The Blogosphere has a bit of an obsession with Diebold voting machines. Many worry that the corporate control over such machines could lead to a hacker-led, corporate funded conspiracy to create massive election fraud. In contrast to this science fictionesque possibility of a conspiracy, there are real, massive, ongoing purges of the African-American vote around the country. Through "spoiled ballots" and felony disenfranchisement, Republicans (and even some Democrats) have successfully denied voting rights to as many as 2.4 million voting-age African-Americans:

In the entire nation 1.4 million black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of the nation's black male population...

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote--but it did not guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in seven cases, they aren't...

Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).

Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes--one in seven--were "invalidated," i.e., never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled.

In the 2000 election, 1.9 million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical reasons, like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on. The reasons for ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious shading to the ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of Harvard experts discovered that just as in Florida, the number of ballots spoiled was--county by county, precinct by precinct--in direct proportion to the local black voting population.

Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--both in the percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled--not counted--as a white voter," explains political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report. "National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters."

With laws such as the "Help America Vote Act," conservatives continue to score victories when it comes to disenfranchising African-Americans. With as many as 2.4 million African-Americans being denied the right to vote, one of the most important triumphs of the civil rights movement is in danger of being reversed. When Jim Crow collapsed in the sixties, its sympathizers went on to find another way.