By Dr. Marcia Magnus – President and Founder Caribbean American Politically Active Citizens
SOUTH FLORIDA – Review this overview of Voter Suppression in 2020 alone and let it fuel your resolve to vote and Make Your Plan To Vote!
- In Georgia: 70% of the 53,000 held up voter registration applications are from African Americans.
- In Texas: more than 2,000 potential voters had their registration applications rejected under questionable pretenses.
- In North Dakota: a 2020 voter identification law targeted rural Native Americans.
- In Ohio: the Supreme Court upheld a law which purges voters from the registration rolls if they do not vote in two federal election cycles.
- In Nevada: over 90,000 voters were purged from registration rolls by using an unreliable postcard removal scheme.
- In Wisconsin, 17,000 eligible voters from predominantly African-American counties were purged from registration rolls.
Closer home, in 2019, Floridians voted to restore voting rights to 1.4 million Floridians, including 1 in 5 Blacks.
However, in 2020, Republican legislators and Gov. DeSantis, knowing that Florida is a battleground state, imposed new financial restrictions on ex-felons. They now need to pay fees before they could vote.
Luckily, LeBron James and other professional athletes partnered with Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to pay ex-felons’ fees of $100,000.
But, in the August 2020 primary election, a poll worker in Naples told a Democratic voter that the primary election was for Republicans only.
In Broward county, when voters arrived at four library polling locations—Tamarac, Lauderhill Mall, and Miramar, and the African American Research Library—they discovered that the polling stations had been moved.
- Black Broward voters searched in vain for ballot drop boxes.
- Poll workers directed Black Broward voters to polling places that actually had been closed.
The Story of Otis Moss Sr.
Maybe you didn’t hear this story. In 1946 in Georgia, Otis Moss Sr., my minister’s grandfather walked 18 miles in one day, to three polling places, in his Sunday best (suit). He still did not get to vote. He died before the next election.
Oprah tells the Otis Moss Sr. 9-minute story here.
You won’t have to walk for 18 miles in one day in your Sunday best to cast your vote.
Request a mail-in ballot, use this Voters’ Guide (Broward County, Miami-Dade County, Palm Beach County) to help you, sign, date, and mail your ballot. All this won’t take you 18 minutes!
Vote because Otis Moss Sr. didn’t get to vote, after walking 18 miles!
According to my minister Rev. Otis Moss III, of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (Michelle’s and Barack’s church for 20 years):
“Why would people suppress your vote?
- Because they are afraid of you and your voting power!”
Vote as if your quality of life depended on it!
