Counting on indignation.

• Author: Jackson, Damien

When Donnise DeSouza arrived at the Robert Morgan Vocational School in Florida's Miami-Dade County in November of 2000, she fully expected to vote. Registered since 1982, the African American attorney arrived at the polling place an hour before closing. To her surprise, DeSouza was told her name was not on the rolls. A poll worker sent her to the Richmond Fire Station to vote. She arrived with ten minutes to spare, and was directed to a "problem line," where she waited for her registration status to be verified. At 7:00 p.m.--the poll's closing time--a poll worker informed her that if her name was not on the roll, she couldn't be allowed to vote and there was nothing she could do, DeSouza recalls. The poll workers stopped voter verifications and refused DeSouza's request for an absentee ballot.

DeSouza later found out that the poll workers, by law, should have continued efforts to verify her voting status since she was inside the precinct prior to closing. Even more jarring, she discovered that her name had been on the roils of registered voters all along.

"A lot of what happened that day was clearly race-related," says DeSouza.

DeSouza's experience was far from exceptional. The 2000 Presidential race in Florida presented a slew of inequities, including a high proportion of nullified ballots in black precincts, police roadblocks barring access to polling sites, the relocation of polling sites without notice, and unjustified computerized voting purges.

Unfortunately, Florida was not alone. In its 2001 report, "How to Make Over One Million Votes Disappear," the Democratic investigative staff of the House Judiciary Committee reported "at least 1,276,916 voters in thirty-one states and the District of Columbia had their votes discarded."

The impact of such underhanded tactics on attitudes in the black community was evident. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of black Democrats who say "people like me don't have any say about what the government does" climbed twenty-four points between 1999 and 2002 (34 percent to 58 percent), while white Democrats' views kept relatively stable.

"Right now, they definitely do not believe it is a fair process," says Stephanie Moore, director of the Fannie Lou Hamer Project, a nonprofit electoral reform organization.

"Folks are still upset" about the 2000 election, which was stolen "right in front of everyone's eyes," says Rashad Robinson, field director for the Center for Voting and Democracy...