Haitians demonstrating outside Miami's Immigration & Naturalization Service building in Little Haiti on the night of 4th November 2002
Background
During the 2000 US election, international news media – particularly US media outlets such as CNN, CBS, etc. – were unable to announce a winner on the night of polling day, reportedly because the result was “too close to call.” To some extent, the US media’s tradition of “calling” elections when only a fraction (sometimes as low as 3%) of votes has been counted did indeed contribute to the embarrassing spectacle in the world’s largest Western democracy, since the hullabaloo surrounding the close finish in Florida intensified an already chaotic situation. The practice of “exit polls” has been standard for television news networks for decades, and journalist Lynn Landes of www.Ecotalk.org has speculated on a link between vote-rigging in America and the computerization of election outcome predictions from 1964 onward (see “Election Night Projections – Cover for Vote-Rigging Since 1964?” Dissident Voice, Sept. 23, 2002). The acceptance by election officials of predicted outcomes also meant that the laborious task of counting postal ballots was dumped in some states up to and including 2000 because it was decided that they could not influence the predicted outcome where sufficiently wide anticipated margins based on exit polls and partial counts already existed. This meant that exact results including hand-filled early/postal ballots were often not provided.
In the two years since the 2000 election, information has come to light suggesting that the narrow margin of victory enjoyed by then-Texas Governor George W. Bush may have had something to do with foul play, in addition to an even split in the Florida electorate. As reported at the time of the election, several voters – mostly African-Americans – were turned away from polling stations in south Florida when they showed up to vote. Journalist Greg Palast has written several articles exploring this and other issues surrounding the 2000 election (see: www.GregoryPalast.com). According to Palast, the 2000 Republican victory in Florida may have been attributable to a “voter-cleansing” program that the Florida state legislature adopted to remove felons (who cannot vote after conviction until the state reinstates their rights) from voter lists across the state (see Greg Palast, “Florida’s flawed ‘voter-cleansing’ program,” www.Salon.com, Dec. 4, 2000).
The Florida government contracted a private company, DBT Online (since merged into Choice Point), to create “a ‘scrub list’ of 173,000 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris” (Harris won election as a Republican candidate to the US House of Representatives in November 2002). Some months before the 2000 election, Choice Point gave Florida officials a list of 8,000 names of ex-felons to be “scrubbed.” However, as Palast notes, it turned out “none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors.” Choice Point then blamed the error on “the original source of the list – the state of Texas” (emphasis added), but it was too late to reverse the damage done to voters’ rights. Thousands of eligible voters may have been turned away at the polls as a result of the erroneous list. Furthermore, since the list of “felons” overwhelmingly featured the names of blacks, and 93% of blacks in Florida voted for Democratic candidate Al Gore, the disenfranchisement could naturally have been expected to work to the disadvantage of the former Vice President.
A Choice Point spokesman admitted that his company had made a mistake in providing the Texas-made list to Florida, but dismissed the errors in the 8,000 names as insignificant, “a minor glitch – less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the electorate.” However, this fraction was – as Palast has noted – more than fifteen times the lead that George W. Bush claimed to have over Al Gore in Florida. Palast also points out that ChoicePoint was far from non-partisan in American politics, since its leadership was composed of high-powered Republicans. A former president of the company who died in 1998 donated $100,000 to the Republican Party.
Putting on a good face
With the 2002 election held in an atmosphere of enduring public suspicion that President George W. Bush may have won office due to electoral skullduggery in southern Florida, local authorities in the region were eager to convey a positive public image. Miami-Dade County organized an extensive programme of media events and photo opportunities to show the world that the district had cleaned up its act. Journalists were given “media kits” – massive folders and stacks of reading materials to acquaint themselves with procedural and technical aspects of the election, and in downtown Miami, a media workroom was equipped with laptop computers and phone lines on the 18th floor of Miami-Dade County Hall. Selected voting sites were opened to media representatives before polls opened, featuring displays and demonstrations of the new voting equipment. Four “media observation precincts” were established, where journalists could observe the inside of polling stations after polls had closed on Monday, November 4th (early voting took place for two weeks before election day), and before opening on Tuesday, November 5th. Miami-Dade County Manager Steve Shiver appeared at scheduled times around the Miami metropolitan area to talk to the media and public, and the Miami-Dade Police “Command Post” was on display for filming and interviews to show that the county was well prepared for any unpleasantness.
Miami-Dade County also invited “independent” observers to monitor and assess the poll. A Miami-Dade official informed BHHRG that the county had contracted the Washington-based Center for Democracy (CFD) to monitor the election for $94,000. Led by academic and author Prof. Allen Weinstein, the handful of CFD representatives worked in conjunction with members of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). Although the OSCE was sending its own delegation to Florida, the CFD-IFES team included former OSCE officials, such as Linda Edgeworth (OSCE Director of Elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1997-99, Head of the OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission in Bucharest, Romania in 2000, and designer of polling stations and vote counting procedures for Kosovo in 2001), and also Tony J. Sirvello III, OSCE observer for the 1997 Albanian parliamentary elections.
Much of the CFD’s 17-page pre-election report is devoted to commendation of local officials for the time and energy expended on preparation and organization of the election. Certainly, BHHRG noticed county officials’ attentiveness and apparently genuine efforts to deal with inquiries and requests. However, there was a definite “showcase” quality about the county’s preparations for the media. For example, BHHRG was present when a county employee in the media relations department was desperately urging a correspondent from a major news service to visit one of the four “media observation precincts” as opposed to voting sites in other areas of the county, as the journalist expressed a desire to do. The “stage-managed” atmosphere of the whole exercise probably did require much time and energy on the part of officials to achieve, but it hardly created a sense that those charged with conducting the election had nothing to hide.
Finally, the fiasco of the September 10th, 2002, primary elections in Florida (examined in more detail in the next chapter) also served as a grim backdrop to the November 5th poll. Protests by Haitians in the Little Haiti district of Miami on the evening of November 4th over the detention of over 200 Haitian asylum-seekers in a holding pen west of Miami created a further sense of dread, since some of the most egregious incidents of alleged voter disenfranchisement had occurred in this district in 2000. BHHRG observed a demonstration by about 1,500 Haitian-Americans outside Miami’s office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on election eve. The demonstration was organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest and most influential labor unions in the United States, which played a heavy role in mobilizing the electorate to come to the polls and vote for Democratic candidates.
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