Voting rights still threatened

MICHAEL PAUL WILLIAMS
POINT OF VIEW
Jul 12, 2004
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that al-Qaida is planning a major attack in the United States to disrupt the November elections.

Meanwhile, domestic sources threaten to disrupt the legitimacy of the elections and the health of our democ racy no less than the poll taxes and literacy tests of yesteryear.

Once again, Florida - a key state in the upcoming presidential election - is using a flawed process to purge people from its voter rolls.

The state whose governor happens to be the brother of the president compiled a list of nearly 48,000 people it believed to be felons. Of those, more than 22,000 were black and only 61 were Hispanic, according to wire reports.

In Florida, 90 percent of the state's black voters are registered Democrats. Hispanics there tend to vote Republican.

The list was to have determined who was eligible to vote in the November election. Florida scrapped the list last week after concluding that the method used to compile it was flawed in leaving off some Hispanic felons, possibly allowing them to vote.

Is this why the state had tried to hide the list from view? Florida's Republican-controlled legislature had passed a 2001 statute limiting public access to the purged-voter list. CNN and other news organizations challenged the statute and were granted unfettered access after a judge ruled the statute unconstitutional.

In 2000, Florida pared 94,000 voters from its rolls in another process rife with errors. Many of those barred from voting were black. Bush won the pivotal state by a mere 537 votes.

Florida, like Virginia, does not restore voting rights to felons upon their release from prison. Once again, I'll pose a question: When felons pay their debt to society, why shouldn't their voting rights automatically be restored?

In their disproportionate impact on black citizens, voter scrub lists and ballot disqualification appear to have followed the poll tax and literacy tests as the latest means to disenfranchise citizens.

Anyone who would dismiss outright the plausibility of a concerted effort to deny suffrage to a class of U.S. citizens should recall that for most of our nation's history, America either denied or did not protect the right to vote for women, black people and the poor.

Unfortunately, this problem isn't confined to Florida.

Greg Palast, an investigative reporter for the BBC and author of the best-selling book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," wrote that 1.9 million Americans' ballots were rejected in the 2000 presidential election. About 50 percent of those rejected ballots were cast by blacks, even though black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

"It's easy to lose your vote," Palast writes, "especially when some politicians want your vote lost."

This problem wasn't lost on 13 black congressmen, all Democrats, who asked the United Nations to oversee the upcoming presidential election. The U.N. politely declined last week.

We should be concerned about our electoral process being hijacked by terrorists. But can our democracy survive a repeat of the doubts surrounding the 2000 election?