[Announce-DAN] [B4BorG] FAIR ACTION ALERT: Allegations of voting rights violations need inve

[Jennifer Pozner <buildingbridges@mindspring.com> (by way of Mark Cohen <buildingbridges@mindspring.com>)]

Hello, all. Civil rights groups have asked the Department of Justice to
investigate whether or not major irregularities during this election
aggressively disenfranchised African American and other minority voters,
potentially violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These serious charges
deserve serious journalistic investigation, as the action alert below
details. When civil rights leaders wonder whether we have seen a return to
latter-day Jim Crow voting discrimination, the story is at least as
important to our democracy as all the discussion of dangling chads. I
encourage you to contact media outlets and ask them to investigate these
charges. Remember that letters are best received when they maintain a polite
and firm tone.

Feel free to forward or post this alert to any individual or list you
believe would be interested in this critical aspect of the ongoing election
story. 

Best,
Jennifer L. Pozner, Women's Desk Director, FAIR

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	FAIR-L [SMTP:FAIR-L@FAIR.ORG]
> Sent:	Friday, November 17, 2000 7:48 PM
> To:	FAIR-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
> Subject:	[FAIR-L] ACTION ALERT: Allegations of voting rights
> violations need invest igation
> 
>                                  FAIR-L
>                     Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
>                Media analysis, critiques and news reports
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ACTION ALERT:
> Allegations of voting rights violations need investigation
> 
> November 17, 2000
> 
> Since November 7, major media outlets have devoted enormous attention to
> the
> aftermath of the presidential election in Florida. But one critical aspect
> of this story has received relatively little attention: the allegations of
> a
> pattern of voting irregularities and discrimination against
> African-Americans and other minority groups that may violate the 15th
> Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
> 
> Upon request from major civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the
> Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Justice Department is
> deciding whether to pursue a federal investigation into allegations of
> significant harassment of minority voters in Florida and elsewhere
> throughout the country. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 makes it illegal to
> intimidate, threaten, coerce or prevent any individual from exercising his
> or her right to vote.
> 
> These are some of the disturbing and highly newsworthy charges that
> deserve
> more media attention:
> 
> --Charles Weaver, publisher of Community Voice, a Fort Myers African
> American weekly paper, witnessed "intimidation, harassment and apparent
> illegal activity" at a polling place he visited. ''There were illegal poll
> watchers, threatening people, telling them, 'I know where you work. You're
> going to get fired,''' Weaver told the Inter Press Service (11/14/00). The
> same article reported that Tallahassee police set up traffic checks at the
> entrance to a polling place in a black neighborhood; that police in
> Newport
> News, Va. stopped people at checkpoints; and some black voters were turned
> away from polls in St. Louis for not having voter registration cards, even
> though registration cards were not required from white voters.
> 
> --In an NAACP public hearing held in Miami (C-Span, 11/11/00), Stacy
> Powers,
> a former police officer who currently serves as news director for Tampa
> radio station WTMP, spoke of witnessing numerous voting irregularities in
> her election day travels through city neighborhoods. Powers testified that
> she saw people being turned away from several polling places in the black
> community after being told their names were not on voting lists. When
> Powers
> reminded poll workers that an individual can legally sign an affidavit and
> vote even if their name isn't on an official list, she said, she was
> ejected
> from several polling places (Daily News, 11/17/00).
> 
> -- Miami's Donnise DeSouza testified that she was denied the right to vote
> after being shuttled to several polling places and told her name was not
> on
> the list. When she checked with the elections board the next day, she
> said,
> she found her name was in fact on the list. Many other voters were told
> they'd been dropped from the rolls as convicted felons, even though they
> had
> never been arrested, and that names of black college students who
> registered
> this summer never showed up on voter lists, according to the NAACP
> hearings
> (Daily News, 11/17/00).
> 
> --According to the New York Times (11/17/00), more than 26,000 ballots
> were
> disqualified in the largely Republican area of Duval County-- four times
> the
> total in 1996. The Times notes that nearly 9,000 of these ballots were
> cast
> in predominately African-American communities around Jacksonville, which
> registered support for Al Gore over George Bush at a ten-to-one ratio.
> (The
> November 17 Daily News places the number of rejected African-American
> votes
> in Duval County at more than 12,000, nearly 60 percent of disqualified
> ballots).
> 
> --Derek Drake, an editor of the black weekly newspaper Central Florida
> Advocate, told the London Financial Times (11/16/00) that Haitian
> Americans
> and Hispanics, unlike whites, were often asked for two forms of
> identification. "There was either something of a conspiratorial nature
> going
> on or there was mass incompetence," Drake said. In a recent column for the
> Los Angeles Syndicate (11/12/00), the Reverend Jesse Jackson noted that
> ballot boxes in black communities went uncounted, voters were turned away
> after being told there were no ballots left, and Creole speakers were not
> allowed to assist Haitian immigrants voting for the first time.
> 
> Such exclusionary voting practices are hardly limited to Florida, or to
> racial minorities. According to a Federal Election Commission report cited
> by the Center for an Accessible Society, more than 20,000 U.S. polling
> places fail to meet the minimal requirements of accessibility, depriving
> people with disabilities of their fundamental right to vote. (Some of
> their
> stories are documented by the Center's magazine, Ragged Edge Online, at
> http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/1100/1100votestory.htm .)
> 
> In New York City, Columbia University journalism students reported that
> citywide voting irregularities included broken ballot booths, the denial
> of
> translation assistance and insufficient instructions given to first-time
> Russian voters hoping to support a write-in candidate, and the transposing
> of the Chinese characters for "Republican" and "Democrat" on wall posters
> at
> polling places and on columns in ballot machines (City Limits Weekly,
> 11/13/00).
> 
> As Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News noted (11/17/00), "Congress passed the
> Voting Rights Act specifically to dismantle the Jim Crow laws -- including
> poll taxes and literacy tests -- that kept blacks from voting in the South
> for most of the 20th Century." Major media should investigate the
> allegations of fraud, harassment, intimidation and voter profiling in
> Florida and throughout the country, to determine whether or not the 2000
> election included civil rights violations akin to latter-day Jim Crow
> voter
> discrimination.
> 
> ACTION: Contact major media and request they conduct in-depth
> investigations
> into allegations of violations to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
> 
> CONTACT:
> NBC Nightly News
> Phone: 212-664-4971 or 202-885-4259
> Fax: 202-362-2009
> mailto:Nightly@nbc.com
> 
> ABC World News Tonight
> Phone: 212-456-4040
> Fax: 212-456-2795
> mailto:netaudr@abc.com
> 
> CBS Evening News
> Phone: 212-975-3691, 202-457-4385
> Fax: 212-975-1893
> mailto:audsvcs@cbs.com
> 
> For more media contacts, see:
> http://www.fair.org/media-contact-list.html
> 
>                                ----------
> 
> Feel free to respond to FAIR ( fair@fair.org ). We can't reply to
> everything, but we will look at each message. We especially appreciate
> documented example of media bias or censorship. And please send copies of
> your email correspondence with media outlets, including any responses, to
> us
> at: fair@fair.org .
> 
> FAIR ON THE AIR: FAIR's founder Jeff Cohen is a regular panelist on the
> Fox
> News Channel's "Fox News Watch," which airs which airs Saturdays at 7 pm
> and
> Sundays at 11 am (Eastern Standard Time). Check your local listings.
> 
> FAIR produces CounterSpin, a weekly radio show heard on over 120 stations
> in
> the U.S. and Canada. To find the CounterSpin station nearest you, visit
> http://www.fair.org/counterspin/stations.html .
> 
> Please support FAIR by subscribing to our bimonthly magazine, Extra!
> For more information, go to:
> http://www.fair.org/extra/subscribe.html . Or call 1-800-847-3993.
> 
> FAIR's INTERNSHIP PROGRAM: FAIR accepts internship applications for its
> New
> York office on a rolling basis. For more information, please e-mail Peter
> Hart (phart@fair.org)
> 
> You can subscribe to FAIR-L at our web site: http://www.fair.org , or by
> sending a "subscribe FAIR-L enter your full name" command to
> LISTSERV@AMERICAN.EDU . Our subscriber list is kept confidential.
> 
> You may leave the list at any time-- just send a message with "SIGNOFF
> FAIR-L" in the body to: LISTSERV@AMERICAN.EDU .
> 
>                                   FAIR
>                              (212) 633-6700
>                           http://www.fair.org/
>                           E-mail: fair@fair.org
> 
> list administrators: FAIR-L-request@american.edu
> 

To post a message to the list, send email to:
    billionairesforbushorgore@topica.com

To unsubscribe, send a blank email to:
  billionairesforbushorgore-unsubscribe@topica.com

To read this list on the web, visit the following url:
    http://www.topica.com/lists/billionairesforbushorgore


If the volume of mail is too much for you, you can subscribe to a list which
will send only announcements about Billionaires for Bush or Gore related
events by sending a blank email to billionaires-announce-subscribe@topica.com 
________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________
T O P I C A  http://www.topica.com/t/17
Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics




-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~>
eGroups eLerts
It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free!
http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/2/_/794163/_/974741289/
---------------------------------------------------------------------_->

To Post a message, send it to:   announce-dan@eGroups.com
To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: announce-dan-unsubscribe@eGroups.com