How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement.
Fifteen years ago, on December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore and put George W. Bush in the White House.
This article was first published at The Nation and is adapted from Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman.
'On November 7, 2000, Willie Steen, a Navy vet who had served in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm, went to cast his ballot for president at the St. Francis Episcopal Church in Tampa, Florida.
He brought his 10-year-old son, Willie Jr., to the polls for the first time. They waited a half hour to reach a poll worker. When Steen gave the poll worker his name, she searched a list of registered voters in the precinct and told him, “You can’t vote. You’re a convicted felon.”
“You must be mistaken,” a shocked Steen replied. “I’ve never been arrested in my life.” He worked at a hospital, a Tampa orthopedics center, that wouldn’t employ anyone with a felony conviction. . .
The 2000 election in Florida forever changed American politics and kicked off a new wave of GOP-led voter disenfranchisement efforts. “Other people began to see that in very competitive elections, you could make a difference by keeping certain voters from participating,” Hailes said. Bush’s election empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics, who hyped the threat of voter fraud in order to restrict access to the ballot, and remade a Supreme Court that would eventually gut the centerpiece of the VRA.'
http://billmoyers.com/2015/07/31/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-new-wave-voter-disenfranchisement/
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