Blacks aim to avenge Florida's 2000 poll

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Jeb Bush under threat from voters who were struck off last electoral roll

Julian Borger in Tampa, Florida Saturday November 2, 2002 The Guardian

From his prone position on a barber's chair, head thrown back and lathered, red suede shoes protruding skywards at the other end, Gerald White makes an alarming observation about politics in Florida.

"There should have been blood in the streets," he said.

Mr White is no stranger to blood. He used to be Marvin Gaye's bodyguard, and when the singer was shot dead by his own father on April 1 1984, it was with Mr White's gun. Mr Gaye had told him to lend it to his old man.

But 18 years later, Mr White is talking about voting - or rather failing to vote - in the 2000 elections, when Florida became internationally famous for its banana republic approach to the electoral process.

There were confusing ballots and, of course, the hanging chads (those fiddly bits of paper that clung on to voting cards even after they were supposed to have been punched out). This year, Florida's poll should be almost entirely chad-free. In the big cities the old punch-cards have been replaced by voter-friendly touch-screens, a sort of electoral equivalent to cash machines, and the polls have opened two weeks early in case of teething problems.

But for black Floridians, the 2000 elections were about disenfranchisement, and their problems are by no means over. Thousands of voters turned up at the polls two years ago and found their names had been removed from the electoral roll.

It turned out that the Florida establishment, run by Governor Jeb Bush, George Bush's younger brother, had hired a private company to draw up a list of all Floridians with a criminal record, so they could be removed from the voting lists (under Florida law, past convictions bar you from voting for life).

But the company, DBT, was instructed to overestimate and to "scrub" from the lists anyone with a similar name, date of birth and race to people with past felony convictions. As blacks account for nearly half of all such convictions, but only 11% of the Florida electorate, that meant that a disproportionate number of blacks with similar names and ages to felons were "scrubbed".

"Our votes were stolen. It's like coming to my house and taking the groceries from my wife and children," Mr White said.

At the mid-term elections on Tuesday, Mr White is determined to turn up again, and this time make his vote count against Governor Bush. The same goes for everyone else waiting for a shave and a haircut at Cole's beauty and barber shop on Martin Luther King boulevard, at the heart of Tampa's main black district in Hillsborough county.

Monroe Mack, who has come to Cole's to turn out the vote on behalf of Governor Bush's Democratic challenger Bill McBride, believes (as do many political pundits) that anger-fuelled black turn-out will prove decisive in a close-run race.

"We are the x-factor," Mr Mack said.

The x-factor will have to be particularly strong this time to save Bill McBride, an amiable but politically inexperienced lawyer who is still trailing by more than five points, according to most local polls. Almost all the mainstream newspapers have backed Mr Bush, pointing to his opponent's lack of a political record and his vagueness over policy.

The contest is turning into the biggest grudge match of the elections. Terry McAuliffe, who is the head of the Democratic political machine, has made the younger Bush brother his party's primary target.

Unseating the governor would not only embarrass the president, it would also put the Florida state apparatus at the Democrats' disposal in the 2004 presidential elections, when the "Sunshine state" may once again prove decisive.

The Republicans are well aware of the threat and have poured resources into the campaign. The president himself has flown in to help the campaign, as well as party luminaries such as Senator John McCain, who was rallying war veterans this week.

The party has also channelled funds into Jeb Bush's $30m re-election campaign. The governor still has more than $10m left from this sizeable war chest to spend on television advertising in the last days of the campaign.

The Democrats have little more than $1m remaining for the last few days, and plan to focus instead on using volunteers such as Mr Mack to turn out the faithful on polling day. This weekend the party is sending former president Bill Clinton, a hugely popular figure among African Americans, to help fuel enthusiasm.

Mr Mack expects that there will be plenty more problems. "There's a lot of people out there who were taken off the voting lists back in 2000 who are still having problems getting reinstated. It's a long and difficult process," he said.

In fact, the liberal online magazine Salon.com reported yesterday that there were still 94,000 voters from the DBT's original "purge" list - half of them black - who are still barred from voting, despite the company's own admission that the list is hugely inaccurate. In fact a company report admitted that only 3,000 names on the list could be entirely verified.

Salon carried out its own examination of the list and found more than 400 people who were recorded as carrying out crimes in the future. Eight appear to have been convicted before they were even born.

The state government has promised to fix the list, but only by next year, long after the election. Meanwhile, Mr Mack is hoping to overcome the formidable obstacles by sheer weight of numbers. But even he admits he faces a daunting challenge.

"It's hard to judge how people will respond to 2000," he said. "Whether they'll get mad as hell or just think their vote won't count and stay home."

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2002

Answers

I don't understand this connection the blacks have with Clinton, unless it's that they really think he was the first black president.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2002

Even weirder is the attraction he holds for women, some of them rich and powerful in their own right.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2002

rich and powerful women do not necessarily have brains. same as him.

-- Anonymous, November 03, 2002

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