The Truth About Florida

By Danny Schechter, AlterNet. Posted October 14, 2002.

In a typical understatement, The New York Times called the 2000 presidential vote in Florida the most "flawed and fouled up election in American history." Everyone knows who won, but few realize that a whopping 175,000 ballots went uncounted in an election whose outcome turned on 537 votes. Even fewer know about purges from the voter rolls or how the recount in key counties was undermined, if not deliberately delayed, and, in effect, sabotaged.

When it was over, the new administration asked Americans to forget Florida, to "move on" or "get over it." Much of the media did just that -- never fully investigating the charges of voting irregularities and claims of disenfranchisement by minorities. On Sept. ll, the "newspaper of record" quipped that the Florida debate shifted from "who won?" to "who cares?"

In truth, millions do care. During the year following the election, the federal government sued three Florida counties for voting rights violations. Other cases were heard in the Florida courts. At the end of August, a tiny item moved on the Associated Press wire: "The NAACP's lawsuit over Florida's disputed 2000 presidential election appears headed for a close as the state and two counties the only remaining defendants have agreed to a settlement, attorneys said ... The class-action lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other civil rights groups argued voters were disenfranchised during the Nov. 7, 2000 election; it included allegations that blacks were kept from voting in some counties." And the consequences of the 2000 elections continued to be apparent even this year, when many were shocked when new ballot machines misfired in Florida once again during the 2002 primary. Others commented that voter turn out had fallen to 30 percent nationwide. One TV journalist suggested that there might be a "voter boycott" underway.

The media had covered and miscovered the 2000 election as a horse race, as if only the main candidates had a stake in its outcome. Later, the networks were forced to apologize to Congress for their "serious mistakes" in their screwed up, deceptive and inept election-eve forecasting. When it was over, they dropped the story like a hot potato with no follow-up. Their long delayed "media review" of the election results was an incomprehensible mishmash that was interpreted in some, but not all newspapers as validating a Bush verdict. Many media critics challenged the media consortium for misrepresenting their findings and "burying the lead" which showed a narrow Gore victory.

But such developments and their significance were reported but not widely followed up. They were hardly bathed in national television attention. The media had moved on. Case closed.

But for some, big questions nagged at the national conscience. Questions that my colleague Faye Anderson, a one time Republican and now an African American political consultant, and I investigated for a new film called "Counting on Democracy" which takes a new look at the untold Florida story in the context of the fight for voting rights.

The film is narrated by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, who worked on earlier films with Martin Luther King on the struggle of the 1960s civil rights movement on the same issue. Our film is not about Gore or Bush, but the still outraged voters of Florida and all Americans who watched what happened there with disgust and embarrassment.

Representing All Sides

In making the film, we tried very hard to avoid strident voices and conspiracy theorists. We instead elaborated on the argument that a "tyranny of small decisions" was responsible for the electoral disaster. We sought out credible figures, including civil rights leaders and top journalists with Newsweek, and the New York Times. We even featured the president of the Associated Press.

We tried to interview leading Florida Republicans as well, but they all refused, perhaps believing (correctly it may turn out) that the film would be perceived as "biased" if they were not part of it. We did manage to get two top members of the GOP, including the man who ran the Bush campaign's strategy to stop the recount, and a GOP former Governor. We also showed an interview with Florida Elections Director Clayton Roberts and testimony by Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris. On the Democratic side, we spoke with members of Congress, the lawyer who argued Gore's case in the Supreme Court and the head of the Gore campaign, who admitted that they had made big mistakes which cost them the election. The main characters were voters, labor organizers and civil liberties union monitors. The film indicts Bush and Gore equally for compromising their commitment to small "d" democracy to get elected.

After a year-long battle of our own, we raised the money to make the film. We did so in the spirit of a call by Alex Jones of Harvard University's Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy who wrote in the New York Times: "The answer is tough investigations of what happened in the voting and the vote counting, uncompromised by the false notion that avoidance of controversy will be healing. The answer is also tough reporting on what happened in Florida that does not confuse fairness with the unsatisfactory practice of quoting one strident (voice) and then its opposite in every story."

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