[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 4 (Saturday, January 6, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H46-H47]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       EXPLANATION OF PROCEEDINGS OCCURRING DURING JOINT SESSION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to address the House for 5 minutes to 
speak about what took place here in joint session today and to talk 
about what has led us to this point.
  Today, here in this Chamber, we had a joint session to count the 
electoral votes; and, of course, there were some of us, mostly 
represented by Members from the Congressional Black Caucus, who chose 
to come to the floor in an attempt to object to the acceptance of the 
electoral votes from Florida. We did that, despite the fact we 
understood the rules. We knew that in order to object, we had to have 
in writing the objection, signed by both a House Member and a Member of 
the Senate.
  We did not have one Member of the Senate who had signed any 
objection, but we came to the floor of this House and we said to the 
Vice President, who presided over the joint session, each time that we 
objected we said that, no, we did not have a signature from a United 
States Senator, that we only had our signature, we had the signatures 
of some of our colleagues, and we had the support of our constituents.
  It was important for us to do this. It was important because we have 
just experienced one of the most traumatizing and devastating 
elections, particularly as it played out in Florida, that this country 
has ever been involved with.

                              {time}  1345

  I would like to cite to you some of what happened in Florida that has 
caused us so much concern. I am going to quote from an article that was 
done by Laura Flanders. I will not be quoting all of the article, but I 
will be submitting the rest of this for inclusion in the Record.

       On day one after the election, there was a story in the 
     Florida papers about an unauthorized police roadblock, 
     stopping cars not a mile from a black church-turned-polling-
     booth. NAACP volunteers reported being swamped with 
     complaints from registered voters who found it impossible to 
     vote. They heard stories of intimidation at and around 
     polling places; demands for superfluous ID; people complained 
     about a pattern of singling out black men and youth for 
     criminal background checks, and in call after call, would-be 
     voters complained they had been denied language 
     interpretation and other help at the polls.
       By now it is clear that overwhelmed election workers made a 
     mass of mistakes, but those mistakes were laced through with 
     some clear intent to suppress some votes.
       A full 3 weeks after the election, The New York Times 
     finally took a serious look and reported that, anticipating a 
     large turnout in a tight race, Florida election officials had 
     given laptop computers to precinct workers so they would have 
     direct access to the State's voter rolls, but the computers 
     only went to some precincts and only one went to a precinct 
     whose people were predominantly black. The technology gap in 
     the no-laptop precincts forced the workers there to rely on a 
     few phone lines to the head office. Voters whose names did 
     not appear on the rolls were held up, while workers tried to 
     get through on the phone, for hours, or until they gave up.
       For those who voted, there was another technology glitch. 
     Mr. Speaker, 185,000 Floridians cast votes that did not 
     count. Theirs were the ballots that had been punched too few 
     or too many times, or were otherwise flawed. Flaws too, seem 
     to have followed race lines. In an election that turned on a 
     few hundred votes, Floridians whose ballots failed to 
     register a mark for President were much more likely to have 
     voted with computer punch cards than optical scanning 
     machines. In Miami Dade, the county with the most votes cast, 
     predominantly black precincts saw their votes thrown out at 4 
     times the rate of white precincts. According to the Times, 
     one out of 11 ballots in predominantly black precincts were 
     rejected, a total of 9,904.
       Urban, multi-racial Palm Beach, home of the infamous 
     butterfly ballot and Duval, where candidates' names were 
     spread across 2 pages despite what the published ballot had 
     shown, produced 31 percent of Florida's discarded ballots, 
     but only 12 percent of the total votes cast in Duval, which 
     has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the Nation, more 
     than 26,000 votes were rejected, 9,000 from precincts that 
     were predominantly black.
       Many Floridians who found themselves ``scrubbed'' off the 
     voting rolls were not purged accidentally, reports Gregory 
     Palast for Salon.com. Florida Secretary of State Katherine 
     Harris paid a private firm, ChoicePoint, $4 million to 
     cleanse the voting rolls, and the firm used the State's 
     felon-ban to exclude 8,000 voters who had never committed a 
     felony. ChoicePoint is a Republican outfit. Board members 
     include former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir, and 
     billionaire Ken Langone, chair of the fund-raising committee 
     for Mayor Giuliani's aborted New York Senate bid.

  I cannot complete all of what I would like to share, but I will be 
submitting this for the Record. Let the record show that we were here 
today, that we participated and we voiced our objection, and the fight 
will continue for justice and equality. People were disenfranchised, 
and that must be stopped and corrected.

       The erroneous data wasn't their doing, ChoicePoint 
     complains, the names came, raw, from the state of Texas. They 
     were supposed to be reviewed locally, but they were 
     distributed un-reviewed. African Americans dominate. (The 
     8,000 wrong names were ``a minor glitch'' ChoicePoint told 
     Palast; a glitch fifteen times the size of the Texas 
     Governor's lead.)
       As for that election morning police checkpoint, near 
     Tallahassee, Robert Chamber, a Black resident, told the 
     Guardian UK he knew what it was about: ``putting fear in 
     people's hearts. . . . '' The Florida panhandle is home to 
     the largest concentration of neo-confederate white 
     supremacist groups in the US. But this problem is no neo-nazi 
     plot--it's racism of the institutional, not the exceptional 
     kind, and even more devastating than the statistics has been 
     Democratic leadership's silence. While African Americans in 
     huge numbers know there was massive voter fraud, harassment 
     and intimidation a la Jim Crow, the Democratic Party's white 
     top-dogs have resolutely refused to talk about voting rights, 
     race or racism--Why? For fear it will hurt them in the court 
     of public opinion? Among white swing voters and southern 
     Democrats? Already hurting in all of those places, they're 
     trifling with one of the few solid voting blocks they've got 
     left, (Blacks, Latinos, Jews.)
       The NAACP came out strong, the weekend after the election, 
     holding public hearings and gathering 300 pages of legally 
     sworn testimony from 486 people who say they were denied 
     their right to vote. With the Congressional Black Caucus the 
     NAACP wrote to Janet Reno seeking a Justice Department 
     investigation into possible violations of the Voting 
     Rights Act. That was back on November 14th. Since then, 
     the Gore campaign has filed dozens of lawsuits--not one 
     deals with violations of voting rights. The Justice 
     Department has initiated what officials go out of their 
     way to characterize as a preliminary inquiry, not an 
     investigation. (Alligator-wrestler Reno is scared to stir 
     the waters in her home-state, where she's hoping to retire 
     any day now, some say.)
       The Gore team has chosen to try to eke some votes out of 
     three counties with manual counts, and to make much of 
     butterflies and chards, but nothing of race. (Recently, Gore 
     told a reporter he was ``very troubled'' by the ``serious 
     allegations.'' That's it.) His racist denial of the 
     seriousness of racism makes nonsense out of US politics.
       The Electoral College is a tool of racism. As Yale's Akhil 
     Reed Amar wrote in the New York Times, ``the College was 
     designed at

[[Page H47]]

     the founding of the country to help one group--white Southern 
     males--and this year, it has apparently done just that.''
       In the years after the forced-end of slavery, former slave 
     states like Florida imposed those felon-disenfranchisement 
     laws, precisely to disempower freed-but-impoverished Blacks. 
     The political parties crafted the statewide primary system 
     into what amounted to a white-man's private club to keep the 
     newly enfranchised under the old establishment's control. 
     Then came literacy tests and poll taxes--voters had to keep 
     their tax-receipts on file--anything to keep electoral power 
     in white hands. For an idea of what those tackling literacy 
     tests faced, consider: under Jim Crow, Florida required that 
     textbooks used by the public school children of one race be 
     kept separate from those used by the other--even in storage.
       After the 1965 Act was passed, states did everything they 
     could to dilute Black influence. Winner-take-all systems, or 
     absolute majority vote requirements were embraced to keep 
     black candidates from winning over split fields of white 
     candidates in local races--in just the same way as winner-
     take-all works in the presidential contest. More offices were 
     filled by appointment. Legislative and congressional district 
     lines were redrawn to keep black voting strength submerged.
       None of this requires looking back very far: the same House 
     Speaker, Tim Feeney, who wants the Florida legislature to 
     select a Bush slate of Electors no matter what the vote-
     counters count, suggested reintroducing literacy tests just 
     two weeks ago: ``Voter confusion is not a reason for whining 
     or crying or having a revote,'' said Feeney. ``It may be a 
     reason to require literacy tests.'' (Palm Beach Post, 11/16.)
       The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who may well be the 
     final arbiter of which votes get counted and which (white) 
     man gets the White House, is William Rehnquist, a 
     segregationist from way back.
       In 1962, Republican activist William (then ``Bill'') 
     Rehnquist was the leader of Operation Eagle Eye, a flying 
     squad of GOP lawyers that swept through polling places in 
     south Phoenix to question the right of minority voters to 
     cast their ballots. As Dave Wagner reported in the Arizona 
     Republic last year, Rehnquist defended keeping African 
     Americans out of stores and restaurants in Phoenix. In 1964, 
     at the Bethune Precinct, (which was 40 percent Hispanic 
     and 90 percent Democratic) Rehnquist and Operation Eagle 
     Eye activists challenged every Black and Mexican voter's 
     ability to read the Constitution of the United States in 
     the English language (then a requirement.)
       The result, according to one witness, was ``a line a half-
     block long, four abreast . . . They wanted people to become 
     frustrated and leave.'' In his testimony to a US Senate 
     hearing on his appointment to the Supreme Court, Rehnquist 
     denied that he officially challenged anyone's right to vote. 
     Just as today's defenders of Bush, argue that voter error, 
     not bias, disproportionately shrank the counted vote, 
     Rehnquist argued that he broke no rules, he was just 
     following the law.
       Trying to wage politics in the US while tiptoing around 
     racism is like sidestepping an elephant. It's dangerous, it's 
     not smart, and it won't work, What suppresses the Black and 
     minority vote suppresses the Democratic and liberal-
     progressive vote. The majority of white male voters haven't 
     pooled Democratic since 1964 and only women of color create 
     the gender gap for Gore. Yet the unequal distribution of 
     resources and bias that created a practically apartheid 
     voting system in Florida was sustained by the Democratic 
     Party--who approved of the process, try as they might to 
     blame the Governor's cronies. And Democratic pro-drug war, 
     pro-death penalty, pro-felon disenfranchisement policies 
     stoked the racist atmosphere in which this election was held.
       The conditions are ripe for a pro-democracy movement. A 
     moment, at least: this is it. Some things have changed in the 
     nation since 1964, and when the pubic has heard (or seen on 
     CSPAN) the witnesses who gave the NAACP testimony, they have 
     been shocked. Voter protests in Florida have built a multi-
     racial coalition, that is advocating the kind of electoral 
     reform the whole nation could get behind. Among their 
     demands: a non-partisan election commission, standardized 
     voting procedures and federal enforcement of the Voting 
     Rights Act. Add to that, the longer-term structural changes 
     some advocate: instant run off voting, or some form of 
     proportional representation, so that small parties (and 
     minority constituencies) could build support for their issues 
     without throwing elections to their foes.
       The public has seen the Electoral College in its worst 
     light: for the first time, the tyranny of a minority may 
     contradict the popular will. Perhaps something will come of 
     the shared experience of disenfranchisement. But not if we 
     don't talk about what's at the root of it: racism. Not ``the 
     system,'' but this particular, racist one. And those who've 
     been marginalized must occupy the center. People of color are 
     central to why our electoral system is set up this way; 
     likewise, they must be at the heart of any movement for real 
     democracy. We can get rid of the racism, but only if we all 
     shove that elephant out at once.
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