. "I voted every
election -- city council, schools, didn't matter. I'm undereducated, and I'm
black, but now this, this is my third strike. I kept it as a reminder that they
finally took my voice away."
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