Vanishing Votes
by Gregory Palast

On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act
(HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty
civil rights time bomb.

 First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November
2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local
election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries,
supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2
percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil
rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are
black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number
ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial
pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his
older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all
fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission
against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the
2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files.
The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine
Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.

The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December
2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP
lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise
from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly
scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to
the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the
computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably
tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught
up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital. Steen's case
was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal record.
(My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close
enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case
to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.

The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won
his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under
suspicion? What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb
called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four years
in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his
record: Steen remains an African-American.

If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First,
there's the chance your registration card will simply be thrown
out. Millions of minority citizens registered to vote using what
are called motor-voter forms. And Republicans know it. You would
not be surprised to learn that the Commission on Civil Rights found
widespread failures to add these voters to the registers. My
sources report piles of dust-covered applications stacked up in
election offices.

Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a felon.
In Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub sheets, some
600,000 residents are legally barred from voting because they have a
criminal record in the state. That's one state. In the entire nation
1.4 million black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of
the nation's black male population.

At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of
1965 guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote--but it did not
guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in
seven cases, they aren't.

Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has
the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has
the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on
technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to
Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is
counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).

How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do
it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his
name. Their votes did not count.

Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the
Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those
spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep
in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent
of black votes--one in seven--were "invalidated," i.e., never
counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots
were spoiled.

Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused
to count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra
applied to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000,
of the votes "spoiled" were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90
percent chose Gore. The nonblack vote divided about evenly between
Gore and Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these
ballots, Al Gore would have racked up a plurality of about 87,000
votes in Florida--162 times Bush's official margin of victory.

That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election,
1.9 million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical
reasons, like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on.
The reasons for ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious
shading to the ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of
Harvard experts discovered that just as in Florida, the number of
ballots spoiled was--county by county, precinct by precinct--in
direct proportion to the local black voting population.

Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--both in the
percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the
voters whose ballots don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida
was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled--not counted--as
a white voter," explains political scientist Philip Klinkner,
co-author of Edley's Harvard report. "National figures indicate that
Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite
to white voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all
ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by
nonwhite voters."

So there you have it. In the last presidential election,
approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their
ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November
2004, efficiently, by computer--because HAVA and other bogus reform
measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not
address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted vote.

One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And
when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political
careers in the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day.