THIS SYSTEM MUST BE FIXED
Election Day Mess Triggers Voting Rights Lawsuits Around the Country
The right to vote, and to have one's vote accurately and fairly counted, is as fundamental a right as we have in this country. It is now abundantly clear that this precious right was repeatedly violated not only in Florida, but at polling booths across the country, because of flaws in the voting system that disproportionately affected people of color. Our nation must now rededicate itself to assuring the equal right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, won by the Civil Rights Movement only after years of struggle, is not a history lesson. It is living history and we are living it now.
When the US Supreme Court halted the manual recount of votes in Florida in its December 12, 2000 decision, the ACLU registered its strong disagreement with the Court's action. But despite its unfortunate result, the decision in Bush v. Gore did make it clear that every vote must be given equal weight under the Constitution. The ACLU and other civil rights organizations are now taking the Supreme Court at its word. During the past week, three separate lawsuits were filed in Georgia, Florida, and Illinois on behalf of African American voters who were prevented from having their votes counted by systematic irregularities in the voting process.
1. Andrews v. Cox: On January 5th, the ACLU's Voting Rights Project filed the first post-election challenge to a state's electoral process in state court on behalf of seven African American voters in DeKalb, Fulton and Cobb counties in Georgia. The complaint alleged that voters in some Georgia counties were ten times more likely than others to lose their right to vote because of a "fatally flawed" system. It characterized Georgia's voting system as "a hodgepodge consisting of antiquated devices, confusing mechanisms, and equipment having significant error rates even when properly used." Georgia law currently allows the use of various mechanisms to record votes, including paper ballot, voting machine (lever), vote recorder (punch card machine), electrical scanning systems, and certain electronic voting systems. The ACLU found a high level of error in punch card machines (4.7 percent), used in predominantly African American counties, as compared to the 2.1 percent error rate for optical scanners. The complaint asks the court to block the state from conducting future elections "using machinery that fails to correctly and accurately record every vote cast."
2. NAACP v. Harris: On January 10th, the ACLU, along with the NAACP, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and several other groups filed a lawsuit in the federal court in Florida challenging the discriminatory and unequal voting policies and practices in Florida's electoral system. Filed on behalf of the NAACP and twenty-four individual African-American and Haitian-American voters, the lawsuit stems from an investigation conducted by the NAACP in the days and weeks following the November 7th election. The investigation identified disparate and unfair voting practices across the state that resulted in the invalidation of a disproportionate number of ballots cast by Black voters for President, the wrongful purge of Black voters from official voter lists, a failure to properly process registrations of black voters, and the establishment of unjustifiable barriers to black voters. The complaint asks for a range of remedies designed to repair a system that is fatally flawed.
3. Black v. McGuffage: On January 11th, the ACLU of Illinois filed a case in federal court on behalf of three African American voters alleging that inequalities, highlighted by the use of the error-ridden punch card voting system, resulted in a disproportionate number of ballots from precincts with high racial minority populations going uncounted in the presidential election. The court challenge followed the release of official results in Chicago showing that more than 70,000 legally cast ballots were not counted. A Washington Post analysis found that in those Cook County precincts where the population was comprised of less than 30 percent persons of color, the percentage of uncounted ballots averaged just 4.9 percent. But in those precincts where racial minorities comprised more than 90 percent of the voting population, the percentage of uncounted ballots exceeded nine percent. The lawsuit asks the court to enter a permanent injunction prohibiting the state of Illinois from conducting future elections using the punch card system.
In his statement at the Washington, D.C. press conference called to announce the filing of the case in Florida, ACLU Legal Director Steven R. Shapiro said, "What we witnessed in Florida during the past election was a national embarrassment. It is simply no longer possible for the nation to ignore the deep, disturbing, and discriminatory flaws in the electoral system that have now been revealed to all of us in excruciating detail." The ACLU remains committed to ensuring that in the future, each and every vote is counted equally and accurately.