Early Afternoon, November 7, 2000: Florida NAACP Official Receives Reports that African-American Registered Voters Not on Voting Rolls

Florida NAACP official Anita Davis, already troubled by reports of Highway Patrol roadblocks interfering with black citizens’ attempts to vote in Leon County (see 11:30 a.m. November 7, 2000), receives a telephone call from her grandson Jamarr Lyles, a college student at Florida A&M in Tallahassee, the county seat. Lyles had joined in the NAACP’s effort to register new African-American voters, and like Davis is thrilled at the reports of huge turnouts among black Floridian voters, but tells his grandmother that he is receiving dozens of reports from his friends that they were not allowed to vote: that their names were not on the voting rolls, though they had registered to vote. [Tapper, 3/2001]