A Racist Elephant in Our Living Room

Laura Flanders

There's an elephant in our electoral living room that Democratic leaders want  to hide. In all the talk about cranky voting machines, chads and butterflies,  this is one topic the Gore camp has not touched. It will hurt them. It has  already. In this case, the pachyderm is institutional racism, and in an  election of losers it has come out on top.

Consider the big picture: in election 2000, 90 percent of African Americans  voted for Gore, as did 63 percent of Latinos and 55 percent of Asians  (exit-poll data on Native Americans is unavailable but they've historically  voted Democratic.) The popular vote - that national, pro-Democrat majority --  is disproportionately people of color. Thanks to the winner-take all,  Electoral College system, it counts for naught.

In the contested state of Florida, the Black vote was up a huge 65 percent.  In a state where thirty-one percent of all Black men may not vote because of  an 1868 ban on felons, Blacks contributed 16 percent (up from 10 percent) of  the turnout, and nine out of ten voted Democratic. Again, disproportionately,  their votes won't count.

On day one after the election, there was a story in the Florida papers about  an unauthorized police roadblock, stopping cars not a mile from a Black  church-turned- polling-booth. NAACP volunteers reported being swamped with  complaints from registered voters who had found it impossible to vote.  They  heard stories of intimidation at and around polling places; demands for  superfluous ID; people complained about a pattern of singling out Black men  and youths for criminal background checks, and in call after call, would-be  voters complained they'd been denied language interpretation, and other help  at the polls.

By now it's clear that overwhelmed election workers made a mass of mistakes  but those mistakes were laced through with some clear intent to suppress some  votes. A full three weeks after the election The New York Times finally took  a serious look and reported that -anticipating a large turnout in a tight  race -- Florida election officials had given laptop computers to precinct  workers so they could have direct access to the state's voter rolls, but the  computers only went to some precincts, and only one went to a precinct whose  people were predominantly Black. The technology gap in the no-laptop  precincts forced the workers there to rely on a few phone lines to head  office. Voters whose names did not appear on the rolls were held up while  workers tried to get through on the phone, for hours, or until they gave up.

For those who voted, there was another technology glitch. 185,000 Floridians  cast ballots that did not count. Theirs were the ballots that had been  punched too few or too many times, or were otherwise flawed. Flaws too, seem  to have followed race lines. In an election that turned on a few hundred  votes, Floridians whose ballots failed to register a mark for President were  much more likely to have voted with computer punch cards than optical  scanning machines.  In Miami Dade, the county with the most votes cast,  predominantly Black precincts saw their votes thrown out at four times the  rate of white precincts: according to the Times, 1 out of 11 ballots in  predominantly black precincts were rejected, a total of 9,904.

Urban, multi-racial Palm Beach, home of the infamous butterfly ballot, and  Duval, where candidates' names were spread across two pages despite what the  published ballot had shown, produced thirty one percent of Florida's  discarded ballots (but only twelve percent of the total votes cast.) In  Duval, which has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the nation, more than  26,000 votes were rejected, 9,000 from precincts that were predominantly  Black.

Many Floridians who found themselves "scrubbed" off the voting rolls weren't  purged accidentally, reports Gregory Palast for Salon.com. Florida Secretary  of State Katherine Harris paid a private firm, ChoicePoint, $4 million to  "cleanse" the voting rolls, and the firm used the state's felon-ban, to  exclude eight thousand voters who had never committed a felony. ChoicePoint  is a Republican outfit. Board members include former New York Police  commissioner Howard Safir and billionaire Ken Langone, chair of the  fundraising committee for Mayor Giuliani's aborted New York Senate bid.  The  erroneous data wasn't their doing, ChoicePoint complains, the names came,  raw, from the state of Texas. They were supposed to be reviewed locally, but  they were distributed un-reviewed. African Americans dominate. (The 8,000  wrong names were "a minor glitch" ChoicePoint told Palast; a glitch fifteen  times the size of the Texas Governor's lead.)

As for that election morning police checkpoint, near Tallahassee, Robert  Chamber, a Black resident, told the Guardian UK he knew what it was about:  "putting fear in people's hearts…." The Florida panhandle is home to the  largest concentration of neo-confederate white supremacist groups in the US.     But this problem is no neo-nazi plot - it's racism of the institutional, not  the exceptional kind, and even more devastating than the statistics has been  Democratic leadership's silence. While African Americans in huge numbers know  there was massive voter fraud, harassment and intimidation a la Jim Crow, the  Democratic Party's white top-dogs have resolutely refused to talk about  voting rights, race or racism - Why? For fear it will hurt them in the court  of public opinion? Among white swing voters and southern Democrats? Already  hurting in all of those places, they're trifling with one of the few solid  voting blocks they've got left, (Blacks, Latinos, Jews.)   

The NAACP came out strong, the weekend after the election, holding public  hearings and gathering 300 pages of legally sworn testimony from 486 people  who say they were denied their right to vote. With the Congressional Black  Caucus the NAACP wrote to Janet Reno seeking a Justice Department  investigation into possible violations of the Voting Rights Act. That was  back on November 14th. Since then, the Gore campaign has filed dozens of  lawsuits - not one deals with violations of voting rights. The Justice  Department has initiated what officials go out of their way to characterize  as a preliminary inquiry, not an investigation. (Alligator-wrestler Reno is  scared to stir the waters in her home-state, where she's hoping to retire any  day now, some say.)

The Gore team has chosen to try to eek some votes out of three counties with  manual counts, and to make much of butterflies and chards, but nothing of  race. (Recently, Gore told a reporter he was "very troubled" by the "serious  allegations." That's it.) His racist denial of the seriousness of racism  makes nonsense out of US politics.

The Electoral College is a tool of racism. As Yale's Akhil Reed Amar wrote in  the New York Times, "the College was designed at the founding of the country  to help one group - white Southern males - and this year, it has apparently  done just that."

In the years after the forced-end of slavery, former slave states like  Florida imposed those felon-disenfranchisement laws, precisely to disempower  freed-but-impoverished Blacks. The political parties crafted the statewide  primary system into what amounted to a white-man's private club to keep the  newly enfranchised under the old establishment's control. Then came literacy  tests and poll taxes - voters had to keep their tax-receipts on file -  anything to keep electoral power in white hands. For an idea of what those  tackling literacy tests faced, consider: under Jim Crow, Florida required  that textbooks used by the public school children of one race be kept  separate from those used by the other -- even in storage.

After the 1965 Act was passed, states did everything they could to dilute  Black influence. Winner-take all systems, or absolute majority vote  requirements were embraced to keep black candidates from winning over split  fields of white candidates in local races - in just the same way as  winner-take-all works in the presidential contest. More offices were filled  by appointment. Legislative and congressional district lines were redrawn to  keep black voting strength submerged.

None of this requires looking back very far: the same House Speaker, Tom  Feeney, who wants the Florida legislature to select a Bush slate of Electors  no matter what the vote-counters count, suggested reintroducing literacy  tests just two weeks ago: "Voter confusion is not a reason for whining or  crying or having a revote," said Feeney. "It may be a reason to require  literacy tests." (Palm Beach Post, 11/16.)

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who will may well be the final arbiter  of which votes get counted and which (white) man gets the White House, is  William Rehnquist, a segregationist from way back.

In 1962, Republican activist William (then "Bill") Rehnquist was the leader  of Operation Eagle Eye, a flying squad of GOP lawyers that swept through  polling places in south Phoenix to question the right of minority voters to  cast their ballots.  As Dave Wagner reported in the Arizona Republic last  year, Rehnquist defended keeping African Americans out of stores and  restaurants in Phoenix.  In 1964, at the Bethune Precinct, (which was 40  percent Hispanic and 90 percent Democratic) Rehnquist and Operation Eagle Eye  activists challenged every Black and Mexican voter's ability to read the  Constitution of the United States in the English language (then a  requirement.)

The result, according to one witness, was "a line a half-block long, four  abreast…They wanted people to become frustrated and leave."  In his testimony  to a US Senate hearing on his appointment to the Supreme Court, Rehnquist  denied that he officially challenged anyone's right to vote. Just as today's  defenders of  Bush, argue that voter error, not bias, disproportionately  shrank the counted vote, Rehnquist argued that he broke no rules, he was just  following the law.

Trying to wage politics in the US while tiptoing around racism is like  sidestepping an elephant. It's dangerous, it's not smart, and it won't work.  What suppresses the Black and minority vote suppresses the Democratic and  liberal-progressive vote. The majority of white male voters haven't polled  Democratic since 1964 and only women of color create the gender gap for Gore.  Yet the unequal distribution of resources and bias that created a practically  apartheid voting system in Florida was sustained by the Democratic Party -  who approved of the process, try as they might to blame the Governor's  cronies. And Democratic pro-drug war, pro-death penalty, pro-felon  disenfranchisement policies stoked the racist atmosphere in which this  election was held.

The conditions are ripe for a pro-democracy movement. A moment, at least:  this is it.  Some things have changed in the nation since 1964, and when the  public has heard (or seen on CSPAN) the witnesses who gave the NAACP  testimony, they have been shocked. Voter protests in Florida have built a  multi-racial coalition that is advocating the kind of electoral reform the  whole nation could get behind. Among their demands: a non-partisan election  commission, standardized voting procedures and federal enforcement of the  Voting Rights Act. Add to that, the longer-term structural changes some  advocate: instant run off voting, or some form of proportional  representation, so that small parties (and minority constituencies) could  build support for their issues without throwing elections to their foes.

The public has seen the Electoral College in its worst light: for the first  time, the tyranny of a minority may contradict the popular will. Perhaps  something will come of the shared experience of disenfranchisement. But not  if we don't talk about what's at the root of it: racism. Not "the system,"  but this particular, racist one. And those who've been marginalized must  occupy the center. People of color are central to why our electoral system is  set up this way; likewise, they must be at the heart of any movement for real  democracy. We can get rid of the racism, but only if we all shove that  elephant out at once.

 "The Laura Flanders Show," Monday-Friday, 9-Noon, Mountain Time 1490 KWAB and www.Radioforchange.com