If Florida wants to lose its reputation as the place where democracy goes to die, it isn’t making many strides. The Washington Post had a disturbing feature piece today on African-American voter registration in Duval County (Jacksonville’s county). It isn’t a pretty picture.
As you’ve no doubt heard, many have raised questions as to whether Republican officials — in Jeb Bush’s administration and at the local level — have been intentionally making it harder for black voters to register and participate in Florida. Duval, in many ways, has earned the specific focus — four years ago, 42% of 27,000 ballots thrown out came from four heavily Democratic black precincts, a small fraction of which would have made Al Gore president.
Dem organizers are committed to correcting this problem. By the end of last week, 31,155 black voters had been added to the rolls. Whether they’ll be allowed to vote, however, is another question. Local officials, all of whom are Republican, have flagged about 1,500 registrations as incomplete, and as of last week had yet to process 11,500 more.
You’ll never guess who’s getting excluded.
A Washington Post analysis found nearly three times the number of flagged Democratic registrations as Republican. Broken down by race, no group had more flagged registrations than blacks.
This, in a heavily GOP county where records show that the number of blacks added to the rolls since 2000 approximately equals the number of non-Hispanic whites.
Some of the flagged registrations had clerical errors no more serious than putting their address on the wrong line of the form.
Officials in Duval County would have us believe that Dem registrations were three times more likely to get flagged than GOP registrations because of a remarkable coincidence. Considering all that’s happened in Florida, no reasonable person should believe them.