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The New York Times

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November 30, 2000, Thursday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk

LENGTH: 1946 words

HEADLINE: CONTESTING THE VOTE: BLACK VOTERS;
Arriving at Florida Voting Places, Some Blacks Found Frustration

BYLINE:  By MIREYA NAVARRO and SOMINI SENGUPTA; Josh Barbanel contributed to this article by conducting a computer analysis of voting results.

DATELINE: MIAMI, Nov. 29

BODY:
Dedrana McCray, 18, turned out with her parents and her sister to cast the first vote of her life on Nov. 7, her freshly minted voter registration card in hand.

The poll workers waved her parents and 28-year-old sister to the booths, but Ms. McCray said she was told that her name was not on the voter rolls. As she waited anxiously, the workers tried to phone the county offices to check her name against the master lists but were rebuffed by a continual busy signal. An hour later, Ms. McCray said, she gave up, went home and cried.

"I thought it'd be a happy day," Ms. McCray said. "I was telling my mom and dad, 'We're a voting family, but I would never want to vote again.' It is a hassle. If you have all your stuff and ID and you're registered and everything is right, why go through that if you still can't vote?"

Ms. McCray, who lives in Opa-Locka, a small city north of Miami, was part of a tide of black Floridians responding to Democratic and civil rights leaders who encouraged them to register and turn out to vote -- many of them, like Ms. McCray, for the first time. The vast majority cast their ballots without incident, giving Vice President Al Gore a major boost that helped make the presidential vote so close.

But interviews with election officials and voters across the state suggest that some African-Americans like Ms. McCray -- it is unclear how many -- were turned away from the polls. The interviews show that the election system itself buckled under the weight of high turnouts, which election officials say they expected but which still overwhelmed them.

Technology that could have helped handle the overflow was not available in black precincts. In other places, registration lists were flawed. Elsewhere in Florida, unrelated events -- a sudden police presence in black neighborhoods in Tampa and late delivery of voter cards to black students at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach -- have left some prominent blacks suspicious that black voters were disproportionately harmed.

In the case of Ms. McCray, David Leahy, the supervisor of elections in Miami-Dade County, said she had been properly registered and should have been allowed to cast her ballot. Mr. Leahy could not say why Ms. McCray's name had been omitted from the precinct voting lists. He acknowledged in an interview this week that the phone lines on which precinct workers were supposed to check a voter's status were frequently busy. Mr. Leahy said the county tried to ease the strain on its phone lines by providing election officials in 18 of the county's larger precincts with laptop computers that were linked to the official register of voters.

A New York Times analysis of those precincts shows that 14 were predominantly Hispanic while 1 was heavily African-American and 3 were mostly white. Vice President Al Gore carried Miami-Dade County by 53 percent to 46 percent. The analysis shows the 18 precincts with the laptops voted 56 percent to 42 percent for Gov. George W. Bush.

Mr. Leahy said the distribution of computers had been motivated by criteria that had nothing to do with race or politics. He said they had been sent to the most populous precincts, which in Miami-Dade County were mostly Hispanic.

The electorate in Miami-Dade County is 44 percent Hispanic, 31 percent non-Hispanic white and 20 percent black.

The issue of where computers were available to compensate for jammed phone lines was significant for voters of all races because Florida, unlike some other states, does not allow voters to cast their ballots provisionally. Voters like Ms. McCray, whose names were for some reason omitted from the precinct lists, could not vote unless county officials directly confirmed their status.

In Hillsborough County, a mixed urban and rural area that includes Tampa, election officials said they, too, equipped a handful of precincts with computers that could be used to review the county's entire list of registered voters. The hope, they said, was to reduce the number of telephone calls from precinct workers to the county election office.

Although Tampa has some predominantly black precincts, none received computers. County officials said the equipment was sent to precincts with the largest number of address changes and disputed ballots in the last election.

As a result, not one of the 10 precincts that were equipped with these computers in Hillsborough County had a black majority. In fact, only 3 were in precincts where more than a quarter of voters were black. Mr. Bush carried the county 51 percent to 47 percent. In the 10 precincts with computers, the vote 55 percent for Mr. Bush; 45 percent for Mr. Gore.

A statewide campaign to register blacks, spurred in part by anger over the decision by Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida last year to eliminate affirmative action, brought thousands of first-time voters to the polls on Election Day. More than 59,100 black Floridians signed up to vote from February to October of this year alone, swelling the ranks of black voters by nearly 7 percent to 934,261 statewide. White registration, by contrast, grew by 3.6 percent to 6,564,813 statewide. Blacks' share of the turnout in Florida jumped to 16 percent, exit polls show, compared with 10 percent in the last presidential election.

Civil rights leaders from groups like the N.A.A.C.P. and the Rainbow Coalition have called for a federal investigation of whether Florida improperly deprived blacks of their right to vote. In the hours after the polls closed on Nov. 7, the groups said African-Americans had been intimidated by police sweeps and roadblocks and victimized by widespread confusion. The groups sent hundreds of sworn statements to the Justice Department which they said supported the accusations

"What is clear is that this is a systematic plan" to disenfranchise black voters, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in an interview. "African-American voters were substantially targeted."

That accusation is unproven, and Justice Department officials said privately that they were reluctant to involve themselves in the fray.

The N.A.A.C.P. announced today that it planned to file several lawsuits over purported irregularities involving hundreds of complaints from black voters in Florida.

Interviews around the state suggest that the most significant obstacles confronting blacks appear to have stemmed from logistical problems: voter registration cards for black college students that did not arrive until 2 p.m. on Election Day, flawed registration lists, busy signals on county phone lines and confusion over how to use translators.

Representative Alcee L. Hastings, a black Democrat from South Florida, from a Congressional district where turnout topped 80 percent at some precincts, said the chaos on Election Day lowered the black vote totals.

"Is that a racial thing?" Mr. Hastings asked. "I don't think so. But is it something that had a cumulative effect and had an impact on the African-American vote? I think that's the case."

"The responsibility of the supervisors of elections is to prepare for 100 percent turnout," he said. "I don't think they can get off the hook."

Mary Womack, deputy supervisor of elections in Broward County, said: "You can only do so much. We did what we could with what we had to work with."

Ms. Womack said that her department was "very, very busy" on Election Day, with about 35 operators handling calls, and that while poll workers had to wait, "a lot of people did get through."

One who tried repeatedly and failed was Elease H. Williams, a clerk at a mostly black precinct in Fort Lauderdale who said she and five other poll workers turned away about 100 people who did not appear on voters' lists and insisted they were registered.

"This was the first year we didn't get through," Mrs. Williams, 72, a poll worker for more then 20 years, said. "I was so disgusted."

Turnout throughout the state was about 70 percent, the state division of elections said, compared with 67 percent in 1996. Some counties reported record turnout. In Hillsborough County, 369,000 voters came to the polls this year. In the last two presidential elections, officials said, an average of 315,000 turned out.

Pam Iorio, Hillsborough County's election supervisor, said the county expanded its phone bank for handling calls from precincts. Even so, Ms. Iorio said, the phones were completely swamped.

Does that mean some voters, particularly in the heavy turnout black Democratic precincts, had been improperly turned away?

"I hope not," Ms. Iorio replied. "But there's always that possibility in a high-turnout election.

To the extent that Election Day problems affected blacks disproportionately, political experts say, it was the Democrats who paid for it. More than 90 percent of the black vote in Florida went to Al Gore, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.

One reason the problems faced by black voters have become such a focal point of contention is Florida's tarnished history in dealing with minority voters. In the last decade, civil rights groups have initiated or intervened in at least seven lawsuits in Florida trying to protect the voting rights of minorities, mostly in redistricting cases where white voters have challenged majority-black and Hispanic Congressional districts.

Police presence near black polling sites added to the anger and suspicion. In a black neighborhood outside Tampa, what police say was a legitimate robbery investigation was portrayed as something more menacing by local radio. Similarly, a roadblock by the Florida Highway Patrol near a predominantly black precinct just outside Tallahassee raised the ire of some African-American voters who saw it as intimidating. The police said it was a random checkpoint that had been set up to conduct routine inspections of drivers.

Among Haitian voters in Miami, there were widespread complaints that volunteer interpreters were not allowed to help voters who did not speak English. Carline Paul, the hostess of two educational shows on Haitian radio, said she heard them as she went on the air all day from the North Miami campaign headquarters of Phillip Brutus, a Haitian-American lawyer running for Florida state representative.

Voters can be accompanied by an assistant if they make a specific request to designate that person to help at the polls, county officials said. But not long after the polls had opened, Ms. Paul said, calls started pouring in from Creole-speaking voters. "They don't want nobody to help people voting," one of the messages she hurriedly scribbled down on yellow pieces of paper read. "NW 7th Ave. No help," another one said.

"They wouldn't let anyone help anybody," Ms. Paul said. "You hear about people going home with their ballots. People whose polling places had changed. People not on the list. There were thousands."

A little help from election officials would have allowed Tammy Milledge, 26, to cast the first vote of her life. Ms. Milledge, a medical assistant in Tampa, showed up at the address on her voter registration card shortly before 6 p.m. There was no problem: She saw her name on the voter rolls.

But Ms. Milledge mentioned to the precinct clerk she had moved two months earlier. The clerk shook her head. "She said, 'Honey you can't vote here,' " Ms. Milledge recalled.

The precinct worker, who had been unable to reach the election office all evening, suggested she try a polling place close to her new home. When she arrived, frantic, she learned that she was not registered there.

The polls closed and Ms. Milledge went home dejected. "I was just determined to vote this year," she said. "But I couldn't."
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GRAPHIC: Photo: One Haitian-American volunteer poll worker, Raymond Brutus, left, cousin of a Florida legislative candidate, says he saw many flaws of the kind reported by callers to Carline Paul, right, a South Florida radio host. (Andrew Itkoff for The New York Times)(pg. A30)      

LOAD-DATE: November 30, 2000