One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

On the night of November 7, 2000, forty-nine states had tallied their ballots. Bush and Gore were in a virtual tie as the world waited for the count from Florida. Whoever won its twenty-five Electoral College votes would become the forty-third US president. Florida was a festering election cesspool—as racially backward as it was bureaucratically inept. Secretary of State Katherine Harris had used faulty data to purge approximately twenty thousand names, mostly of blacks and Latinos, from the voter rolls. In polling stations in Jacksonville’s black neighborhoods, police officers stationed themselves conspicuously around the buildings and at entry points as if this were Mississippi in the 1950s all over again. In other cases, voters who knew they were registered learned on Election Day that their names were nowhere to be found on the registrar’s list. Poll workers could not get in touch with election officials to do any kind of verification because the phone lines were jammed. There was a more effective method of verification using laptop computers, but those were placed in predominately white, Republican precincts.