Many black voters in South Florida wary of election system

By Gregory Lewis and Toni Marshall
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted August 6 2004

Rosa Thornton, a senior citizen living in northwest Fort Lauderdale, definitely plans to vote in the Aug. 31 primary and the Nov. 2 general election.

"I always vote," she said. "I just have no plans to do it at the polls."

Mount Olive Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale has a supply of absentee ballots, and Thornton and others will use them to vote.

Across the Palm Beach County line, Rosalind Murray, a community redevelopment specialist, will file an absentee ballot in Delray Beach. Like many blacks in South Florida, she is concerned about her vote counting.

"I'm not a conspiracy theorist person," Murray said, "but the more I hear, I think there might be something funny going on. You don't know who to trust. I think there's a better chance of my vote being counted if I vote early and absentee."

Thornton and Murray's suspicions about using touch-screen machines to vote this fall reflect a racial divide that is already showing up in polls and is leading many community leaders to boost efforts to get out the vote, even if it takes absentee ballots.

A recent poll, in which 600 Floridians were interviewed between July 15 and 19, found about one-third of whites said they lacked confidence in the voting system, but two-thirds of African-Americans had little or no confidence. The poll was conducted for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Florida Times-Union.

"There's not a lot of hoopla with voting here," said Henry Graham of Hollywood's Liberia neighborhood. "They don't understand the touch-screen machines. They like the old method better. There needs to be more education on the use of the machines."

The new machines, which work like ATMs to count votes but don't provide a paper trail, came with election reforms following the controversial 2000 presidential election.

Nearly 1 million blacks cast ballots in that election, which was decided by 537 votes in Florida and swung the election to George W. Bush.

Recounts, tossed ballots and purged voter rolls that affected many black voters directly, followed by the suspension of Broward County Elections Office Supervisor Miriam Oliphant for alleged incompetence, led to distrust and suspicion of the whole voting system.

With the new voting machines, the distrust has focused on the technology and the fact that they do not provide for a paper recount.

In response, black churches in South Florida such as Mount Olive Baptist are stockpiling absentee ballots.

New Macedonia Missionary Baptist in Riviera Beach has designated a church member to handle absentee and early voting.

"We want to make sure every vote counts," Bishop Thomas Masters said. "It was important that people know they're options for voting, especially the seniors."

While Democrats and Republicans alike are worried about the touch-screen voting machines, Democrats know that if suspicion in black precincts translates into a low turnout, it could spell doom for Democratic candidates.

"Black turnout is crucial for the Democrats, especially in competitive states like Florida and Ohio," said political scientist David Niven of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. "It's so important that it's impossible to overestimate."

Without African-American votes, Niven said, the last Democratic president would have been Lyndon Johnson.

Scott Maddox, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said Thursday that his party is encouraging voters, including black voters, to vote early absentee "because there's less of a chance of shenanigans."

While he has encountered black voters' concern about 2004, he said he thinks the large number of disenfranchised black voters in 2000 left them more determined to make sure their votes count this time.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will begin airing commercials on black-oriented radio next week describing how easy the machines are to use in an attempt to alleviate people's fear of voting on them, said William McCormick, president of the NAACP's Fort Lauderdale chapter.

The civil rights association and other nonpartisan voter groups involved in the Election Program in Florida, such as the People for the American Way Foundation, are pushing early voting by lobbying churches and providing rides to polling sites. McCormick said the effort would focus on one of the county's early voting sites, Aug. 21 at the Lauderhill Mall.

"We'll do what we have to do to get the vote out," McCormick said, including, encouraging "people who have reservations about the voting machines to file absentee ballots."

In the 2000 election, about 4 percent of the ballots cast by black voters were absentee. Nearly 700,000 absentee ballots were filed in that election, about 11 percent of all ballots.

Pompano Beach Commissioner and former Mayor E. Pat Larkins predicted that the number of absentee ballots filed by black voters in this year's election would exceed those filed four years ago.

"I know about machine reluctance," he said. "A lot of votes will be by absentee ballot, like we've never seen before. Usually, it's confined to the sick and the elderly.

"But a lot of people rightly or wrongly really don't have that much confidence in the machines," Larkins said. "But many are not fully informed on the matter. Those who are informed are concerned about the ability to recount as opposed to the machine's malfunctioning."

The current Broward Supervisor of Elections, Brenda Snipes, said her office has conducted daily outreach with many demographic groups, including the black community, to train community-based volunteers to conduct sessions on how to use the machines.

"We see the greatest apprehension from seniors, more so than the black community," she said. "We let people touch the machines. Once they get over their fear, they see they are simple as can be."

"It's mostly the elderly, even my age group 40 and up," said Linda Wilkerson, a 45-year-old teacher who lives in Fort Lauderdale. "There is a fear of the computer. I think it is keeping them away from the polls."

The Parkway Middle School teacher said,

"They need more practice places."

Nonetheless, many black seniors understand the importance of voting because of the struggle to get the right to cast ballots, particularly in the South during the Jim Crow days.

Finley Drewery, a 66-year-old retiree from Fort Lauderdale, has overcome his voting machine fears.

"I like this," he said. "It's not complicated ... as long as they get results. Hey, you got to look around. The whole world is computerized."