[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 152 (Monday, December 11, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2170]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                             KEEP THEM OUT!

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JOHN CONYERS, JR.

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, December 11, 2000

  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to condemn the violations of 
the Voting Rights Act that have been reported in Florida on November 7. 
Election Day 2000 is a day that will live in infamy, in every 
American's mind who cares about the concepts of Democracy, Justice, and 
Equality. Thousands of votes, mostly African-American, students, and 
senior votes, were disqualified, and effectively, disenfranchised. 
Despite higher than ever turnouts of minorities and seniors, we had 
higher than ever rates of disqualified and disenfranchised voters, and 
that my colleagues is unAmerican. Bob Herbert of the New York Times has 
shed light on some of the egregious tactics employed by Florida 
elections officials attempting to keep Americans from voting, in the 
December 7 issue of the New York times. I respectfully request that it 
be placed in the Congressional Record, to highlight the despicable 
tactics employed to keep American votes from being cast and counted in 
the 2000 election. This article reflects much of the sentiment of 
African-Americans and other Americans who share these concerns about 
this crisis in our Democracy.

                             Keep Them Out!

                            (By Bob Herbert)

       The tactics have changed, but the goal remains depressingly 
     the same: Keep the coloreds, the blacks, the African-
     Americans--whatever they're called in the particular 
     instance--keep them out of the voting booths.
       Do not let them vote! If you can find a way to stop them, 
     stop them.
       So here we go again, this time in Florida.
       It turns out that the state of Florida is using a private 
     company with close ties to the Republican Party to help 
     ``cleanse'' the state's voter registration rolls. Would it 
     surprise anyone anywhere to learn that the cleansing process 
     somehow managed to improperly prevent large numbers of 
     African-American voters from voting in the presidential 
     election?
       Gregory Palast, a reporter with the online magazine Salon, 
     has done a number of articles on this. He noted that the 
     company, ChoicePoint, and its subsidiary, Database 
     Technologies Inc. (DBT), came up with a ``scrub list'' of 
     173,000 names. These were the names of people registered to 
     vote in Florida who, according to ChoicePoint, could be 
     knocked off the rolls for one reason or another.
       There was good reason for Florida to be concerned about the 
     integrity of its voter registration rolls. In 1997 the mayor 
     of Miami was removed from office because widespread fraud had 
     occurred in the election. The following year a law was passed 
     requiring counties in Florida to purge the rolls of duplicate 
     registrations, the names of deceased persons and felons.
       So far, so good. The problems developed when the state 
     turned to ChoicePoint, which compiles and sells vast amounts 
     of frequently shaky information about individuals. 
     (ChoicePoint, which acquired DBT last May, was fired by the 
     state of Pennsylvania for breaching the confidentiality of 
     driving records.) With this private outfit in the picture it 
     soon became clear that top Republican officials would be 
     trying to reap a partisan political advantage from a law 
     designed to correct an egregious wrong. And that partisan 
     advantage would be realized in large part by trampling on the 
     voting rights of minorities.
       Over the spring and summer ChoicePoint was forced to 
     acknowledge that 8,000 voters it had listed as felons had in 
     fact been guilty only of misdemeanors, which would not have 
     affected their right to vote. What is maddening is that when 
     such an erroneous list of names gets into the hands of county 
     election officials, as this one did, it is very difficult--
     often impossible--to find out what's correct and what's not 
     correct.
       That snickering you hear is from Republican operatives who 
     know that these kinds of foul-ups, because they are based on 
     criminal records, will disproportionately affect minority 
     voters.
       ChoicePoint eventually came up with a ``corrected'' list of 
     173,000 names of people it targeted as ineligible because 
     they were deceased, or were registered more than once, or had 
     been convicted of a felony.
       But it was a lousy list, riddled with mistakes. And in an 
     interview with me yesterday, Marty Fagan, a ChoicePoint vice 
     president, said there had never been any expectation that the 
     list would be particularly accurate. Remember now, we're 
     talking about a list that would be used to strip Americans of 
     the precious right to vote.
       Mr. Fagan said the list focused on people who ``might'' 
     have been deceased, or might have been listed twice, or 
     ``possible felons.'' He said it was ``important to know'' 
     that the information needed to be ``verified'' by county 
     election officials.
       That was interesting, because ChoicePoint came up with 
     58,000 people--people registered to vote--who would fall into 
     the category he calls ``possible felons.'' How in the world 
     were county election officials supposed to check out each and 
     every one and find out if they were felons or not?
       They couldn't. They didn't.
       The horror stories about perfectly innocent black voters 
     being turned away from the polls because they had been 
     targeted as convicted felons started coming in early on the 
     morning of Nov. 7, Election Day. And they're still coming in.
       Blacks turned out to vote in record numbers in Florida this 
     year, but huge numbers were systematically turned away for 
     one specious reason after another.
       The tactics have changed, but the goal remains the same.

       

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