Jesse Jackson Files Suit in Florida

Dec. 6, 2000 -- Black Florida state legislators joined the Rev. Jesse Jackson today in charging the voting rights of Florida blacks were violated in the presidential election.

At a press conference in Tallahassee, Jackson said 27,000 votes in Duval County were not counted on Election Night, including 16,000 in black inner city neighborhoods and 6,000 so-called undervotes — where voters were not registered as selecting a candidate for president, though they voted elsewhere on the ballot.

Jackson said Monday more than 22,000 of those ballots were thrown out because of undervotes, where no vote is read by vote counting machines, or overvotes, where more than one vote is read.

Florida Black Caucus members and Jackson jointly filed a civil rights suit Tuesday charging minorities in Duval County were discarded at higher rates than those of whites and possibly contributing to Democratic candidate Al Gore’s possible loss of Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the presidential election.

The Republican Party of Florida today had no comment on the suit.

Jackson also took issue with Miami-Dade’s decision last month to abandon its manual recount after its canvassing board determined the county could not complete the recount by a deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court.

“Our case remains clear. We want to win by the count, not by the clock,” Jackson said.

When the Miami-Dade recount was discontinued, it showed Gore gaining 157 votes on George W. Bush. Also, Democrats have said 10,700 Miami-Dade ballots that didn’t register a vote for president in previous counts should be hand counted.

Jackson called for a full federal investigation into alleged minority voter disenfranchisement across the state.

“The Department of Justice has a duty to protect the protected vote, and they must do their job and they have not,” he said.

The Justice Department on Monday sent two investigators to Florida to gather information to see whether a federal investigation is warranted.

Intentional Disenfranchisement?

Since Election Day, hundreds of voters have claimed they were unfairly turned away from polling places or were so confused by ballot instructions that they voted incorrectly.

The NAACP has compiled 300 pages of such testimony, including accusations of voter intimidation, polling sites being closed without notice and interpreters being barred from helping non-English speaking voters.

Last month, the civil rights group announced plans to sue the state of Florida and several of its counties over the alleged irregularities and urged federal authorities to investigate.

Executive leader of Florida’s black caucus, Frederica Wilson said it will act to make sure that minority voters are not disenfranchised in the future.

“We will propose legislation to study the election process and establish concrete reform that standardizes voting in Florida to ensure we will never leave another vote behind,” she said.

Wilson charged that some people were “deliberately” discouraged from voting in the state.

“We saw officials in this state build dams and build roadblocks of hostility to disenfranchise voters across Florida,” she said.

“People of goodwill know that there’s a major injustice that’s being carried out here,” said Kinder Meeks, a black caucus member.

Urging Votes Be Counted

Jackson criticized Bush for opposing a manual recount of the county’s ballots and including the results in the state’s certified totals.

“If Mr. Bush’s premise is [to] leave no American behind, then count the votes in Miami-Dade,” he said.

With the Texas governor leading the vice president in the state’s official count by a mere 537 votes, the allegedly missed votes could have a potentially decisive margin.

Jackson went on to criticize Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, for not “monitoring the process” in the state.

“If we were in Yugoslavia, and Milosevic was losing a race, and there was one contested state and his brother, [was] the governor [of] … that state, and the machinery of state broke down, and he became the winner by a virtue of the breakdown of that machinery, we would say that race does not pass a smell test of transparency,” he said.