Despite the outrageously large number of African American votes nullified in Florida -- the subject of a lawsuit filed the week of December 8th, 2000 by Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL) and civil rights leaders -- Al Gore remained conspicuously silent on the issue until he was being fitted for his political coffin. Suddenly he was "very troubled" by the "serious allegations" involving suppression of the black vote.

A detailed analysis of the Florida vote by the Washington Post the week prior to December 8th, produced a staggering finding: the higher the percentage of black voters, the higher the rate of rejected ballots. For instance, up to a third of the ballots cast in Jacksonville's black precincts were tossed out, four times more than in neighboring white precincts.

This huge disparity in discarded votes is a reminder that we are indeed two Americas -- not just when it comes to education, health care, housing and our vaunted prosperity, but even when it comes to voting. In the precincts of the other America, there were longer lines, less reliable voting machines and less access to technology that instantly identified mismarked ballots and gave voters a second chance. So even when it comes to this most egalitarian of acts, some are more equal than others.

The African American turnout in Florida was an astounding 65% higher than in 1996. Many new voters were spurred by Gov. Jeb Bush's One Florida program, which sought to dismantle affirmative action in university admissions and state contracting. "We'll remember in November" was their slogan. And they did. The problem was that when many of these freshly registered voters showed up at the polls, they were not on the rolls and were not allowed to vote. First-time voter Dedrana McCray arrived at her polling place in Opa-Locka with her valid voter registration and ID in hand, but was turned away because she was not on the list, and phone lines to the county office that could verify her status were constantly busy. Score one for George W. Bush.

Too bad McCray didn't live in one of the 18 more affluent precincts in the county that were equipped by the election commission with laptop computers that allowed them to tie into the main registration rolls. Even though the powers that be knew that the highest number of new registrants were in African American districts, the laptops went disproportionately to white and Cuban American districts. How many African Americans were turned away for want of a PowerBook? (This begs the question, that if the election commission knew in advance that the highest number of new registrations to vote were in African American districts, and those districts were not provided with adequate access to county voter rolls, that this was a deliberate act, and not an accident. WFI Editor)

And it wasn't only new voters who had trouble. In an unprecedented move, Florida had hired a private company (laden, as it turns out, with Republicans), to purge its voter rolls. But the "scrub list" the company supplied was riddled with inaccuracies -- once again disproportionately penalizing African Americans. In Hillsborough County, for instance, 54% of those on the error-filled list of felons to be excised from the rolls were black, though African Americans account for less than 12% of the county's voting population. Score more for Bush.

"I asked the vice president on numerous occasions," the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me, "to incorporate both in his remarks to the American people and in his legal strategy the huge black disenfranchisement that happened in Florida. But he didn't for fear of being accused of playing the race card. It's hard to believe that race is still a third rail of American politics It's a reminder that neither party marched in Selma."

On a TV the week before the election, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume expressed outrage at the lack of attention being paid by the mainstream media to the voting violations in African American communities. Aren't you equally outraged, I asked, by the lack of attention being paid by Gore -- who after all, received 93% of the African American vote? Mfume spread the blame around, then finally conceded that Gore has "a special obligation given the historic allegiance that black people have had to the Democratic Party." George W. Bush received no more than 7% of the black vote in Florida, and only 8% nationwide.

EXAMPLES:

1. Try this story detailed by Ron Davis, an African American in Miami-Dade County. "Our family always votes together. This year it was my turn to drive. After work, my wife Lisa and I borrowed a van from a friend and picked up my brother, my parents and my uncle and aunt. About a block away from the polling place, were were pulled over by a county sheriff. He looked in the van and asked me if I had a chauffeur's license. I said 'This is my family and we're going to vote.' He said, 'You can't take all those people to the polling place without a license. Go home and I won't write you a ticket.' I was tired of arguing. We went home and all tried to vote later. But it was too late."

2. Or how about this from Dave Crawford, another African American , from Broward County: "I showed up at the polling place with my 5-year-old daughter. I was stopped at the door by an election official. He asked me my name. I told him. He said, 'Son, we've got a problem. You're not allowed to vote.' I asked him what the hell he was talking about. He said, 'Son, says here you're a convict. Convicts can't vote. He had a list in his hand. And I told him that I'd never even been arrested in my life. I handed him my voter ID card. He just shook his head, smiled and pointed at a list. He never showed me my name. My daughter began to cry and I left in disgust."

3. In Duval County, a Republican stronghold, about 25,000 votes were tossed out by the canvassing board; most of those came from black precincts. According to numerous accounts, election workers regularly demeaned as being "dumb and retarded" those voters who asked for help. Throughout Florida, more than 170,000 votes were dismissed, more than half of them from black precincts.

SOURCE: The first part of this article was written by Arianna Huffington, a syndicated columnist, and is excerpted here from the 8 December, 2000, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, from an editorial entitled, "Florida's Ugly Secret: Nullified African American Votes." The second part of this article, under the subtitle, "Examples:" was written by Alexander Cockburn, and is excerpted here from the 15 December, 2000, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, from an editorial entitled, "There Should Be No Closure on Florida's Disenfranchising Outrages."

Now that Bush has lost the popular vote, but will be installed into the Presidency due only to the election of the Electoral College, as the 3rd President to win without a majority of the popular vote in 122 years, not only is his legitimacy thrown into doubt, but so is that of the Supreme Court, and even the Congress [which also employs the same electoral process which has been exposed as corrupt across the country, as a result of the 2000 presidential election, including the arbitrary failure of state's to count valid ballots as well as the placement of archaic voting equipment in districts that tend to historically vote against the party in power of any particular state]. The battle may be over, but not the war. And the likelihood is that this corrupt republic has lost so much credibility that it is dead, and merely in need of dissolution. It will happen we now know, with certainty. It is just a matter of time. What replaces it will determine the future of freedom and democracy in the United States. But before we let pundits and bureaucrats invent a system that will allow them to perpetuate their influence, we must look back to the roots of American government, to the principles of law and justice that existed for a thousand years before the founders of the republic abandoned them in 1776.)