Super Bowl Tuesday

Jacksonville, Florida

These days, Jacksonville likes to pass itself off as a "Shining New City of the South," with gleaming downtown corporate towers and lush gated communities. The city fathers are hoping to promote this new image when they host the 2005 Super Bowl in February.

But there's tension in the air in Jacksonville--pregame jitters, if you will--about another, bigger game: the presidential election. In 2000 more than 27,000 votes were "spoiled" in Duval County because of a poorly designed ballot and directions suggesting that votes be punched on every page (those who did this had their votes tossed out as "over votes").

Most of those 27,000 votes came from voting districts 7, 8, 9 and 10, predominantly African-American neighborhoods. In 2000 Duval took the prize for the highest percentage of spoiled votes in the state-about one in five black votes wasn't counted. The Rev. R.L. Gundy, who serves Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church on the northside in Springfield (7th district), is still furious. "If those votes had been counted, we wouldn't have had to talk about hanging chads." And so it has been that he and other (mostly black) civic leaders have been planning for years and working for months to make sure that, as Elder Lee Harris of the Mt. Olive Primitive Baptist Church says, "every vote is counted, and that history is not repeated here in Jacksonville."

A group of civic leaders representing more than 100 churches, and organizations including the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), unions and nonprofits such as America Coming Together, gathered and formed the Jacksonville Leadership Coalition to protect the election. They collected new registrations and they organized voter education classes, working with the local colleges. They also started calling on the office of the superintendent of elections.

"We have to keep the spotlight on the supervisor's office so that no one is disenfranchised," said Gundy, who is executive director of the coalition.

This past spring the coalition started trying to work with the Republican assistant supervisor of elections, Dick Carlberg, to make sure that votes were counted and that more early polling sites were opened. Other, smaller counties had as many as eight. Duval, geographically one of the largest counties in the nation (the city of Jacksonville alone covers 840 square miles), had only one.

Carlberg put them off, and when presented with tens of thousands of new voter registrations, warned them that he wasn't sure he'd be able to process them all in time. As for additional sites, he said, "It's just not doable." Gundy said that when the coalition confronted Carlberg and asked him whether he would open more polls if ordered by the state, he said he wouldn't.

In mid-October, in a scene straight out of the 1960s civil rights movement, ministers and their parishioners picketed the elections board. "I come today to tell you we have our marching orders," the Rev. Levy Wilcox, head of the local chapter of the SCLC, said. "We are going to march around this building until such time as you change your mind and those who are your master."

Not long after the marches it was announced that Carlberg's boss, the supervisor of elections, was quitting because of ill health (he had suffered a heart attack earlier but remained on the job while letting Carlberg run the show) and that Bill Scheu, a local attorney well respected for his civic work, was taking over. After meeting with the coalition, Scheu ordered four more polls opened.

Suddenly, Jacksonville was on the political map. Big hitters queued up to make appearances. Last Friday John Edwards flew into town; the next day President Bush appeared. Mike Laughton, head of the Democrats' effort in Florida, told reporters that if Kerry wins 42 percent in Duval, he could win Florida. Mike Hightower, the Republican chairman of Duval County, countered that he wasn't worried: They'd registered 40,000 new voters.

"Jacksonville reminds me of Birmingham," the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, president of the SCLC, told me. Shuttlesworth, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr, has been coming down to work with the coalition every week, then returning to his parish in Cincinnati on the weekends. "When people have been down so long and so terribly, a call comes to coalesce, and to strive for complete human rights. It happened in Birmingham, and it's happening here."

Shuttlesworth says that he wishes the SCLC and other groups had come to Jacksonville after the last election-"if we had, we wouldn't be in Iraq now." He and others on the board had suggested it, he told me, but their requests were ignored. "But now we must move as never before, and we are." He added that he is surprised and impressed with the depth of the coalition. "If we can keep this up, it will be a movement. We shook up the nation and the world in Birmingham and Alabama, and we'll do that here."

Last Sunday Al Gore came to town. Although many of the ministers believe he should have challenged the Florida 2000 vote, taking his failure to do that as a personal affront, they welcomed him to their churches, where he joked that if anyone didn't think their vote counted, "tell them to call me." Congresswoman Corrine Brown spoke, but the star was Isaac Hayes, in black glasses and burnt-orange suit, who sang a hymn in at least one of the churches, a favorite tune his grandfather would hum before meeting with churchgoers at Mom's Restaurant, after they went and voted.

At Mt. Sinai, Gundy read the Psalm 140 (beginning: "Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man; preserve me from the violent man/Which imagine mischiefs in their heart; continually are they gathered together for war") and reminded his congregation: "The Super Bowl isn't in February, it's on November 2. And this Sunday's pregame-come on out and vote," as he shepherded them to vans waiting to take them to early voting polls.

On Monday, at the daily morning meeting with the superintendent of elections, while discussing the question of what the guidelines should be regarding voter challenges, Gundy warned: "Make no mistake-this election is the first Super Bowl. And if this election is 'spoiled,' there won't be any Super Bowl in February."

Suzanne Charlé

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