Blacks Cry Foul In Duval County

They claim 'conspiracy to defraud voters'

Robert Salladay / SF Chronicle 11dec00

The Rev. Tom Diamond decried the election in his sermon. Chronicle photo by Darryl Bush

Vice President Al Gore can look almost anywhere in Florida and find a simple mistake or unforeseen circumstance that tipped the election into chaos, but this northeast city has 22,000 examples for him to chew on.

Democrats in Duval County, where Texas Gov. George W. Bush soundly defeated Gore, want to know why a two-page presidential ballot prompted 22,000 votes to be thrown out, including an estimated 10,000 from predominantly African American areas that voted overwhelmingly for Gore.

The racially charged controversy threatens to linger here well past whatever decision the U.S. Supreme Court makes this week, leaving Jacksonville residents with the uneasy thought that their errors could have picked the next president.

Black leaders, including Jesse Jackson and the NAACP, contend that African American voters were intentionally given a confusing ballot so their votes would be invalidated. Jackson arrives in Florida today for another protest rally and to hear complaints of possible intimidation at polling places.

"This was a conspiracy to defraud the voters of the state of Florida, especially here in Duval County," said the Rev. Tom Diamond of Abyssinia Missionary Baptist Church.

Diamond said yesterday that many "grassroots people" -- the elderly, immigrants and semi-literate, as he described them -- were fooled into picking two candidates or were illegally turned away at the polls because they didn't have identification.

Yolanda Scott, a telecommunications worker in Jacksonville, said she tried to vote but found her name missing from the list, even though she voted in the primary. Her husband was on the list, however.

Scott said she finally got to vote after she went down to the central elections office in downtown Jacksonville. But she wondered how many other African American voters were similarly turned away and never came back.

"If you make it difficult," Scott said, "they will go away."

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating complaints that voters were intimidated at the polls throughout Florida. Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the NAACP and the AFL-CIO, along with several area residents, have filed lawsuits in Duval County alleging civil rights violations.

Already, the NAACP says it has received nearly 500 complaints and taken hundreds of sworn statements that point to a "massive, systematic exclusion of black, Jewish and immigrant voters." Although African Americans make up about 25 percent of the population, about 40 percent of the ballots thrown out came from black districts in this mostly segregated city.

The number of votes thrown out because of irregularities in the 2000 presidential ballot is four times the number of previous elections, officials in Duval County have said.

The central complaint from Democrats and black leaders has been over the design of the ballot in Duval County. It's a different version of the now- infamous butterfly ballot used in West Palm Beach County, but the outcome was much the same.

One side of the ballot listed Gore, Bush, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and two other presidential candidates. The other side listed five other candidates. A sample ballot printed in the Jacksonville newspaper asked people to "vote on each page," and Democratic activists told voters the same thing on election day, to their chagrin.

As a result, 22,000 Duval County ballots were thrown out because they contained votes for more than one presidential candidate. An additional 5,000 ballots carried no vote for president, and those may be the subject of a recount, depending on the will of the U.S. Supreme Court.

But the 22,000 overvotes probably are gone forever, and Democrats in Florida believe those ballots would have provided Gore with enough votes to take the state -- and the White House. There are no plans to recount the 22, 000 overvotes, not even if the Supreme Court starts a recount.

Reviews by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Florida Times- Union show that the 5,000 Duval County undervotes came from areas where Bush won big, and the 22,000 overvotes came disproportionately from African American neighborhoods, which voted for Gore by a 10-to-1 ratio. Only the 5, 000 overvotes are being considered for a recount.

Richard Mullaney, an attorney for the Duval County elections board, said they are investigating all complaints made by the NAACP, Jackson and others, but he dismissed complaints that Jacksonville officials deliberately set out to violate the rights of black voters.

"Whatever allegations of whether the ballot was confusing or the instructions were confusing," Mullaney said yesterday, "there has not been a systematic attempt to disenfranchise any group."

In many cases, Mullaney said, voters who claimed to have been hassled at the polls had moved and had failed to re-register. He warned against rhetoric that racism played a part, saying it "doesn't further the debate, and happens to be untrue."

"It's very possible there were some poll workers who made some mistakes, workers who forgot to offer affidavits (to voters without identification)," Mullaney said. "But it's a big step to go from isolated incidents to say there is racial discrimination."

But African American leaders say they are going to continue pressing the issue.

"We feel that blacks have been disenfranchised," said the Rev. Pernell Raggins of the Zion Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Jacksonville.

E-mail Robert Salladay at rsalladay@sfchronicle.com