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Baltimore Sun May 8, 2003

Jim Crow Revived in Cyberspace

By Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast

Birmingham, Ala. -- Astonishingly, and sadly, four decades after the
Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Birmingham, we must ask again, "Do
African-Americans have the unimpeded right to vote in the United
States?"

In 1963, Dr. King's determined and courageous band faced water hoses and

police attack dogs to call attention to the thicket of Jim Crow laws --
including poll taxes and so-called "literacy" tests -- that stood in the
way
of black Americans' right to have their ballots cast and counted.

Today, there is a new and real threat to minority voters, this time from

cyberspace: computerized purges of voter rolls.

The menace first appeared in Florida in the November 2000 presidential
election. While the media chased butterfly ballots and hanging chads, a
much
more sinister and devastating attack on voting rights went almost
undetected. In the two years before the elections, the Florida
secretary of
state's office quietly ordered the removal of 94,000 voters from the
registries. Supposedly, these were convicted felons who may not vote in
Florida. Instead, the overwhelming majority were innocent of any crime,
though just over half were black or Hispanic.

We are not guessing about the race of the disenfranchised: A voter's
color
is listed next to his or her name in most Southern states. (Ironically,
this
racial ID is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a King legacy.)
How
did mass expulsion of legal voters occur?

At the heart of the ethnic purge of voting rights was the creation of a
central voter file for Florida placed in the hands of an elected, and
therefore partisan, official. Computerization and a 1998 "reform" law
meant
to prevent voter fraud allowed for a politically and racially biased
purge
of thousands of registered voters on the flimsiest of grounds.

Voters whose name, birth date and gender loosely matched that of a felon

anywhere in America were targeted for removal. And so one Thomas Butler
(of
several in Florida) was tagged because a "Thomas Butler Cooper Jr." of
Ohio
was convicted of a crime. The legacy of slavery -- commonality of black
names -- aided the racial bias of the "scrub list."

Florida was the first state to create, computerize and purge lists of
allegedly "ineligible" voters. Meant as a reform, in the hands of
partisan
officials it became a weapon of mass voting rights destruction. (The
fact
that Mr. Cooper's conviction date is shown on state files as "1/30/2007"

underscores other dangers of computerizing our democracy.)

You'd think that Congress and President Bush would run from imitating
Florida's disastrous system. Astonishingly, Congress adopted the
absurdly
named "Help America Vote Act," which requires every state to replicate
Florida's system of centralized, computerized voter files before the
2004
election. The controls on the 50 secretaries of state are few -- and
the
temptation to purge voters of the opposition party enormous.

African-Americans, whose vote concentrates in one party, are an easy and

obvious target.

The act also lays a minefield of other impediments to black voters: an
effective rollback of the easy voter registration methods of the Motor
Voter
Act; new identification requirements at polling stations; and perilous
incentives for fault-prone and fraud-susceptible touch-screen voting
machines.

No, we are not rehashing the who-really-won fight from the 2000
presidential
election. But we have no intention of "getting over it." We are moving
on,
but on to a new nationwide call and petition drive to restore and
protect
the rights of all Americans and monitor the implementation of
frighteningly
ill-conceived new state and federal voting "reform" laws.

And so on Sunday in Birmingham we marched again as our fathers and
mothers
did 40 years ago, this time demanding security against the dangerous
"Floridation" of our nation's voting methods through computerization of
voter rolls. Four decades ago, the opposition to the civil right to
vote
was easy to identify: night riders wearing white sheets and burning
crosses.
Today, the threat comes from partisan politicians wearing pinstripe
suits
and clutching laptops. Jim Crow has moved into cyberspace -- harder to
detect, craftier in operation, shifting shape into the electronic
guardian
of a new electoral segregation.

Martin Luther King III is president of the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference. Greg Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,
and
his investigation of computer purges of black voters appeared in
Harper's
Magazine.

http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.voting08may08,0,7994499.stor

y?coll=bal-oped-headlines
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

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