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BATTLEGROUND STATE


 Black leaders protest difficulties in Fla. vote registration

By Jo Becker, Washington Post  |  October 17, 2004

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Earlier this month, nearly a dozen 
African-American ministers and civil rights leaders walked into the 
Duval County election office here, television cameras in tow, with a 
list of questions: Why weren't there more early voting sites closer to 
black neighborhoods? Why were so many blacks not being allowed to redo 
incomplete voter registrations? Who was deciding all this?

ADVERTISEMENT
        

Standing across the office counter under a banner that read "Partners in 
Democracy" was the man who made those decisions, election chief Dick 
Carlberg. Visibly angry, the Republican explained why he decided the way 
he had: "We call it the law."

Black leaders said the scene at the supervisor's office was reminiscent 
of a blocked schoolhouse door at the height of desegregation. They 
charge that GOP officials are deliberately using the law to keep black 
people off the rolls and hinder them from voting.

Four years ago, ballots cast from black neighborhoods throughout Florida 
were four times as likely to go uncounted as those from white 
neighborhoods. Nowhere was the disparity more apparent than in Duval 
County, where 42 percent of 27,000 ballots thrown out came from four 
heavily Democratic black precincts.

Despite attempts by Florida officials to prevent a repeat of the 
controversy that dogged the last presidential election, black leaders 
said they are concerned that this year new registrations are being 
rejected for minor errors and that limited accessibility to early 
polling places could lead to more disputes, roiling Florida and the 
nation long after Election Day.

Florida, with 27 electoral votes, is again a hotly contested 
battleground. Democratic organizations, black churches, and civil rights 
groups have embarked on an aggressive get-out-the vote effort in 
minority neighborhoods in Duval County and elsewhere in the state.

From the 2000 election to August 2004, nearly 200,000 black voters were 
added to the rolls in Florida, a 21 percent increase due in large part 
to registration drives by groups including America Coming Together. 
Registration by white voters increased almost 6 percent.

Black people overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and Senator John F. Kerry, 
Democrat of Massachusetts, has made turning out that vote a key part of 
his Florida strategy. He and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, 
Democrat of North Carolina, have made three campaign trips to 
Jacksonville alone.

But black leaders said they are worried that the campaigning will not 
matter if black voters are disenfranchised.

In Duval County, 31,155 black voters had been added to the rolls by end 
of last early October. That is more than the total number of ballots 
nullified here four years ago, in a race that George W. Bush won by 537 
votes.

But hundreds more could show up at the polls only to find they cannot 
vote. The office has flagged 1,448 registrations as incomplete, and as 
of this month had yet to process 11,500 more.

A Washington Post analysis found nearly three times the number of 
flagged Democratic registrations as Republican. Broken down by race, no 
group had more flagged registrations for paperwork flaws than blacks. 
This, in a heavily GOP county where records show that the numbers of 
blacks added to the rolls since 2000 roughly equals the number of 
non-Hispanic whites.

Some registrations were missing critical information, such as a 
signature. Others had different problems, with some people listing post 
office boxes instead of street addresses or putting street addresses on 
the wrong line.

Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood, a Republican appointed by the 
president's brother, Governor Jeb Bush, recently ruled that for 
registrations to be deemed complete, new voters must not only sign an 
oath attesting to their citizenship but also check a box that states the 
same. Unlike many counties that have chosen to ignore the directive, 
Duval County chose to enforce it.

Carlberg, who is acting election chief because his superior is ill, told 
the ministers that the office did the best it could to contact 
applicants who submitted incomplete forms, but the law says that "if 
they aren't complete now, they're not going into the system."

Carlberg's office, as well as Hood's, said the real blame belongs with 
the Democratic-leaning groups that targeted minority voters and then 
turned in sloppy and incomplete registrations. The disproportionate 
number of black Democratic registrations flagged, said Carlberg 
spokeswoman Erin Moody, is a function of "who those groups are targeting."

But during the 10-minute confrontation at Carlberg's office earlier this 
month, the ministers argued that the election official had stalled in 
processing new registrations until it was too late to fix them by the 
Oct. 4 cutoff. "You kept them in a box in a cage," charged Edward Exson 
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The 2000 election sent a record number of black people to the polls in 
Florida. But these new, inexperienced voters were more likely than their 
white counterparts to live in areas with outdated, error-prone machinery 
that did not give voters a chance to correct problems.

In Duval County, the situation was compounded by the election office 
putting out instructions reminding people to "vote all pages," which led 
to thousands of invalidated "overvotes" because the list of presidential 
candidates was spread over two pages.

Since then, the outdated machinery has been replaced, but suspicions linger.

"The big question is, will our vote count?" Deborah Hargrove, 53, told 
Susan Hunter, a canvasser for America Coming Together who knocked on her 
door this month. "Who's to know if they are just going to throw it away 
in the garbage can?"

But as Hunter handed out fliers to voters detailing their rights, she 
also encountered a fierce determination. Many of the retirees in this 
neighborhood remember when blacks were attacked by white men armed with 
ax handles and bats after they tried in 1960 to sit at Jacksonville's 
whites-only lunch counters, in a civil rights episode that became known 
as Ax Handle Saturday.

"I'm going to vote as long as I live," Sally Brown, 73, vowed when 
Hunter knocked on her door. "They're not going to make me stop."

One of the major changes enacted since 2000 is aimed at making voting 
easier by requiring local election officials to allow voters to cast 
ballots up to 15 days before the election. The law does not specify how 
many early voting sites there must be.

The ministers who went to Carlberg's office earlier this month had plans 
to bus their congregations to those sites after Sunday services as a way 
to help those juggling jobs or without a car.

Orange County, which has about the same number of registered voters as 
Duval, has opted to open nine early voting locations. Duval will have 
one, although Jacksonville is geographically the largest US city, 
covering 840 square miles. It will be at Carlberg's office, miles from 
most of the majority black precincts. The same is true in Volusia 
County, where the GOP supervisor has angered black ministers there by 
refusing to open the site on Sundays.

Carlberg noted that the black leaders arrived unannounced with a 
contingent of reporters and refused his invitation to meet privately. 
"It should have been conducted in a nonmedia environment -- someplace 
where we could sit down and discuss the issues in a gentlemanly, 
civilized fashion," he said.

In a follow-up letter to the ministers, Carlberg said additional sites 
cannot be added this close to the election. The office does not have 
time to train staff members or install equipment, he said.

But in Volusia County, which has been sued in federal court over the 
same issue by the NAACP, spokeswoman Deanie Lowe said the election 
office is looking into adding three sites. 

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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