> --------
>
> Spurred by the unwillingness of the broadcast media to report voting
> problems during the 2004 election race, we want to alert our friends,
> family and colleagues to the widespread voter suppression and
> disenfranchisement that occurred in Broward County, Florida. We
> staffed the emergency hotline for the Kerry Campaign Headquarters in
> Broward County from late October through the election. All of us were
> devastated by the margin of Bush's win in Florida, particularly since
> polls predicted the race would be extremely close.
> Many of the calls to our hotline were from voters who had pressed the
> 'Kerry' button on their electronic voting screen, only to have 'Bush'
> light up as the candidate they had chosen. In some cases, this would
> happen repeatedly until about the 5th or 6th time the voter pressed
> 'Kerry' and eventually his name would light up. In other cases, the
> voters pushed 'Kerry' but were later asked to confirm their 'Bush'
> vote.
> We had calls about a road block, put up by the police at 7am on Nov.
> 2, which blocked road access to two precinct locations in majority
> black districts. There was no justification for the road block, no
> accident or crime scene or construction.
> Many of our calls dealt with voter suppression, or manipulation, of
> the Haitian population occurrences which seem too numerous, and their
> targets too indefensible, as primarily poor, first-time-voter,
> Creole-speaking refugees, to be anything but systemic. In one
> example, a voter whose hands were bandaged could not press the
> touch-screen himself; he asked the nonpartisan election official to
> press 'Kerry' for him, but the election official pressed 'Bush' and
> sent his vote immediately into the machine. Many, many others were
> denied the right to vote and were not given provisional ballots, while
> others were refused assistance at the polls, even though provisional
> ballots and voter assistance are legal rights. Others were told they
> had already voted and were turned away, although they had never voted
> previously. This latter experience was a complaint not isolated to
> Haitians but also included other surprised voters with no recourse
> except their word against that of the Supervisor of Elections.
> We spoke with hundreds of voters who were certain they had registered
> to vote in the past 6 months, well before the October 18 deadline, but
> were not on the rolls. And those were just the people who had the
> information to contact us.
> The local paper, citing the Supervisor of Elections office as its
> source, told all people voting by absentee ballot that they could turn
> in ballots by hand to any of its seven offices by 5pm on Tuesday, Nov.
> 2. Every single one of those offices except one was closed on
> Tuesday.
> We had numerous calls from voters on Nov. 2 whose precincts had
> closed, yet the Supervisor of Elections office had given voters no
> notification of the closure, and no notification of where to go to
> vote. Thousands of people were likely disenfranchised because of
> inexcusable mishaps such as this.
> We had many calls from people who had been harassed by poll workers,
> who were turned away without being allowed the right to vote
> provisionally (another breech of voter rights). Other people were
> turned away because the address on their driver?s license did not
> match the address on their voter registration card; again, this is in
> direct violation of election law.
> All of these problems do not even take into account the 58,000
> absentee ballots that had been 'lost' by the Supervisor of Elections,
> in perhaps the most democratic county in the state, disenfranchising
> thousands of people who were disabled, out of the country, or elderly
> and unable get to the polls.
>
> These events, and many others, have been documented and
> also reported to lawyers, but we fear they will not get the attention
> they deserve. This is what we witnessed in just one county. We
> believe that these ?voting irregularities? raise serious concerns
> about the legitimacy of the results in Florida, and more broadly,
> about the health of democracy in this country. Please circulate this
> widely.
>
> Libby Anker Libanker@berkeley.edu
> Ryan Centner rcentner@berkeley.edu
> Jill Greenlee jillgreenlee@hotmail.com
> Rachel Van Sickle-Ward rvansick@berkeley.edu
> ------

George Wittemyer
Department Environmental Science Policy & Management
201 Wellman Hall
University of California at Berkeley
CA 94720-3112, USA

Fax: (1-510) 642-7428
Lab: (1-510) 643-1227
email: georgew@nature.berkeley.edu
[link|http://www.CNR.berkeley.edu/~georgew/|http://www.CNR.berkeley.edu/~georgew/]