Littenberg isn't alone, either in her feeling of disenfranchisement or her determination to do something about it. According to the Miami Herald, more than 170,000 Florida voters "ruined" their presidential ballots by either voting for more than one candidate or by not marking their ballot in a way that could be read by ballot-counting machines. In a June 2001 report, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that disenfranchisement "fell most harshly on the shoulders of African-American voters." One newspaper review of voting records shows that nearly 9 percent of the votes cast in majority-black precincts went uncounted in Florida in 2000, compared to "just" 3 percent of the votes statewide. The Civil Rights Commission cited estimates that black voters were nearly 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected.

And those analyses addressed only those ballots that were actually cast. Many African-Americans were denied the right to vote at all, either through intimidation delivered by a highway patrol checkpoint that just happened to be set up near a polling precinct in Leon County, or through policies that incorrectly purged many African-Americans from the voting rolls and then denied them the chance to correct the errors on Election Day.

"That election was a coup," says Davis, the 64-year-old pastor at Hilltop Baptist. "It was unspeakable, OK? It was a power thing, a political thing, a hostile takeover."

Rep. Meek, whose campaign dramatically increased turnout among African-Americans in 2000 only to see so many of their votes go uncounted, said last week that he expects black voters to show up at the polls with a passion in November. "George Bush loves black people in his TV commercials," Meek said. But he said it is Bush's policies -- particularly on the economy, jobs, healthcare and possibly the crisis in Haiti -- and not his TV spots that will drive the black vote.

Exit polls showed that black voters preferred Al Gore over George Bush by a margin of 93-7 percent in 2000. Activists are working hard to ensure that black voters turn out in large numbers this year; a coalition of civic and social-action groups have set a goal of registering 2 million new black voters for November. Among their target states: Florida.

Some observers are skeptical that Florida Democrats can muster the same extraordinary black turnout in 2004 that they enjoyed in 2000. University of South Florida professor Susan MacManus notes that turnout among African-Americans fell sharply from 2000 to 2002, despite the fact that Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe attempted to turn Gov. Jeb Bush's reelection race into a referendum on George W. Bush and the 2000 vote.

And Dáte, the Palm Beach Post bureau chief, said that African-American voters may be less motivated to vote this time around because one of the factors that drove them to the polls in 2000 -- anger over Jeb Bush's abolition of affirmative action in 1999 -- is a more distant memory now.

Both MacManus and Dáte expressed concern that feelings of disenfranchisement in the past could leave African-Americans feeling that any attempt to vote now would be futile. Meek is not convinced. Every day, he said, George W. Bush "reminds African-Americans why they should wake up early to vote against him."

It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of Florida in 2004. With 27 Electoral College votes -- two more than it had in 2000, and 10 percent of the total needed to win -- Florida is the fourth-biggest prize in the presidential race. But it's bigger than that, really. Barring an unexpected landslide one way or the other, the only states with more Electoral College votes than Florida are already spoken for. California and New York are predictably Democratic; Texas is solidly Republican. That means Florida will likely be the biggest state in play.

"Florida is a must-have state, and both parties have admitted so," says MacManus, a leading analyst on Florida politics. "And it's just as much about the election in 2000 as it is about the election in 2004. Both parties want to prove that they won Florida in 2000, and they want to lock in all the new voters who have registered here since then."

History suggests that a Democrat can win without Florida; if Al Gore had just carried his home state of Tennessee, he would have taken the White House no matter what the Supreme Court said. But so long as Kerry holds on to California and New York, which together promise nearly a third of the Electoral College votes needed for victory, it's hard to see how Bush can win the reelection without the Sunshine State. The last Republican to win the presidency without Florida was Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

The Electoral College math explains the attention being lavished on Florida by the Bush and Kerry campaigns. Bush has visited Florida 19 times already, and not just to visit his brother. Bush's policies on Cuba and his desperate determination to pass a Medicare prescription drug benefit suggest that Karl Rove is paying close attention to voting blocs here, and Bush-Cheney media buys last week prove it; the campaign appears to have spent nearly a million dollars on TV in Florida already.

Kerry can't match Bush in time or money, but he's trying. By the time Sen. John Edwards announced his withdrawal from the Democratic race last week, Kerry was already in Orlando, stumping for votes among the swing voters who live along the I-4 corridor. Kerry said Florida will be a "critical battleground" in November -- so much so that he returned to the state Monday for two more days of campaigning.

Both Republicans and Democrats are spending time trying to peel off Floridians typically in the others' camp. The Republicans have worked with Haitian-Americans in the hopes of finding some kind of toehold among blacks, and they're courting the traditionally Democratic Jewish vote in Florida as well.

Steven Abrams, the Republican mayor of Boca Raton, said the attacks of Sept. 11 and the absence of Joe Lieberman on the Democratic ticket give Republicans an opening with Jewish voters, who he said comprise about 7 percent of Florida's voting population. Kerry has a strong record on Jewish issues; after Kerry met privately with Jewish leaders in New York last month, the head of the Anti-Defamation League told the New York Daily News that there's "no significant gap" between Bush and Kerry on Israel. Abrams doesn't buy it. Given Bush's almost unequivocal support for the actions of hard-liner Ariel Sharon, it would be hard for anyone to be as solidly pro-Israel as the president has been. And the Republicans are plainly ready to attack Kerry for "flip-flopping" on the Middle East; Abrams noted that Kerry initially seemed to criticize Israel's construction of a security fence, then seemed to back off from that criticism during his meeting with Jewish leaders.

Kerry is trying to pick off fiscal conservatives in Florida, highlighting the massive budget deficits that have appeared on Bush's watch, and he's working to appeal to military voters by citing his own war record and calling on military-friendly surrogates like former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland.

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