Down & Dirty (4 page)

In Tallahassee, Anita Davis, past president of the local branch of the NAACP, is running around, going precinct to precinct.
She returns from District 1 polling centers, jubilant. Turnout is way high.

After Gov. Jeb Bush formally introduced his “One Florida” initiative in March—which would effectively end affirmative action
in the state— local NAACP activists were rejuvenated, launching their “We’ll remember in November” voter registration/revenge
drive. Today, November 7, black voters do indeed seem to be remembering. Davis’s first trip out was at around 9
A.M.
, to one precinct where hundreds had already voted.

The overall numbers bear out her enthusiasm. Just under sixty thousand African-Americans registered to vote between February
and October, a 7 percent increase. White registration grew by about half that. And while black voters constitute 934,261 of
the Florida electorate, compared to 6,564,813 whites and Latinos, today, state black turnout is so high—the highest ever—that
black voters will constitute 16 percent of the total turnout. In 1996, that number was just 10 percent.

Today in the Sunshine State, 93 percent of black voters will go for the vice president.
^*
Little of this seems attributable to Gore, whose consultants reportedly kept blacks out of photographs with the veep during
the
campaign, so as to keep him from seeming too liberal. (In September, Gore was pulled from directly addressing the National
Baptist Convention for fear of scaring away the soccer moms and blue-collar dads and other white swing voters the campaign
lusted after so unattractively.
¹
) No, but blacks are turning out in record numbers today, in Leon and Duval and Gadsden and Miami-Dade and elsewhere, not
so much for Gore, but against Bush.

And not just Bush—and his Bob Jones University–visiting, Confederate flag–waving, itchy-death-row-trigger-finger-wiggling,
South Carolina racist–pandering cracker Texas ass. But also his brother Jeb—whom many NAACP officials call “Jeb Crow”—as well
as Poppy Bush, whose aides bragged in 1988 that they would make black murderer Willie Horton seem like Gov. Mike Dukakis’s
running mate when it was all said and done.

Which is not to say that the African-American community doesn’t have issues with Dubya. In the second presidential debate,
Bush defended his opposition to a hate crimes bill, saying that it wasn’t needed, since all of the killers of his fellow Texan
James Byrd, Jr., had been sentenced to death. But not all three had been put to death. One had been given a life sentence.
And while the mainstream press ignored that fact, giving Bush a bye on this as they did on so much else, black radio hosts
sure as hell noticed. So did the NAACP, which ran a TV ad against Bush, featuring Byrd’s niece, Renee Mullins, saying that
when Bush refused to support the hate crimes bill that bore her uncle’s name, it felt like he’d been killed all over again.
Incendiary stuff, stuff that whites decried as over the line, but it had an impact in the right neighborhoods.

And it goes beyond the descendants of the late Connecticut senator Prescott Bush. Despite its reputation in the Northeast
as a somewhat anomalous Southern state, Florida has a fairly ugly racial history.

This isn’t just
ancient
history, the 1889 Florida poll tax, the 1920 Ococee County murders and arson and other retaliations against blacks who had dared
to try to vote, the 1951 Christmas Day murder of the NAACP’s Harry T. Moore, who launched a Brevard County registration drive.
No, it’s more recent than that in the minds of much of Florida’s black community. For Godsakes, post-Reconstruction, no black
Floridian had been elected to the U.S. House until
1992.
²

When Davis, sixty-four, moved down to Tallahassee from Buffalo in 1979—her son had been recruited to play football for FSU,
and she was eager to get away from Buffalo’s winters—Leon County didn’t have one
countywide black elected official. Not one. Post-Reconstruction, after all, the first black ever elected to the Tallahassee
city commission was James Ford, and that hadn’t been until 1971. Writing before the primary that year, the
Tallahassee Democrat
had described Ford, the Leon High School vice principal, as a “mature Negro…. We are impressed that he may be the best-qualified
Negro ever to offer for public office in Tallahassee. We would expect him to serve, if elected, as a proper representative
of his racial minority without antagonistic attitudes toward the majority that might result in more frustration and discord
than genuine advancement.”

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.