Down and dirty

The release of the Civil Rights Commission report on the Florida election turns into another partisan catfight.

By Alicia Montgomery

Jun 8, 2001 | The United States Commission on Civil Rights released its draft report on last fall's Florida presidential election at a plodding but contentious hearing on Friday. The atmosphere ranged from touchy to openly hostile, as the eight commissioners chewed over 200 pages of drainage from the Florida Election Day swamp without anyone making a clear case for or against the notion that African-American voters faced intentional discrimination on Nov. 7.

Like all things related to the presidential election in Florida, the meeting quickly divided into an acrimonious debate between Democrats and Republicans , and those who believe in a Florida conspiracy and those who don't. While stopping short of saying there was a racist conspiracy to keep out black votes, Commission Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry, a registered independent, said the report shows the general sloppiness of the Florida election system had a "disparate impact" on African-American voters, and called on the Department of Justice to investigate further.

Contradicting Berry, and the report, at every opportunity was Abigail Thernstrom, the sole registered Republican on the commission and the first commissioner appointed by President George W. Bush. Thernstrom slammed the document for being full of politically charged rhetoric and broad assumptions of injustice with little statistical backup.

And she had a point. Along with the pages of personal stories collected from commission hearings in Florida shortly after the election, the report includes sidelong swipes at Harris and Bush. For example, in the chapter titled "Responsibility Without Accountability?" the panel takes issue with Gov. Jeb Bush's testimony that county election supervisors were ultimately responsible for logistical problems that plagued the voting. That might be a cop-out, but the report sneers, "Under the Florida Constitution, the governor is charged with ensuring that 'the laws be faithfully executed.' Governor Bush apparently delegated the responsibility to ensure that the election laws are faithfully executed."

The report also promiscuously employs terms like "several" or "many" when trying to account for the number of victims of all races who were locked out of the polls by the foul-ups in Florida. In describing the problems encountered by disabled voters, the report states that "numerous [disabled] Florida residents encountered obstacles to polling precincts and were thus disenfranchised." Whether that "numerous" means tens, hundreds or thousands of voters, the report gives no clue. In another chapter, the panel describes "countless" would-be voters who arrived at polling stations and found their names missing from the rolls.

Perhaps in an attempt to account for the dearth of hard numbers about just how many voters were lost to barriers of language or access, missing registration information and bad communication between state election offices, Chapter 9 of the report claims, "Perhaps the most dramatic undercount in Florida's election was the nonexistent ballots of countless unknown eligible voters, who were turned away, or wrongfully purged from the voter registration rolls by various procedures and practices and were prevented from exercising the franchise."

There were more specific figures in the report concerning the numbers and races of people bumped off the voter rolls by Florida's reliance on felon purge information provided by ChoicePoint, a Texas data analysis firm, claiming that more than 51 percent of those incorrectly scrubbed off the voter rolls were African-American.

Blaming a "lack of leadership" by Florida state officials, the panel also concluded that the state provided an inadequate education for poll workers and voters, denied proper access to disabled individuals, failed to outline proper procedure for handling disputed voter registration, did not provide language help for non-English speaking voters and carelessly purged the voter rolls based on a faulty list of "felons." The report surmised that these factors led to "widespread voter disenfranchisement" that Berry said "fell most harshly on the shoulders of African-Americans."

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