Voting While Black: Racism in the Coverage of the Recount?

by Lynne Serpe
from CommonDreams.org

December 08, 2004

Look at the map of Cuyahoga County, Ohio (visit www.votecobb.org for more detailed precinct maps) The areas with the greatest concentrations of African Americans are in the city of Cleveland. According to 2003 population estimates by the United States Census Bureau, 1.4 million of Ohio’s 11.4 million people live here, or 11.5%.

About 155,000 provisional ballots were cast in Ohio, including nearly 25,000 (16% of the statewide total) in Cuyahoga County. Under a 2002 federal law, provisional ballots are given out at a polling place if a person’s name is not on the voting rolls or if there are questions about someone’s eligibility to vote. Once the election is over, voting officials review the provisional ballots to see if they are valid. If they are certified as valid, then they are added to the vote totals from Election Day.

Now, go back to the map and notice the distribution of voting precincts where the number of certified (accepted) provisional ballots exceeded 5% of the total ballots cast in the precinct. Note that these blue and red boxes represent people who were made to fill out provisional ballots even though they were registered to vote and were at the correct precinct.

How could there be such a glaring disparity between the white and black sections of Cuyahoga County in the distribution of provisional ballots? And why would so many African Americans wait for up to ten hours in some instances to vote using provisional ballots instead of regular ballots?

One possible reason is the purging of voters from the voter rolls that Republicans election officials have done in Florida and other states, usually under the guise of removing felons, who cannot vote in some states. Unfortunately, when people have similar names, some people are incorrectly purged from the rolls, and some never find out until they show up to cast their vote.

Another reason for the disproportionately high numbers of African American provisional ballots could be infamous “challenge lists” used by Republican operatives to challenge potential voters. While the GOP said they were just trying to stop fraud, there is no proof that blacks commit more fraud than whites – but there is proof that African Americans have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in recent elections.

A third reason for the provisional ballots could be that more African Americans were recently-registered voters, so their voting records were more likely to have errors, especially if allowing these new minority voters to cast ballots was not a priority.

A final reason for the large number of African Americans casting provisional ballots could be that they were voting on machines that malfunctioned. Seventy percent of Ohio voters used antiquated punch card machines like those used in Florida in 2000. Ohio, like most states, has a disproportionate number of antiquated machines in precincts with poor and minority communities.

Unfortunately, some of Ohio’s leading newspapers are looking at these disparities and accepting them as business as usual. According to Editor and Publisher, a journal that covers the newspaper industry, the editor of The Columbus Dispatch, Ben Marrison, said, “We have written a lot about it, but we have found very little evidence that anything has happened in the election that didn't happen in every other [Ohio] election.” ( http://www.editorandpublisher.com/... )

At The Cincinnati Post, Editor Mike Philips has no staffers assigned fulltime to recount stories in his state because, "It looks like there is an awful lot of smoke, but not much fire." Ron Royhab, editor of The Blade in Toledo, has staff keeping an eye on the voting irregularities, but says, "We have not found any irregularities."

Even Eve Parziale, the Ohio bureau chief at the venerable Associated Press, which writes stories that are carried by papers all over the country that are too small to have staff in all 50 states, has concluded that, "there were not enough voting booths, but people were allowed to vote."

By looking only for provable fraud, and not investigating the obvious question why minority voters and white voters had extremely different experiences on Election Day, these editors – and each of us – are choosing to accept as a given that when minority voters receive second-class status, it is not really news.

That is indeed a sad commentary for a country that purports to be ready to support the development of democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Ukraine. Fifty years after Rosa Parks took a stand, I guess it is still okay if some of us ride in the back of the bus.

Lynne Serpe is Campaign Manager for the Green Party Presidential Campaign of David Cobb ( www.votecobb.org ), which has joined the Libertarian Party to file an historic recount challenge to the 2004 Ohio presidential election results. She can be reached at lynneserpe@hotmail.com

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