Justice Department investigates Florida vote

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2000 by Montgomery, Alicia

The U.S. Justice Department sent investigators to Florida the first week in December to investigate numerous allegations of election day problems in minority neighborhoods.

The NAACP delivered close to 300 pages of testimony to Justice Department attorneys that document 486 allegations that range from incompetence to harassment of Florida's minority voters. The report said that widespread difficulties "point toward the massive, systematic exclusion of black, Jewish and immigrant voters."

The investigation resulted when NAACP President Kweisi Mfume appealed to Attorney General Janet Reno to look into the problems.

Perhaps the most serious charges focus on Hillsborough County. Stacy Powers, news director at Tampa's WTMP radio station, tearfully testified during a NAACP hearing held Nov. 11 in Miami about what she saw on election day.

Powers had been going to various polling places, trying to help people she believed had been unfairly turned away from voting. After being ejected from one polling place for "getting snippy," Powers talked with an elderly man leaving the polls. He proudly sported an "I Voted" sticker. Just as Powers was driving away, a police car approached the man and two officers got out. Powers said the officers accosted the man, demanding: "What exactly are you doing in this area? He pointed to his collar and said, 'I just voted.' And they said, 'We want to see I.D. and we want to see it now!'"

Frightened, Powers left the scene. Later, she contacted local authorities to ask why there had been such a strong police presence in the area. Law enforcement officials said they were investigating a burglary. Powers, a former policewoman, didn't believe it: "There's no way you need that many police for that."

Authorities have acknowledged some police misconduct on election day, though not in the incident that Powers witnessed. According to The Guardian, a London newspaper, the Florida Highway Patrol acknowledges that four police officers outside Tallahassee set up an illegal roadblock in a black community Nov. 7. Some voters were detained for up to 20 minutes. Others turned around and went home.

Dormice DeSouza, a Florida attorney who also testified before the NAACP, had to contend with an unexpected change in her polling place. DeSouza arrived at her new polling place an hour before the statewide closing time. But she was delayed by police, who kept DeSouza and others out of the parking lot "until a space became available." Thirty minutes later, DeSouza finally joined a long line of waiting voters.

At 6:50 p.m., with ten minutes left to vote, DeSouza made it to the front of the line, but not to the voting booth: "They said that they didn't have my name." She was shuttled to another line -- for voters with problems -- to wait with more than a dozen people. At 7 p.m., the poll workers simply told DeSouza and the others to go home. DeSouza left "confused and dejected" and didn't vote.

Florida law, however, requires that everyone in line to vote when the polls close should be allowed to vote.

Many Haitian Americans also had problems voting. Marleine Bastien, leader of the Haitian Women of Miami, said that many first-time immigrant voters were denied assistance from Creole translators, contrary to their rights under Florida law. When Bastien went to the polls and asked a worker why no translators were available, she got an earful: "She asked me whether I thought Haitians deserved special treatment. I told her no, that I just wanted to help."

In some cases, Creole translators were stopped from helping. When Bastien offered her assistance, she was "almost assaulted" and threatened by a poll worker: "She told me to get out or she would call the police."

The experience upset Bastien, who was hoping that first time immigrant voters would be able to cherish the election process.

Some who did vote wonder whether their votes were counted. In separate incidents, ballot boxes were left uncollected for days in Miami-Dade County. One of those boxes was discovered at the Good Hope Little River Baptist Church, where over 1,000 people had cast their ballots, four days after the polls closed. The Rev. Clyde Judson had to call election officials to retrieve the ballot box. Law enforcement officials finally collected the ballot box on Saturday, but Judson doesn't know what has happened to it since.

Aside from the work of Kweisi Mfume, Rev. Jesse Jackson and several civil rights organizations, relatively little has been done to explain these examples of alleged misconduct.

There were plenty of early warning signs. Mfume says NAACP officials received more than 80 complaints about voting in Florida before noon on election day. The organization's offices were so flooded with calls about voting irregularities that they dispatched 200 extra volunteers to polling places across the state half-way through election day to monitor the balloting.

Alicia Montgomery is assistant editor of the on-line magazine Salon.com.