On that date, the coalition will station volunteers at voting locations in predominantly Black communities. The volunteers will distribute flyers explaining voting rights, offer help to anyone who requests it, and document any abuses by officials.

Two days after the primary contest, as reports of violations mounted, the NAACP organized a public hearing in Jacksonville. Some 130 attended, a number of whom testified to the panel.

Although the big-business press has concentrated on reporting problems in Miami-Dade and Broward, the two counties with the largest number of registered voters, reports indicated that the violations were much more widespread.

At an Election Protection workshop held by the NAACP, Sharon Lettman-Pacheco, the PAW representative in Tallahassee, told participants that Blacks had encountered problems in 15 counties.

The September 12 panel heard of a wide range of violations. In some cases registered voters were denied their clearly established right to vote by provisional ballot. Others were turned away because they carried no photo identification, which is not required under state law.

One woman said that in the polling station she visited, new voting machines were not ready until 90 minutes after the 7:00 a.m. scheduled opening time. By that time, she pointed out, many people had left to go to work.

In Duval County, "one precinct opened an hour late, others gave out the wrong party’s ballots, some didn’t extend voting hours as ordered and others went through ballot shortages," reported the Jacksonville Times-Union.

In Miami-Dade, reported the Miami Herald, at least 10 percent of the election precincts did not open on time. In several the new touch-screen voting machines were not working for most of the morning. At one Liberty City polling place more than 500 people were turned away because no machines were ready for the first four hours.

The NAACP efforts to expose the obstacles faced by Blacks in the September voting follows the organization’s voting rights campaign after the 2000 presidential elections. After collecting numerous accounts of violations at that time, the NAACP demanded a federal investigation into the matter, and joined others in filing a class-action lawsuit in federal court.

A June 2001 report by the US Commission on Civil Rights found that many Black residents of the state had been wrongfully purged from voter registration lists or turned away from polling places. A heavy state police presence around polling stations in some Black communities intimidated potential voters, and polls were closed in some Black neighborhoods while people were still standing in line. Spanish- and Creole-speaking voters reported that they often could not get access to translators.

"The system is still broke," commented Isaiah Rumlin, a branch president of the NAACP, after the September primary.

At the NAACP convention a closely related issue, the question of voting rights for those in prison or with a criminal record, was given an airing at a session that featured a panel of candidates for state offices.

Florida is one of a number of states that permanently deprives convicted felons of the right to vote. This affects more than 600,000 residents of Florida, where 31 percent of the population denied voting rights consists of Black men. Each year, some 1,000 people succeed in restoring this right through appeals to the governor, a protracted and difficult process. Approximately 50,000 people who have filed such appeals have been on the waiting list for two or three years. This past July U.S. District Judge James King upheld the Florida law.

One audience participant said that anyone released from prison after serving time for a felony conviction should regain the right to vote. Panelist Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers candidate for governor of Florida, responded that the right to vote should apply to all without discrimination, including prisoners.  
 
 
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