Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  The name “Tallahassee” comes from a Creek word for “old town,” and for African-Americans that was true, and it wasn’t good.

  But Davis and others like her had worked hard, and things had changed. The U.S. Justice Department sued the city of Tallahassee in 1974 for engaging “in a pattern or practice of discrimination based on race in hiring.” In 1975, the District Court for the Northern District of Florida ordered Tallahassee to “hire, assign, promote, transfer, and dismiss employees without regard to race or color.” 3 Davis herself served for ten years as NAACP branch president, worked on the 1980s lawsuits that ended the at-large election system that kept blacks without a representative on the county commission or the school board. The first African-American county commissioner was finally elected in 1986, and not long after that came the first black member of the school board.

  So when whites fretted that blacks in Tallahassee, or Florida, wanted “special rights,” when they acted as if society was so far beyond institutional racism there was no longer any need for institutional remedies, Davis wondered just what planet they lived on. It was just 1990 that a black school board member had been first elected in a regular election. 1990!

  At 11:30 A.M., Davis starts getting phone calls from friends right here in District 1. There’s a Florida Highway Patrol road stop right near a black voting district, she’s told, a checkpoint on Woodville Highway and Oak Ridge Road, a black area of town, just one mile from Woodville First Baptist Church, a polling place where a third of the voters are black.

  Davis calls the FHP.

  Yes, they have people doing some spot-checking, she’s told. Nothing odd. Nothing illegal. Just normal procedure. Turns out that in September, the FHP was $1 million in the hole in its gasoline budget, so in October it started conducting checkpoints, which don’t require cops to be driving around and burning fuel so much. They’ve done thirty-one of these so far, asking motorists to show their licenses and insurance information.

  But this seems strange. “It’s odd for them to be out there on Election Day,” Davis thinks. “It just doesn’t smell right.” And why in a black neighborhood? Davis has seen too much to come to any other conclusion: “It’s a method to keep people from the polls,” she thinks. *

  And that’s not all. In the early afternoon, Davis’s grandson, Jamarr Lyles, twenty, a student at Florida A&M, is getting ready to go to his job at Subway. Lyles worked hard to register his friends at the polls, and he’s disappointed, he tells his grandmother. A bunch of them have called him, having been turned away at the polls, told that their names aren’t there. He’s bummed. All that hard work, and for what? Something is going wrong— or, depending on what you want, right—in Leon County.

  At the Orange Bowl in Miami, Cuban-American activist Armando Gutierrez, who served as the spokesman for Elián González’s Miami relatives, is getting his revenge.

  Just as Davis has been activated to seek vengeance against Jeb by defeating his brother in the presidential election, Gutierrez has been motivated to seek vengeance against Al Gore because of the actions of his president, Bill Clinton, and Attorney General Janet Reno for what they did to little Elián. Gutierrez usually makes his money working on campaigns for local judges and smaller ballot issues—like one today on off-street parking. But the main cause today for both him and his poll workers is the defeat of Al Gore.

  Though Gore attempted to distance himself from the Clinton administration’s position that Elián should be returned to his father, who still lives in Cuba, Gutierrez didn’t buy it for one minute. The day before Election Day, Gutierrez even held a press conference at Elián’s Little Havana home with the boy’s two great-uncles, telling the Cuban-American community to come and vote for Bush. “It’s important to remind people that this is how you get even—at the polls,” Gutierrez would say.

  Today he has two precincts to watch, both at the Orange Bowl. Voters keep coming up to him, saying, “We’re here because of Elián,” or even “I voted for Elián,” meaning Bush. Things are going well, Gutierrez thinks.

  Some voting snafus are garden-variety bureaucratic incompetence. Others are perhaps rooted in something else.

  In November 1997, incumbent Miami mayor Joe Carollo was narrowly beaten by Xavier Suarez, mayor from ’86 until ’93. After losing that runoff, Carollo sued for fraud. A handwriting expert Carollo hired cast doubt over the legitimacy of about a fifth of the five thousand absentee ballots cast in the election. In March 1998, the Third District Court of Appeals threw out all five thousand of the absentee ballots, ruling that the “absentee ballot is a privilege,” not a right. Carollo was installed as mayor.

  In the wake of the embarrassing election, in 1998, the Florida legislature passed a state voter-fraud law, creating an ineligible-voter list as part of the central voter file, and requiring all sixty-seven counties to purge their voter registries of ineligible voters, including felons. In 1998, the state became the only one in the nation to hire a private firm to complete the task of accumulating the names of ineligible voters, signing a $4 million contract with DBT Online, since merged into ChoicePoint.

  Early in the year, ChoicePoint sent its latest list of eight thousand exfelons to the state. Linda Howell, the elections supervisor of Madison County, on the Georgia line, knew immediately that something was wrong with the list. Her name was on it. Linda Howell might be plenty of things, but a felon wasn’t one of them. The husband of Duval County elections supervisor John Stafford’s press officer was on the list, too. He also was not a felon. That was enough: neither Madison nor Duval County used Choice-Point’s information.

  As the ChoicePoint lists were examined, it became clear that this wasn’t a case of a name or two accidentally being included. It turned out that only thirty-four voters actually belonged on Leon County’s felon list. But Choice-Point had provided elections supervisor Ion Sancho with more than seven hundred names. Over the summer, ChoicePoint admitted its error, blaming the mistake on erroneous data that listed thousands who had been convicted of misdemeanors as felons. But by then, confusion had set in.

  Sancho repeatedly complained to state division of elections director Clay Roberts, a Jeb Bush appointee who endorsed Jeb’s brother for president. But Roberts didn’t seem to care. “It’s not that bad,” Sancho remembers Roberts telling him. “Improvements have been made. It keeps getting better. We’re working to solve the problems.” By Election Day 2000, Sancho has been complaining about this list for two years, but Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Roberts have paid his and his colleagues’ concerns little attention.

  ChoicePoint, those looking for conspiracies in the coming days will point out, bought one of its bum lists from a company in Texas, and its founder was a major GOP donor. That Harris, Roberts, and Jeb Bush did little from November 1998 to November 2000 to allay the fears of elections supervisors who were concerned about ChoicePoint’s shoddy lists—with a roughly 85 percent accuracy rate—will fuel anger as well. And today, ChoicePoint’s incompetence will have a double-edged impact. Because its information is so frequently wrong, some counties ignored the list altogether, and hundreds of felons are able to vote. But because its information is so frequently wrong, some counties disenfranchised legitimate voters. In Hillsborough County, for instance, 54 percent of the voters on the Choice-Point list were African-American, despite the fact that blacks are only 11 percent of the county’s voting population. 4 Now, a cynic might argue that if it were individual voters named Hilton Mayberry IV being confused with a felon of the same name—as opposed to Miguel Dominguez or Ronnie Jefferson—then maybe Clay Roberts and Katherine Harris would have been quicker to respond to the problem. A cynic might argue that Florida is a state that has pockets of poverty and despair that recall nothing so much as Civil War documentaries. And such a cynic might further point out that Jeb Bush’s biggest and boldest race-related initiative has been to end affirmative action, and thus it would be almost silly to expect him to care about this.

  At around 6 P.M.
in Tallahassee, Willie Whiting, Jr., fifty, a pastor in the House of Prayer Church, goes with his wife, son, and daughter to St. John’s United Methodist Church to vote. But Whiting’s name isn’t on the voter rolls.

  “You have been purged from our system,” he’s told by one of the white poll workers.

  What? That can’t be true, he says. Double-check. The poll worker calls the Leon County elections office. The database has Whiting listed as a convicted felon.

  This shocks Whiting. But unlike most who get caught in a similar situation, Whiting isn’t going to walk away, scratching his head. “Do I need to call my lawyer?” he asks. Eventually the mistake is cleared up, and Whiting is allowed to vote.

  In January of 2000, protesting Jeb’s executive order repealing affirmative-action programs for state contracts and university admissions, African-American protesters, led by Sen. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, and Rep. Tony Hill, D-Jacksonville, staged a twenty-five-hour sit-in in the office of Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan. Jeb instructed aides to “kick their asses out.” (Jeb later claimed that he had been talking about reporters.)

  Pastor Whiting cannot escape the feeling that somehow, in some way, Jeb and others are today just trying to kick his ass out—of the voting rolls.

  Other problems voters have today are less conspiratorial in nature. But they do, for whatever reason, seem to impact black voters more so than whites.

  Quiounia Williams is eighteen. It’s her first election, and she’s excited. She enters the voting booth at First Timothy Baptist Church, on Biscayne Road in Jacksonville, and puts the card inside the slot. But she’s never done this before, and no one’s shown her how to do it, and for some reason the card won’t go down. It doesn’t sit still. Every time she punches a hole, the card moves.

  She leaves the booth.

  “I couldn’t put the card all the way down,” she tells a poll worker.

  “Well,” says the worker, “what actually happened?”

  “When I pushed down, every time I got ready to punch a hole, it would move again.”

  “Don’t worry about it, baby,” the poll worker, an African-American woman, says, handing her an “I voted!” sticker, telling her to put the card in the box.

  The elections office in Duval County, surrounding Jacksonville, is suffering its own distinct chaos. Despite having decided not to use Choice-Point’s scrub list, Duval County is having some serious problems, particularly in its predominantly African-American precincts. Just last weekend, Stafford made sure that 170,000 copies of a sample ballot were inserted into the Sunday editions of the Florida Times-Union. “Step 4 Vote all pages,” it read. But on the Duval ballot, the ten presidential candidates are spread over two pages. Stafford realized that the sample ballot’s instructions were incorrect and could result in overvotes disqualifying the ballot. So today the official ballot has different instructions. “Step 4 Vote appropriate pages,” it reads.

  Ernest Lewis, for one, is confused. It’s his first time voting. Whether it’s because he remembers the instructions from the sample ballot, or whether it’s because he’s new at this and he just figured you vote on every page, Lewis votes on both presidential pages and voids his ballot in the process. More than twenty thousand voters in Duval County will do this today.

  Some Florida counties have systems in place that notify voters immediately if their ballot is invalid, but only 26 percent of black voters live in these counties as opposed to 34 percent of white voters. That means by sheer numbers white voters have an advantage. 5

  In the cotton belt’s Gadsden County on the Georgia line, union officials hustled all June to register two thousand African-American voters, many of them seniors who had never voted before. But today in Gadsden polling booths, many seem to be making up for lost opportunities by picking more than one candidate for president. Some are voting for all ten presidential candidates, then penning Gore’s name on the write-in line. The ballot directions don’t exactly help.“Vote for ONE,” it says above the race for Senate. “Vote for Group,” it says above the presidential contest.

  From the Ochlockonee River to the Apalachicola, more than 2,000 of the 16,812 ballots cast in Gadsden today—two-thirds of which are going to Gore—will be thrown out. It’s a full 12.33 percent of all ballots cast, the highest percentage in the state. 6 It’s just another uncomfortable superlative for Gadsden—the state’s third-poorest, and only majority-black, county, the only county in Florida that went for Walter Mondale over President Ronald Reagan in 1984. Here 94 percent of the students at Chattahoochee High School read below the minimum standard, the county’s schools rank last in the state in reading for fourth, eighth, and tenth grades, and the school district’s graduation rate—46 percent—is the lowest in Florida.

  The pattern is not unique to Gadsden, however. In Miami-Dade County, predominantly black precincts will register an undervote rate of 10 percent, while areas with few blacks have an undervote rate of 3 percent. 7 Some black neighborhoods in largely black Liberty City and Overtown will register overvote rates of 10 percent, while the countywide rate will be just 2.7 percent. 8 Undervotes and overvotes will result in 23 percent of the ballots cast—that’s almost one out of every four ballots—by voters in largely black Palm Beach County areas like Belle Glade, Pahokee, and South Bay being chucked. 9

  By noon in Palm Beach County, WPEC-TV is reporting the story of the butterfly ballot, explaining the problem a hell of a lot better than the Democrats are. Joan Joseph, a Gore coordinator for the north end of the county, instructs her phone-bank supervisor to urge voters not only to hit the polls but to be wary of the ballot’s confusing design.

  They’re getting other weird reports, too. In precinct 162-G, the almost entirely Jewish retirement community called Lakes of Delray, Pat Buchanan— who has defended accused Nazis, called Hitler “a great man,” argued that the United States fought the wrong side in World War II, and accused Holocaust survivors of having delusions of martyrdom—is racking up surprising support.

  Palm Beach County’s infamous butterfly ballot

  Sylvia Robb, wife of Lakes of Delray community president Arthur Robb, is just one of forty-seven voters who punches hole no. 2, thinking it’s for Gore. By the end of the day, no precinct in Palm Beach County will show more votes for Buchanan than this one.

  At 2:57 P.M., Brochin faxes his letter to LePore again, since he never heard from her the first time.

  By 3 P.M. in Nashville, Whouley decides to switch the phone-script on the paid phone bank calls. Their telemarketing company, TeleQuest, is called in Texas. The Dems want them to make seventy-four thousand calls in Palm Beach. TeleQuest says they can’t get anywhere near that number, but the company does make a change. “Some voters have encountered a problem today with punch-card ballots in Palm Beach County,” the new TeleQuest script reads. “These voters have said that they believe that they accidentally punched the wrong hole for the incorrect candidate.” To voters who had yet to vote, instructions were given: “punch number 5 for Gore-Lieberman,” and “do not punch any other number, as you might end up voting for someone else by mistake.

  “If you have already voted and think you may have punched the wrong hole for the incorrect candidate, you should return to the polls and request that the election officials write down your name so that this problem can be fixed.”

  Around that time in Palm Beach, the butterfly-ballot cacophony gets cranked up when outspoken Gore-backing talk-radio host Randi Rhodes tells listeners to WJNO-radio—1290 on your A.M. dial—that she had the same problem.

  “I got scared I voted for Pat Buchanan,” she says on the air. “I almost said, I think I voted for a Nazi.’ When you vote for something as important as leader of the free world, I think there should be spaces between the names. We have a lot of people with my problem, who are going to vote today and didn’t bring their little magnifiers from the Walgreens. They’re not going to be able to decide that there’s Al Gore on this side and Pat Buchanan on the other side….I had to check three time
s to make sure I didn’t vote for a Fascist.”

  In retirement condos from Jupiter to Boca Raton, Rhodes’s fans start wondering if they voted correctly.

  Many of these seniors are deeply upset. Harold Blue, eighty-seven, enlisted in the cavalry right after Pearl Harbor, landing in Normandy at D day plus two, remaining in Europe long enough to carry out the cease-fire orders at the end of war, establishing contact with the Russians. Blue and his wife are legally blind, so at the polling station in a Greenacres public school, he requests help.

  “Number one is Republican, number two is Democrat,” the poll worker advises him. Later, Blue will realize that he punched the wrong hole. He fought for democratic principles in France, he thinks. But this sure as hell wasn’t a democratic election.

  At the elections office, Democratic officeholders like state representative Lois Frankel, state senator Ron Klein, and U.S. representative Robert Wexler come in and start complaining about the “widespread problem” of the butterfly ballot.

  LePore has a real sick feeling in her stomach.“Oh, shit,” she finally thinks.

  Calls are coming in from people complaining because they had a problem voting. Poll workers and voters are calling and complaining that the phones have been busy, because of all the other calls. Harangued by the Democratic officials, LePore finally agrees to write an advisory about the ballot, though she tells the Democrats that she doesn’t have the support staff to get it to every precinct, that they’ll have to distribute it. They print out 531 copies:

  ATTENTION ALL POLL WORKERS. PLEASE REMIND ALL VOTERS COMING IN THAT THEY ARE TO VOTE ONLY FOR ONE (1) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE AND THAT THEY ARE TO PUNCH THE HOLE NEXT TO THE ARROW NEXT TO THE NUMBER NEXT TO THE CANDIDATE THAT THEY WISH TO VOTE FOR.