Blocking-and Rocking-the Black Vote
11/01/2004 @ 5:49pm
Jacksonville, Florida

At 8:30 this morning, members of the Jacksonville Leadership Coalition met to discuss precisely how they were going to make sure all voters in Duval County will be able to vote tomorrow. It was, perhaps, the most important meeting of the hundreds of meetings the group-representing more than 100 churches as well as unions and civic groups-has had in several months of steady organizing.

Florida Republicans have been busy too, compiling and disseminating lists that members of the coalition believe will be used to challenge voters on Tuesday. (Because of Florida law, poll watchers cannot use their right to challenge a voter during early voting.)

There have been several lists: First was Duval County's list that identified 60,000 voters as "inactive." (Last week the new Supervisor of Elections, Bill Scheu, made it clear that "inactive" voters-who had not recently voted-were absolutely allowed to vote and could not be challenged.)

The Republicans created another list by sending out cards to all newly registered voters in Duval County. Over 2,600 were returned with incorrect addresses. Mindy Tucker Fletcher, sent down from DC to Florida to act as senior adviser to the Florida GOP during the campaign, said the Duval list would not be used to challenge voters but to revise the Republicans' mailing list. Oddly, all the names and addresses belonged to Democrats.

Another list, which culled new voters with similar addresses, pinpointed students of Edward Waters, one of the oldest black colleges in the country. But the list that has most infuriated the voting-rights coalition is one sent out late last week by the GOP's Fletcher. That list purports to identify 14,489 "felons who have voted in one of the last two cycles or are newly registered," 925 of whom either voted early or have received absentee ballots in this election. The Republicans admit that they produced these new lists working from the notorious state felon list, which was thrown out earlier this year because it was riddled with errors but which they claim to have cleaned up. (In September Fletcher had mocked the Democrats' effort to register people who had been wrongfully purged from voter lists, saying they were having a "felon voter registration event.") The revised lists have been sent to the governor and made available to Republican poll watchers.