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Originally posted by Achilles.
This was very interesting.
I'm a bit confused on the part about the 2000 election, though. Are they saying that Gore would have won Florida (and, thus, the presidency) if Republicans hadn't suppressed black voters in that state?  |
Although Ari Berman focused on black voter suppression in Florida in the
Fresh Air interview, the suppression was arguably one of a few issues that helped George W. Bush
steal "legally take" the 2000 election. Nader's Green Party candidacy helped tip some swing states and Gore losing his home state of Tennessee that Bill Clinton had previously carried as a Democrat in 1992 and 1996 were also notable factors.
That said, as Berman suggests in his interview, the fact that voter suppression under the Voting Rights Act was never an issue brought before the U.S. Supreme Court despite the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's finding that Black Floridians were "disproportionately prevented from voting" may have been critical in turning the case. Those votes could have easily tilted such an incredibly close election.
Here's the text from the relevant portion of the interview with Berman:
Quote:
GROSS: So let's talk for a minute about Bush v. Gore, the contested election in 2000 and the Supreme Court decision that basically ended the recount in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush. Was the Voting Rights Act cited in that decision or used in the arguments?
BERMAN: No, it wasn't. Perhaps there was a footnote somewhere in the decision about the Voting Rights Act. But the Voting Rights Act was not the subject of Bush v. Gore. It's very interesting that the U.S. Civil Rights Commission did a major investigation into the Florida 2000 election and found that the election there did violate the Voting Rights Act because African-Americans were disproportionately prevented from voting. But that was not what came before the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. And that was not a topic that the Bush administration was eager to embrace after being elected to office.
And this is a real low point for voting rights and a real turning point for voting rights. And if I could just give a little bit of context to what led to Bush v. Gore - there was massive voter purge in Florida in the late '90s and early 2000s. There had been a disputed mayoral election in Miami. There had been evidence of absentee ballot fraud and dead voters casting ballots. And what happened was that the state mandated a purge of the voting rolls to make sure that no felons were voting. Florida's one of those states that didn't allow felons to vote after they had served their time.
So there was this massive voting purge. And it actually had, number one, a lot of errors. The second problem with the list was that it was discriminatory against African-Americans because African-Americans comprised only 11 percent of Florida's electorate, but they were 44 percent of the purge list. So on Election Day, when voters in Florida in 2000 started showing up at the polls and were told that they weren't on the voting rolls or they were felons and were ineligible to vote, this disproportionately affected African-Americans. We knew after the election, as a result of a lawsuit, that 12,000 voters were wrongly labeled as felons - that was 22 times Bush's margin of victory - and that the people that were labeled felons were disproportionately African-American, and they were disproportionately going to vote for Al Gore.
So that was the larger context of Florida. Now, the recount was a little different. The recount was essentially a situation where the Bush campaign wanted as few disputed ballots counted as possible. The Gore campaign wanted as many disputed ballots counted as possible. There was a whole series of election problems in Florida that led to there being many disputed ballots. And when this came before the Supreme Court, the Bush campaign essentially said that you shouldn't count these disputed ballots. And so the Bush v. Gore decision did not mention the Voting Rights Act. And it also did not mention the disenfranchisement of black voters that I think really marred the 2000 Florida election.
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