Millions Blocked from Voting in U.S. Election

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Millions of U.S. citizens, including a disproportionate number of black voters, will be blocked from voting in the Nov. 2 presidential election because of legal barriers, faulty procedures or dirty tricks, according to civil rights and legal experts.

The largest category of those legally disenfranchised consists of almost 5 million former felons who have served prison sentences and been deprived of the right to vote under laws that have roots in the post-Civil War 19th century and were aimed at preventing black Americans from voting.

But millions of other votes in the 2000 presidential election were lost due to clerical and administrative errors while civil rights organizations have cataloged numerous tactics aimed at suppressing black voter turnout. Polls consistently find that black Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

"There are individuals and officials who are actively trying to stop people from voting who they think will vote against their party and that nearly always means stopping black people from voting Democratic," said Mary Frances Berry, head of the U.S. Commission on Human Rights.

Vicky Beasley, a field officer for People for the American Way, listed some of the ways voters have been "discouraged" from voting.

"In elections in Baltimore in 2002 and in Georgia last year, black voters were sent fliers saying anyone who hadn't paid utility bills or had outstanding parking tickets or were behind on their rent would be arrested at polling stations. It happens in every election cycle," she said.

In a mayoral election in Philadelphia last year, people pretending to be plainclothes police officers stood outside some polling stations asking people to identify themselves. There have also been reports of mysterious people videotaping people waiting in line to vote in black neighborhoods.

Minority voters may be deterred from voting simply by election officials demanding to see drivers' licenses before handing them a ballot, according to Spencer Overton, who teaches law at George Washington University. The federal government does not require people to produce a photo identification unless they are first-time voters who registered by mail.

"African Americans are four to five times less likely than whites to have a photo ID," Overton said at a recent briefing on minority disenfranchisement.

Courtenay Strickland of the Americans Civil Liberties Union testified to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last week that at a primary election in Florida last month, many people were wrongly turned away when they could not produce identification.

The commission, in a report earlier this year, said that in Florida, where President Bush (news - web sites) won a bitterly disputed election in 2000 by 537 votes, black voters had been 10 times more likely than non-black voters to have their ballots rejected and were often prevented from voting because their names were erroneously purged from registration lists.

Additionally, Florida is one of 14 states that prohibit ex-felons from voting. Seven percent of the electorate but 16 percent of black voters in that state are disenfranchised.

In other swing states, 4.6 percent of voters in Iowa, but 25 percent of blacks, were disenfranchised in 2000 as ex-felons. In Nevada, it was 4.8 percent of all voters but 17 percent of blacks; in New Mexico, 6.2 percent of all voters but 25 percent of blacks.

In total, 13 percent of all black men are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, according to the Commission on Civil Rights.

"This has a huge effect on elections but also on black communities which see their political clout diluted. No one has yet explained to me how letting ex-felons who have served their sentences into polling booths hurts anyone," said Jessie Allen of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Penda Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project, which seeks to ensure fair multiracial elections, recently reported that registrars across the country often claimed not to have received voter registration forms or rejected them for technical reasons that could have been corrected easily before voting day if the applicant had known there was a problem.

Beasley said that many voters who had registered recently in swing states were likely to find their names would not be on the rolls when they showed up on Election Day.

"There is very widespread delay in the swing states because there have been massive registration drives among minorities and those applications are not being processed quickly enough," she said.

While we look at how fair a reporter Alan Elsners is ....

"Terror Cells

Abuse of Iraqi Detainees Is an Echo of The Cruelties Inflicted on U.S. Inmates

By Alan Elsner

Americans from President Bush down have been shocked by reports of abuse of detainees in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and many would agree with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that such treatment is "un-American." But U.S. human rights activists say there is much evidence that similar abuse regularly occurs in our own prisons, without drawing nearly as much public outrage.

"Wanton violence and malicious assaults are far from unknown in U.S. prisons. Just look at local newspapers around the nation and you will often see reports of lawsuits, settlements and internal investigations documenting the unacceptable use of force by prison staff. The problem is, they don't get much national attention," said Jamie Fellner, U.S. program director for Human Rights Watch.

One problem, Fellner said, is that no central body collects data on how many inmates are assaulted by staff in U.S. prisons and jails. Additionally, prisons are closed institutions that operate without public oversight by the media or independent monitors. Still, she said, the amount of anecdotal evidence of abuse is enormous.

For example, in September 1996, guards at the Brazoria County jail in Texas staged a drug raid on inmates that was videotaped for training purposes. The tape showed inmates forced to strip and lie on the ground. A police dog attacked several prisoners; the tape clearly showed one being bitten on the leg. Guards prodded prisoners with stun guns and forced them to crawl along the ground. Then they dragged injured inmates face down back to their cells. The county and other defendants eventually settled a lawsuit for $2.2 million.

Michele Deitch, who teaches criminal justice at the University of Texas's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, said there are many similarities between the situation in U.S. prisons and the excesses that have been revealed in Iraq.

"I see parallels in the levels of abuse, the humiliation and degradation, the lack of oversight and accountability, the balance between human rights and security interests, overcrowding issues. I ask myself, how can we get people equally concerned about what goes on here," she said.

Most correctional officers are not abusive and just want to get through their shifts safely. But few people involved in corrections would deny that those who do abuse inmates constitute a serious problem.

Two of those allegedly involved in the abuse of Iraqi detainees, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr. and Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, worked as correctional officers. Graner, whose grinning face appears in some of the most lurid Iraqi photographs, was a guard at Greene County State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania. Two years after he arrived at Greene, the prison was at the center of an abuse scandal after guards routinely beat and humiliated prisoners. Prison officials, citing privacy concerns, have declined to say whether Graner was implicated in that case.

Frederick was an officer at Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn, Va., west of Richmond. In a handwritten statement published by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

on Thursday, Frederick compared his role at Abu Ghraib in Iraq with his job as a guard in Buckingham, where he said he had "very strict policies and procedures as to how to handle any given situation." In Iraq, he said, there were no such policies.

Senior officers in Iraq have said there was a serious breakdown of discipline that allowed abuse to flourish. This sometimes happens at home as well.

In Cook County Jail in Chicago, the elite Special Operations Response Team has been implicated in scores of incidents of violence and brutality in recent years. One of the most dramatic took place on Feb. 24, 1999, when members ordered 400 prisoners out of their cells three days after a stabbing. According to a 50-page report by the Sheriff's Internal Affairs Division, the guards, accompanied by four guard dogs without muzzles, forced the inmates to strip and face the wall. They were forced to keep their hands behind their heads and were struck with a baton if they looked away from the wall. Other prisoners were ordered to lie down and were kicked by guards. One said he was beaten, until he

urinated and went into convulsions, because he did not leave a cell fast enough.

According to the sheriff's report, at least 49 inmates were beaten. One, Leroy

Orange, told the Chicago Tribune, "Everybody who had a tattoo got their ass

whipped. It was scary. The dogs were barking and the guards were just beating

the [expletive] out of everybody. I've never seen anything like it."

Around the same time, the sheriff's department in Suffolk County, Mass., which includes Boston, was also in upheaval. A former jail officer, Bruce Baron, said he witnessed more than 20 beatings of inmates during his years as a guard, from 1995 to 1998.

In one incident at the Suffolk County jail, a pretrial detainee locked in a cell on suicide watch was stripped and left without a blanket. According to a Department of Justice press release, after several hours of the detainee's yelling for a blanket, officers decided to enter the cell and "slap him around" to get him to shut up, administering a vicious beating.

In another, Leonard Gibson, an 18-year-old detainee awaiting trial on car theft charges, was assigned to a cell in the medical unit because he suffered from Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary tics and uncontrollable outbursts. His outbursts annoyed officers so much they decided, in the words of the Justice Department, to "slap the Tourette's out of him." A witness testified: "He was screaming. He was pleading, 'Please don't hit me! Stop! I can't help it!' But all you could hear was the pounding. The pounding. He was really hurt."

How can such things happen? Prison experts say the chances of abuse rise when officers' rules of behavior are not clearly stated, rigorously enforced and backed up by proper training. The danger is greatly increased when captors and captives belong to groups with little in common, as is increasingly the case in our prison system in the United States as well as in Iraq.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a majority of the hundreds of new prisons this country built to accommodate a massive increase in the prison population were put in remote, rural regions. So a situation has developed, in California, Virginia and other states, where a majority of the correctional officers are white and a majority of the inmates are black. Without proper training, it is easy for guards to regard those under their control as alien, threatening and inferior.

In 1999, nearly 500 prisoners from Connecticut, many of them black, were sent to Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap, Va., to ease overcrowding in their home state. According to a report by the Connecticut Commission of Human Rights and Opportunities, they were immediately subjected to racial slurs and harassment. Guards routinely used words like "spic," "nigger," "porch monkey" and "boy" when addressing them. Black and Hispanic prisoners were allegedly subject to more cell searches and pat-downs than whites, and guards fired rubber bullets at them for walking too fast or not walking in a straight line. In one instance, black and Hispanic inmates were ordered to crawl toward a correctional officer in the recreation yard. One officer asked an inmate, "You ever been shot by a white man, you ever been stunned by a white man?" Another said, "Yo, black boy, you in the wrong place. This is white man's country."

In both this case and Iraq, officers appeared to regard inmates as less than human.

"Americans are right to be shocked by what happened in Iraq but they need to know that responsibility for abuse, at home as well as abroad, ultimately lies with the public and the leaders they elect," Fellner said.

Alan Elsner is author of the recently published "Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons.""

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