|
Five Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published on March 11
"THE RICH ARE TREMBLING"
CounterPunch Reports From
Mexico
City on the Arrival of
the Zapatistas
"TIFFANY'S ON WINGS"
The Madness of the
F-22 Fighter Plane
WAR CRIMINAL!
Confronting
Elliott Abrams
Published on February 28
THE PARDONER'S TALE
Liberals Kick Bill,
Dance with Bush
TED TURNER'S
GOLDEN SHOWERS
America's Land Lord
Locks Out Poor and
Electroshocks Wolves
THAT'S NOT JAZZ!
The Aesthetic Crimes of
Ken Burns
Search
CounterPunch
Al
Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
New Stories:
CounterPunch Coverage
of Election 2000
|
March
15, 2001
More
Vote Fraud
How Al Gore
Lost Tennessee
By Catherine Danielson
Black voters were told to get behind
the white voters. "You know what it is to stand at the
back of the bus," said election volunteers. Black voters
were told to remove NAACP stickers from their cars-or leave the
polling place without voting. Black voters were intimidated by
police standing around polling places. Black voters stood in
lines over a mile long to use ancient punch-card machines on
the verge of falling apart. Sometimes, they'd stand for five
or six hours. Once, they complained. Minutes later, two police
cars came screeching up. Now, all this does start to sound like
a promo for "Mississippi Burning". Or maybe it's a
documentary about egregious civil rights violations in some Deep
South backwater fifty years ago.
But it happened in November
2000.
Well, then, it's got to be
about Florida. The massive voter disenfranchisement in Florida
has gotten some coverage, especially overseas-the people who
weren't felons illegally scrubbed from voting rolls, the police
roadblocks in black neighborhoods, the Republican operatives
illegally filling out absentee ballots.
But no. All these things-and
much, much more-happened in Tennessee.
Don't be surprised if you haven't heard
anything about any of it. There's very little information available
even in Tennessee. Every newspaper, every radio station, every
television news program is silent. Even Nashville's newspaper,
The Tennessean, where both Al and Tipper Gore once worked, has
zero to say on the subject. And it's not as if it's been kept
secret. The Tennessee Voter Empowerment Team met at the TN NAACP
Conference of Branches on November 17th and released their findings
to the state. But the only coverage has come from the Black press,
newspapers like the Tennessee Tribune, Nashville Pride, and Urban
Flavor. Yet there is massive evidence that thousands perhaps
even tens of thousands-- of people were disenfranchised, the
vast majority of which were Black. How to explain it?
"People want to sweep
this under the rug," says Rev. Neal Darby, head of the Greater
Nashville Black Chamber of Commerce. "They don't want to
think it could have happened here." Indeed, Nashville was
one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement. It's one
thing to see films of black students getting iced tea dumped
over their heads by a jeering white mob as they try to get served
at Woolworth's in the early 1960's. It's quite another to picture
it in the year 2000. And yet-look at what did happen here.
It is more than the outrageous
racial incidents: such as the way that black Nashville college
students weren't permitted to vote even though they were registered,
or the way that Tennessee State University, a historically black
college, was the only university in Tennessee that didn't get
a satellite voting place, or election office workers harassing
black citizens who requested voter registration forms, or election
commission officers refusing to give registration forms to NAACP
representatives and sometimes, as in Chattanooga, actually taking
them back. It's the inexplicable things, such as the way that
polling places all over West Tennessee opened one to two hours
late, or disappeared and reappeared somewhere else without telling
anybody-but, seemingly, only in areas that were Black and/or
poor. Or the missing pages from election rosters all over Nashville.
Or the county where ballot boxes were opened and ballots handled.
So many vote irregularities were reported that the mind starts
to numb after awhile, to get buried under the sheer avalanche
and grasp for some sort of meaning and order. So it's instructive
to note that there were three areas of evidence that are more
disturbing than any other.
The first was what NAACP officers generally
refer to as "the Motor Voter disaster." This was the
first election year in which Tennessee's Motor Voter bill took
effect. Citizens could register to vote at Department of Motor
Vehicle (DMV) offices statewide. The problem is, an unknown number
of those applications never went through. There have been nearly
2,000 complaints to date. Allegedly, this occurred because the
department failed to deliver completed forms to county election
commissions. It's worth noting that there is no standard of
delivery, nor supervision of any kind, when the applications
are delivered from the Department of Safety to the counties-and
that the DMV blames the voters.
The second was the disenfranchisement
of former felons. Dr. Blondell Strong, Director for Prison Re-enfranchisement
for the Tennessee Voter Empowerment Project 2000, narrowly prevented
an attempt at disenfranchisement in Nashville. In Bolivar, former
felons illegally lost their voting rights. Clifton Polk, head
of the local Black Chamber of Commerce, was so infuriated that
he filed an official complaint with the EEOC. Since felons don't
automatically lose their voting rights in Tennessee the same
way that they do in Florida, this issue remains a murky mess.
However, this was the first year it had happened in the state.
The third-and maybe the strangest-is
the way that certain voting precincts all over the state had
a small fraction of the voting machines they should have had.
That's what caused the mile-long lines in districts like Hadley
Park and Upper Antioch. The really odd part is, all these districts
seem to have been, once again, black, hispanic, and/or poor.
According to election commissions, they simply didn't know there
would be such a large turnout. Maybe so. However, according to
Tennessee State Election Commissioner , Brook Thompson, each
county sends a list of registered voters to the polling places.
The precinct list actually kept by volunteers often didn't match
the voting list. (Weird, huh?) Also, as state NAACP president
Gloria Jean Sweetlove points out, the election commission knew
about the NAACP Voter Empowerment Project, whose goal was to
register new black voters. Also, the commission knew that there'd
been a record turnout for early voting. So, once again, this
remains a mystery.
Looking at all of this evidence, you
have to wonder what would come out if Tennessee had the same
kind of investigations that Florida has had, and will continue
to have. Not to mention the fact that similar evidence has come
out of twenty-one other states. The national NAACP, along with
the ACLU, People for the American Way, Advancement Project, and
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, has filed suit to eliminate
unfair voting practices. They will be sending representatives
to Nashville soon in order to hold hearings about voter disenfranchisement
there. So Tennessee may well end up being added to the national
suit, and that would probably be the best shot at investigation.
Certainly, the state attorney general has showed little interest
to date. Yet nobody else has either-not the press, not the legislature,
not the governor, not the senators. I couldn't quite put my finger
on why that bothered me so much. I tried to put it into words
when I talked to Gloria Jean Sweetlove.
"Why is it," I asked,
fumbling towards words to express the inexpressible, "that
I don't see anything about this in the papers, or on TV? Why
will nobody will touch this?"
She gave a long, long sigh.
"I don't think you're old enough to remember. But in the
fifties and early sixties," she said slowly, "nobody
would touch it either." CP
To learn more, please visit:
http://www.nashvilleinsanity.com/NPbreakingnews.html
|