by Askia Muhammad
White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON�While the nation was gripped by proceedings at the U.S. Supreme Court and in Florida courts to determine which contested Florida votes would count in the 2000 presidential election, outraged leaders of the NAACP and other organizations vowed to go to court charging that thousands of Florida Black votes were literally stolen during the election.

The furor that started immediately after election day�when stories began to surface in unusually high numbers of police roadblocks of Blacks heading to the polls, lost ballot boxes, closed polling areas, etc.�bubbled over at Final Call press time as demonstrations and other acts of protest were being brought to bear upon the state. Even a boycott of the state was being planned.

"The (vote) difference between the candidates in this election counted in the hundreds, while the number of African American votes never even counted in Florida is in the thousands, an order of magnitude of 40 or 50 times," Thomas C. Adams, field director of the NAACP National Voter Project told The Final Call.

But Chicago civil rights attorney Lewis Meyers was more explicit. "In all my 29-year career as a civil rights attorney fighting cases in the South, this is the worst case of voter fraud I�ve seen in my life," attorney Meyers told The Final Call. "I can�t even compare it to some cases in Mississippi that I�ve fought."

The NAACP and attorney Meyers, who is working with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow/PUSH organization, plan legal action to expose the alleged fraud and bring change to the voting process in the country.

Attorney Joyce Brown of the Washington, D.C.-based Advancement Project, a group of civil rights attorneys, told The Final Call that beyond an NAACP-sponsored town hall meeting held last month in Miami-Dade County that exposed horror stories of voter irregularities and outright fraud, she and other NAACP lawyers have documented more activities since then reminiscent of Jim Crow-era tactics.

"Many complaints are of African Americans who registered to vote, went in with voter registration and ID and weren�t on the list, even those who voted before and had not moved," she said. "We�ve been told of polling places that were moved.

"Black folks turned out in droves and the NAACP and others put millions of dollars in the get-out-the vote campaign, but we will never know how successful those campaigns were," she said.

It is that enthusiasm with which Black voters turned out that Million Family March National Director Benjamin Muhammad sees as a sign of an enlightened and determined new Black voter mentality.

He told The Final Call that there is a new voter movement developing in the country being led by Blacks. The large turnout was not based on personalities, but on issues, he said.

"The Black vote has broken out of its traditional container, and what has been exposed is the depth of deep-seated white supremacy in the judiciary as well as voting process in America. In terms of next step mobilization, we must now demand greater participation, representation and involvement in the mechanics of the electoral process," he said, explaining that Blacks must organize to be included as vote counters on canvassing boards, election monitors, etc.

He also called upon Black law schools and Black legal professional associations to begin to develop a "legal offensive" strategy on those legal codes that deprive Blacks of political empowerment.

"We must develop a multiple front response and be much more pro-active and not just reactive when incidents of repression take place," he said. "We must rely on our ability to not only cash our votes, but to count our votes" Min. Benjamin concluded, saying the Florida undercount reminds him of the Federal Park Service�s refusal to give an accurate count of the 1995 Million Man March, but that undercount did not diminish the positive impact of the March. (www.millionfamilymarch.com)

NAACP and PUSH attorneys studying the undercount in Florida said they are carefully reviewing recent reports in several newspapers documenting voting irregularities. A Dec. 3 Washington Post report said an analysis of heavily Democratic and Black precincts in Florida showed lost votes due to outmoded machines and confusion at the polls.

In Black sections of Jacksonville, the paper said, one in three ballots did not count. In precincts in Miami-Dade County where the 30 percent of the voters are Black, about three percent of ballots did not register a vote for president compared to nearly 10 percent in Miami-Dade precincts where the Black vote was more than 70 percent, the paper said.

"The more Black and Democratic a precinct, the more likely it was to suffer high rates of invalidated votes," the paper noted.

During a Dec. 2 weekly meeting at Rainbow/PUSH headquarters, the Rev. Jesse Jackson announced that the U.S. Justice Department had sent a team of investigators into Florida to determine if a full-fledged investigation of vote fraud is warranted. NAACP president Kwesi Mfume, the Rev. Jackson and members of the Congressional Black Caucus had requested the investigation last month.

The Rev. Jackson also announced a joint rally with the AFL-CIO for Dec. 6 in Tallahassee and he called for an economic boycott of Florida, including not holding any conventions in the state. Rev. Jackson also blasted plans by the Republican-dominated Florida State legislature which announced at Final Call press time that it would select (electoral college) electors who would vote for Bush even though the process of contesting ballots is not finished.

"The State legislature of Florida is trying to hijack the selection process and take upon themselves the power that belongs to the people," he said. "This is a fix. This is a fraud."

Attorney Meyers told The Final Call that Florida Congresswoman Corrine Brown (D) gave Rev. Jackson information regarding "not just voter irregularities, but wholesale racism." He was referring to 27,000 votes not counted in Duval County. Half of those votes were from the Black community, he said.

"Officials didn�t tell anybody until the 72-hour certification process had run out," he said.

Attorney Meyers also said, and the Post article confirmed, that old voting machines were used primarily in Black areas. Attorney Meyers added that names of college students who had been registered by Rainbow/PUSH weren�t on the voting rolls.

Another injustice was that voters whose names weren�t on the rolls could be certified by a call to election headquarters, but there weren�t enough phones to handle the volume of calls there, he said.

Meanwhile, Vice President Al Gore, whose hopes are riding on the Black vote, suffered another setback Dec. 4 when Leon County Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls rejected his request to order a hand recount of the disputed votes in Miami-Dade or in Palm Beach counties. The judge ruled there is no "reasonable probability" that the Florida election results would be any different if any ballots were recounted.

The ruling could squash his hopes of overtaking Republican nominee George W. Bush�s razor-thin margin of less than 1,000 votes out of more than 6 million cast. Earlier in the day the U.S. Supreme Court set aside a Florida Supreme Court ruling that allowed Mr. Gore to close the gap from 930 to537 votes.

When filed, the NAACP law suit will contend: that polling sites were moved without timely notice or no notice; voters were disenfranchised by some polls closing early; some polling places had no bilingual ballots and Haitian voters were denied assistance from translators; there was a disproportionate purging of votes in predominately Black precincts in several counties, including Duval and in West Palm Beach; charges of voter intimidation in Broward and Hillsboro counties; and there was inadequate training of poll workers in Black precincts.

"I don�t know the extent to which this may have been a systematic effort on the part of anyone or people working in concert with each other, but the number of people turned away rises to a problem that was not just a random oversight of a poll worker. Too many people, disproportionately African American" were disenfranchised, charged attorney Brown, who�s working for the NAACP.

While Blacks voted for Mr. Gore in record numbers, some civil rights leaders proclaimed the Election Day irregularities and efforts to suppress the Black vote an outright "electoral coup."

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), for one, proclaimed that the staunch support from Black leaders and elected officials across the board for Mr. Gore�s efforts to get a full and accurate Florida vote count equal in importance to the Selma-to-Montgomery March. Shortly after the bloody conclusion of that march�during which Mr. Lewis, then chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), said he believed he was doomed to die�the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted.

"As I watched election night 2000 turn into this controversy over counts and recounts, my mind went back to that day on the (Edmund Pettus) Bridge," Mr. Lewis wrote in the Dec. 11 edition of Newsweek. "What�s happening in Florida and in Washington is more than a game for pundits. The whole mess reminds African Americans of an era when we had to pass literacy tests � pay poll taxes and cross every �t� and dot every �i� to get to be able to vote.

"For all the political maneuvering and legal wrangling, many people have missed an important point: the story of the 2000 election is about more than George W. Bush and Al Gore. It�s about the right to vote."

The Rev. Al Sharpton, head of the National Action Network, agreed. He led 200 chanting marchers around the Supreme Court building three times during oral arguments on the Bush appeal Dec. 1. "The most populated tally of Blacks in Florida is Miami-Dade, that�s the county they chose voluntarily to not recount," the Rev. Sharpton told The Final Call.

"All of the irregularities were mostly in areas where we are the most populated. So, though they may use Gore as a projection, the target by some would be to revoke the Voting Rights Act. We had to be here to let them know that history should not record that they did it and Black America was asleep."

Black supporters of the Bush candidacy accuse Mr. Gore�s Black supporters of trying to have their analysis of Black participation in Election 2000 "both ways." Mr. Lewis�s comments in many ways (are) an insult to the intelligence of Black Americans," an Oklahoma financial planner who asked that his name not be used told The Final Call. "On the one hand, we have been reading articles of how the Black vote was the highest it has ever been and how if Gore wins it is a result of this segment of the vote.

"Now in order to give some more air to a Gore contest, or just to stink up the air, we begin hearing of how Blacks were hindered from voting. If that was the case, I can only say they, whoever they are, did a terrible job of suppressing the vote," the Bush supporter said.

(James Muhammad and Eric Ture Muhammad contributed to this report)