 |
 |
 | |
| Home | Voice of Electricity workers | Press Release | Resolutions | Feedback | About Us | |||
|
Voice of Electricity Workers ELIMINATION BLAKS FROM THE VOTERS LISTS AND THEIR RIGHT TO VOTE IS DRASTICALLY REDUCED ON FLIMZY GROUNDS – EVEN THE EXERCISE OF LEGAL SYSTEM IS DISCRIMINATORY The attention given to the Florida elections in the US presidential race has highlighted the horrendous fact that in Florida and throughout the South thirty-five years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act there are numerous ways in which African Americans are prevented from voting. Thus Florida is one of fourteen states that bar ex-criminal offenders from voting even after they have completed their sentences. In Florida alone more than 400,000 ex-criminal offenders who at one time received felony convictions but who have now completed their sentences and are no longer in prison, or probation, or on parole have been barred from voting in this way. This includes almost one-third of black men in that state and more than 200,00 potential African-American voters, 90 percent or more of whom could have been expected to vote Democrat if they had voted. This situation in Florida and other states is documented in a 1998 report entitled Losing the Vote, issued by Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project, available on-line at < http://www.hrw.org/reports98/vote/>. Given the fact that under the present criminal injustice system African Americans are far more likely to be arrested and given means of political control. In Florida the exclusion of African American voters in this fashion was pursued much more energetically, beginning in 1998, when the state government decided that the Florida voter registry be systematically scrubbed and hired a private company, DBT Online, since merged into Choice Point of Atlanta, to carry out the cleansing process. It has been discovered that Choice Point (which has close connections to the Republican Party) made numerous errors, giving Florida officials a list of names to be excluded from the voter rolls prior to the 2000 presidential elections that included thousands of individuals (disproportionately African Americans) who did not have a felony record, but who were nonetheless to be dropped from the voter rolls on this basis. Estimates in some countries indicate that Choice Point’s overall scrub list, called the “central voter file” contained errors in 15 percent of the cases, which would amount to more than seven thousand voters statewide. Florida is the only state to employ a private company to cleanse its voter registry. See: http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/index.html>. A report from The Monthly Review – February 2001. |
| Copyright © 2002 - 2004 Electricity Employees Federation of India. All Rights Reserved. |
 |
