http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/050304C.shtml

Vanishing Votes
By Gregory Palast
The Nation

May 17, 2004 Issue

On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act
(HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil
rights time bomb.

First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000
presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in
coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to
purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to
vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list,
targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than
half--about 54 percent--are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night
about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this
electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White
House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires
all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against
vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election,
imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then
empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge
these lists of "suspect" voters.

The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000
of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP lawyers
sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise from Governor
Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly scrubbed citizens to the
voter rolls. According to records given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the
company that generated the computerized lists, the number of Floridians
who were questionably tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them.
Recently, I caught up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital.
Steen's case was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal
record. (My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen,
close enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's
case to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.

The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won his
case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under suspicion?
What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb called him? Steen,
unlike our President, honorably served four years in the US military.
There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his record: Steen remains an
African-American.

If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First, there's
the chance your registration card will simply be thrown out. Millions of
minority citizens registered to vote using what are called motor-voter
forms. And Republicans know it. You would not be surprised to learn that
the Commission on Civil Rights found widespread failures to add these
voters to the registers. My sources report piles of dust-covered
applications stacked up in election offices.

Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a felon. In
Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub sheets, some 600,000
residents are legally barred from voting because they have a criminal
record in the state. That's one state. In the entire nation 1.4 million
black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of the nation's
black male population.

At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of 1965
guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote--but it did not guarantee
the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in seven cases, they
aren't.

Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has the
highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the highest
"spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in
eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is white-majority
Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one
in 500).

How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do it.
In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his name.
Their votes did not count.

Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Commission
on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He
dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the commission's official
findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes--one in seven--were
"invalidated," i.e., never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of
nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled.

Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused to
count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra applied
to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000, of the votes
"spoiled" were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90 percent chose
Gore. The nonblack vote divided about evenly between Gore and Bush.
Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these ballots, Al Gore would
have racked up a plurality of about 87,000 votes in Florida--162 times
Bush's official margin of victory.

That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election, 1.9
million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical reasons, like
writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on. The reasons for
ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious shading to the ballots
tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of Harvard experts discovered that
just as in Florida, the number of ballots spoiled was--county by county,
precinct by precinct--in direct proportion to the local black voting
population.

Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--both in the percentage of
voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots
don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to
have their vote spoiled--not counted--as a white voter," explains
political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report.
"National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given
the proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears
that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million
votes, were cast by nonwhite voters."

So there you have it. In the last presidential election, approximately 1
million black and other minorities voted, and their ballots were thrown
away. And they will be tossed again in November 2004, efficiently, by
computer--because HAVA and other bogus reform measures, stressing reform
through complex computerization, do not address, and in fact worsen, the
racial bias of the uncounted vote.

One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And when
the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political careers in
the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day.