Vote Fraud in Tennesssee: Worse than Florida?
Catherine Danielson, AlterNet
March 13, 2001
Black voters were told to get behind the white voters. They were
told to remove NAACP stickers from their cars, or leave the polling
place without voting. "You know what it is to stand at the back
of the bus," said one election volunteer.
Some Blacks were intimidated by police standing around polling places.
Others stood in lines over a mile long to use ancient punch-card
machines on the verge of falling apart. Sometimes, they’d stand
for five or six hours.
Once, they complained. Minutes later, two police cars came screeching
up.
It all sounds like a promo for "Mississippi Burning", but it happened
in November 2000. Well, then, it's got to be about Florida. The
massive voter disenfranchisement in Florida has gotten some coverage,
especially overseas.
But no. All these things—and much, much more—happened in Tennessee.
Don't be surprised if you haven't heard anything about any of it.
Every newspaper, every radio station, every television news program
has been silent. Even Nashville's Tennessean, where both Al and
Tipper Gore once worked, has zero to say on the subject, yet there
is massive evidence that thousands—perhaps even tens of thousands—of
people were disenfranchised, the vast majority of whom were Black.
How to explain the mainstream media’s silence?
"People want to sweep this under the rug," says Rev. Neal Darby,
head of the Greater Nashville Black Chamber of Commerce. "They don’t
want to think it could have happened here."
It isn’t just the outrageous racial incidents, such as the way that
Black Nashville college students weren't permitted to vote even
though they were registered, or the way that Tennessee State University,
a historically Black college, was the only university in Tennessee
that didn't get a satellite voting place, or election office workers
harrassing Black citizens who requested voter registration forms,
or election commission officers refusing to give registration forms to NAACP representatives
and sometimes (as in Chattanooga) actually taking them back.
It's the inexplicable things, such as the way that polling places
all over West Tennessee opened one to two hours late, or disappeared
and reappeared somewhere else without telling anybody—but, seemingly,
only in areas that were Black and/or poor. Or the missing pages
from election rosters all over Nashville. Or the county where ballot
boxes were opened and ballots handled. So many vote irregularities
were reported that the mind starts to numb after awhile, to get
buried under the sheer avalanche and grasp for some sort of meaning
and order.
There were four areas of evidence that are more disturbing than
any other.