Something Rotten in the State of Florida

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Glenda Hood has become a particular object of attack in the campaign to hold Florida accountable for its voting practices. Unlike her predecessor, Katherine Harris, who was at least nominally independent because she was elected to the post of Secretary of State, Hood is a direct gubernatorial appointment. In the words of Congressman Wexler, a particularly ardent critic: "She is the political mouthpiece of Jeb Bush, a true partisan using her office to the best possible advantage of the Republican Party. She is the mechanism Jeb and George Bush have employed to do everything in their power to make Florida a Bush state."
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More egregiously – certainly in terms of protecting voting rights – Hood tried earlier in the year to revive a statewide purge list of suspected felons and ex-felons, ostensibly to clean up outdated voter rolls. The list, first dreamed up by Sandra Mortham when she was Secretary of State, disproportionately affects black voters, who vote Democrat by a nine-to-one margin. The list was discredited after 2000 because it was found to be riddled with errors, leading to unknown thousands of cases of wrongful disenfranchisement, many of which have not been corrected.

The state fought to keep this year's list secret, only to have it forced into the open by court order. Sure enough, the list – prepared by the consultancy firm Accenture, which has contributed $25,000 to Republican candidates in Florida – turned out to be top-heavy with black voters (including about 2,000 people who had had their voting rights restored), and it included several people who could demonstrate that they had no criminal record at all. Most startlingly, the list of 48,000 included only 61 Hispanic names – way out of line with the strength of both the general Hispanic population and the prison population of Hispanic people. It's probably no coincidence that Hispanics in Florida – especially Cuban exiles – tend to vote Republican.

Hood was sufficiently embarrassed to drop the list, but the furor focused attention on another glaring injustice in Florida politics: the fact that prisoners have no automatic restoration of voting rights once they have served their time. Florida is one of just seven states that disenfranchise ex-felons in this way, and it is by far the largest. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that about 600,000 people in Florida are denied their voting rights because of their criminal history, including one in three black men.

Former felons can apply for restoration of their voting rights by executive clemency, but the process is tortuously long, requires them to waive the privacy of their medical and financial histories, and has no guaranteed outcome. Governor Bush himself hears a few dozen cases in hearings held four times a year. Given the political benefit of keeping most of these ex-felons off the rolls, it's no surprise that he takes his sweet time. The backlog of applicants is tens of thousands.

Florida has had felon disenfranchisement laws on its books since 1868, when slavery had just been abolished and the white elite, humiliated by the Civil War, was looking for other means to deny blacks their rights. It is hard, even now, not to see a deliberately discriminatory pattern in the law. As Courtenay Strickland of the ACLU Voting Rights Project put it: "Florida is creating degrees of citizenship. When you start doing that, you're creating something that begins to look not quite like a democracy."

That sentiment resonates in Miami's Little Haiti, home to roughly half the one million Haitians in the United States. Pro-John Kerry voting-rights groups have been working the area in force ahead of the 4 October registration deadline, but they have found a population almost completely disillusioned with the electoral process. "They have got it in their minds that Bush will steal the election again," said Rosa Assinthe, a Haitian-American who has been on a registration drive for the Service Employees International Union since April.

Organisers are finding that at least 20 per cent of people who register to vote through their local Department of Motor Vehicles (the agency that issues driving licences) are not receiving voter cards in the mail. People can still vote without a voter card, but only at the correct polling station. The only sure way of finding out which station to go to - and they change from election to election, as do the addresses of lower-income voters and recent immigrants - is to telephone the county elections department. That line is often busy.

Other bureaucratic games appear to be going on. Edeline Clermont, a member of the Haitian American Grassroots Coalition, said she knew of several cases where voters – herself included – received new voter cards in the mail without prompting, only to discover that the party registration had been surreptitiously changed from Democrat to either Republican or Independent. When Clermont went to vote in the August primaries, she was turned away at first because, she was told, she was not listed as a Democrat. "I told them, you'll have to call the police and arrest me, because I'm not leaving this place until I've voted," she said. The polling station officials relented and let her vote by provisional ballot.

Miami's Haitians are particularly suspicious about the way their voting rights are regarded compared with those of the Cuban Republicans living in Little Havana. They are convinced that the Cubans are furiously registering non-citizens and filling in absentee ballots for dead people, and are being allowed to get away with it. The fear among the Haitians, meanwhile, is that if they break the rules in similar ways, they will be caught and punished.

Some of their suspicions are no doubt well grounded. There is a long history of voter fraud in Miami, especially among the Cubans. A Cuban exile columnist reported recently that absentee ballots were being sold on Calle Ocho in Miami for $25 a pop.
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http://www.alternet.org/election04/20052/