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THE
REAL "CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS"
#484 Column Written 11/21/2000 Mumia Abu-Jamal, M.A. All Rights Reserved Politics
is the art of preventing people from taking As
the swarm of lawyers descend on Florida (not to be outdone by the pack
of journalists accompanying them), The legal battles waged in the Sunshine State are remarkable as much for what they entail, as for what they ignore. They involve, of course, the counting, as well as the method of counting, ballots involved in the election. What they ignore is the remarkable revelations presented by a panel convened by the heads of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and People for the American Way on the Saturday after the elections (Nov. 11, 2000). Held
like a formal hearing, with a stenographer acting as a court reporter,
the panelists, among them NAACP CEO KWEISI MFUME, LCCRUL Executive Director
Barbara Arnwine, and PfAW President Ralph Neas, questioned and examined
a number of witnesses, all of whom had some involvement in the Florida
elections. What the witnesses testified to, less than a week after the polls closed, was nothing less than astounding. Adora Nweze, president of the NAACP State Conference in Florida, told of fighting for over 90 minutes with election officials at her polling place for the right to vote. She was told that an absentee ballot was sent to her (which she never received) and thus she was ineligible to vote. She told the panel, "We wanted you to come, even though we may not know the law, we knew it certainly was not right..." One
wonders, if this happened to a savvy civil rights leader in Florida, what
of someone who wasn't so savvy? Several students from the historically Black university in Florida, FAMU, told of registering online at election.com, only to find out that they weren't registered when they tried to vote. A voting rights canvasser, who organized car rides to the polls, told of hundreds of elderly who were told they weren't registered. Indeed, this canvasser, a young woman named Fumiko Robinson, told of her own mother being denied the right to vote, based on an apparent error in the official's log books, which wrongly recorded the spelling of her first name and middle initial. Fumiko's mom, a Japanese-American, could only vote because her husband, an African-American, returned to the polls and fought for her right to vote. Stacy Powers, a journalist and radio producer, told of going to half a dozen polling places where she saw systematic harassment and the denial of voters who were Black. She told of a news source who provided her with a lists of 940 voters who filed absentee ballots (before the election) which were improperly rejected. When one considers the more recent winning margin claimed by the Bush camp-930 votes-the improper rejection of the 940 absentee ballots seems somewhat ominous. Powers, asked how many Black voters were disenfranchised in the Hillsborough County, the 5th most populous county in the state, replied, "thousands." A Haitian-American women's activist, Marliene Bastien, cited "dozens" of cases where Haitians were denied help. She told of a call from a man, who said, "I spent so many years, waiting to become an American citizen, to get the right to vote, and now I can't vote!" He was, she said, "crying on the phone." Yet how many of these voices have you heard represented in the courts, on the news, in the corporate press? Silenced by their suppression at the polling place, they are silenced yet again when their very real concerns are ignored in a national debate that speaks gingerly of "mistakes," yet makes no mention of fraud, intimidation, and blatant violations not merely of the Voters Rights Act, but of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. Silence in the face of such crimes, is a criminal indictment of the entire system, which remains deeply opposed to black political power. ©MAJ 2000
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