Black Florida voters stand strong

Anger over the lost votes of 2000 is still simmering in the mainly black town of Riviera Beach in south Florida, where voters turned out massively on Tuesday for the United States presidential elections, many vowing they will not be disenfranchised again.

Residents, standing in long lines to cast their ballots, said renewed irregularities are only strengthening their resolve to make their votes count. And many said that vote is against President George Bush.

The feeling that Bush stole the last presidential was strong in this city of 30 000, where as many as 16% of the ballots were discarded in the 2000 election, twice as many as the already high statewide average.

”We are not going to let this happen again,” said John Goldwise (57).

”This time we have too many people watching,” he said after casting his ballot at an elementary school, where partisan poll watchers monitored the proceedings.

Outside Riviera Beach’s Lindsey Davis community centre, a dozen members of the non-partisan Election Protection group, among the thousands of lawyers and other volunteers deployed to Florida, noted down complaints and helped voters who had questions.

A lawyer with the John Kerry campaign also offered assistance, but his Republican counterpart stood at a distance and declined to make any comments on his role at the site.

Civil rights groups have accused Republicans of targeting black and Hispanic communities for challenges of their voter eligibility.

Several voters complained they had received phone calls or flyers directing them to the wrong precincts, and have strong suspicions the calls were part of a concerted effort to keep Kerry supporters away from the polls.

Michelle Hargrett (37) pointed to a brightly coloured flyer she said she found on her door, urging her to vote for Kerry but sending her to the wrong precinct, kilometres away from the one where she is registered.

”This is a dirty trick,” she said. She did not fall for it, but used it to teach her 18-year-old daughter a lesson in democracy, and reported it to electoral lawyers.

”I told my daughter that even if we had stood for hours in the wrong line, we’d have still have made sure we eventually voted.”

She said she has voted in every election since she turned 18. But what happened in the last presidential bid made her even more determined.

”I was bitter after the last time, they disenfranchised people who look like me,” said Hargrett, who is black.

Bush won the White House in 2000 after the United States Supreme Court halted five weeks of recounts in Florida, leading many Democrats to cry foul.

In that election, thousands of votes — many from black voters — were discarded for reasons ranging from voter eligibility to badly perforated ballots.

Confusing ballots had caused elderly Jewish voters to mistakenly support a far-right-wing candidate widely considered anti-Semitic.

”My friends in New York still give me of hard time, saying I voted for Pat Buchanan,” said Esther Kinterman, who sat on a bench with two elderly friends, after voting at a synagogue in West Palm Beach.

Many people in south Florida agree the new touch-screen machine is much easier to use than the punch-card system it replaced, though some are concerned that the fact it doesn’t print out ballots will make it impossible to recount votes manually in case of disputes over the outcome of Tuesday’s election.

”Those old machines, I was happy to get rid of them,” said Sheryll Miller, who said she had no trouble casting her ballot at the synagogue, located inside a retirement community. — Sapa-AFP

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