Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood, a Republican appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, recently ruled that for registrations to be deemed complete, new voters must not only sign an oath attesting to their citizenship, but also check a box that states the same. Unlike many counties, which have chosen to ignore the directive, Duval County chose to enforce it.
Carlberg, who is acting election chief because his superior is ill, told the ministers that the office did the best it could to contact applicants who submitted incomplete forms, but the law says that "if they aren't complete now, they're not going into the system."
Carlberg's office, as well as Hood's, said the real blame belongs with the Democratic-leaning groups that targeted minority voters and then turned in sloppy and incomplete registrations. The disproportionate number of black Democratic registrations flagged, said Carlberg spokeswoman Erin Moody, is a function of "who those groups are targeting."
But during the 10-minute confrontation at Carlberg's office last week, the ministers argued that the election official had stalled in processing new registrations until it was too late to fix them by the Oct. 4 cutoff. "You kept them in a box in a cage," charged Edward Exson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The 2000 election sent a record number of black people to the polls in Florida. But these new, inexperienced voters were more likely than their white counterparts to live in areas with outdated, error-prone machinery that did not give voters a chance to correct problems.
In Duval County, the situation was compounded by the election office putting out instructions reminding people to "vote all pages," which led to thousands of invalidated "overvotes" because the list of presidential candidates was spread over two pages.
Since then, the outdated machinery has been replaced, but suspicions linger.
"The big question is: Will our vote count?" Deborah Hargrove, 53, told Susan Hunter, a canvasser for America Coming Together who knocked on her door last week. "Who's to know if they are just going to throw it away in the garbage can?"
But as Hunter handed out fliers to voters such as Hargrove detailing their rights, she also encountered a fierce determination. Many of the retirees in this neighborhood remember when blacks were attacked by white men armed with axes and bats after they tried in 1960 to sit at Jacksonville's whites-only lunch counters in what became known as Ax Handle Saturday.
"I'm gonna vote as long as I live," Sally Brown, 73, vowed when Hunter knocked on her door. "They're not going to make me stop."
One of the major changes enacted since 2000 is aimed at making voting easier by requiring local election officials to allow voters to cast ballots up to 15 days before the election. The law does not specify how many early voting sites there must be.
The ministers who went to Carlberg's office last week had plans to bus their congregations to those sites after Sunday services this month as a way to help those juggling jobs or without a car.
Orange County, which has approximately the same number of registered voters as Duval, has opted to open nine early voting locations. Duval will have one, even though Jacksonville is geographically the largest U.S. city, covering 840 square miles. It will be at Carlberg's office, miles from most of the majority black precincts. The same is true in Volusia County, where the GOP supervisor has angered black ministers there by refusing to open the site on Sundays.
Carlberg would not detail his reasoning with the ministers when they gathered at his office last week.
