The Sideshow links to this interview with reporter Greg Palast. Palast’s work is published mainly in the British press, since the American press doesn’t like to report on the ways the US is still failing Democracy 101.
For example, in black counties in Florida where paper ballots were used, if you made a mistake on a ballot — a single wrong mark — your ballot was thrown out and your vote wasn’t counted. If you voted in predominantly white counties, and you made a wrong mark, your ballot was handed back to you. You were given a fresh ballot, and told to vote again and told how to correct your mistake. How about that?[…]
Oh, it gets better, because the trick of this apartheid “spoilage rate” — that’s the technical term — the trick to lose a million votes or make them disappear is to keep radically changing the system. Because what happens is that technicians fix the systems. In Florida, they fixed the problem with the paper ballots, and, therefore, they had to throw out the paper ballots. For example, the blackest county in Florida is Gadston. One in eight voters — one in eight voters! — had their ballots thrown out in the blackest county in Florida. It had the worst spoilage rating, and they knew it. They knew that there was going to be this problem with their ballots in advance.
Democrats had warned election officials and warned Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush that this was going to happen, in advance of the election, and nothing was done. After the election, it was fixed. And in 2002, there were basically no spoiled ballots in Gadston. So now that black people have their votes counted in Gadston, they’ve now been ordered to switch them over to computers. Because the system currently works — it’s been fixed – – and that can’t stand.
Amendment XV
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Whoops, kinda dropped the ball there, didn’t we?
Now, if only we had some strict constructionists running the courts, I’m sure the constitution would be enforced to the word. Conservatives would love that, wouldn’t they?
I have all sorts of problems with the way the 2000 election was handled in Florida, but this excerpt omits one important fact: the elected county election commissioners in Florida had substantial authority regarding the purging of voter rolls and the creation of ballots. Things may have been done worse in Gadston county than in other places, but any differences among counties was the fault of local officials — the state government did not give separate instructions to the election officials in different counties (although they did other bad things, but those were all statewide, not local).