Vote Fraud in Tennessee: Worse than Florida?

By Catherine Danielson, AlterNet. Posted 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," or maybe a documentary about egregious civil rights violations in some Deep South backwater fifty years ago.

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 -- the people who weren't felons illegally scrubbed from voting rolls, the police roadblocks in Black neighborhoods, the Republican operatives illegally filling out absentee ballots.

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.

On the other hand, it's not as if it's been kept secret. Solid coverage has come from the Black press, newspapers like the Tennessee Tribune, Nashville Pride, and Urban Flavor. And 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." Indeed, Nashville was one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement. It's one thing to see films of Black students getting iced tea dumped over their heads by a jeering white mob as they try to get served at Woolworth's in the early 1960's. It's quite another to picture it in the year 2000.

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. So it's instructive to note that there were three areas of evidence that are more disturbing than any other.

The first was what NAACP officers generally refer to as "the Motor Voter disaster." This was the first election year in which Tennessee's Motor Voter bill took effect. Citizens could register to vote at Department of Motor Vehicle offices statewide. The problem is, an unknown number of those applications never went through. There have been nearly 2,000 complaints to date. Allegedly, this occurred because the department failed to deliver completed forms to county election commissions. It's worth noting that there is no standard of delivery, nor supervision of any kind, when the applications are delivered from the Department of Safety to the counties -- and that the DMV blames the voters.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »