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as many as 40% of the black votes in Florida were cast by first-time voters, who tend to make more mistakes. Many black Americans were voting for the first time in part because of a project— “Operation Big Vote”—intended to register record numbers of minorities for the 2000 election. The project is managed nationally by the NAACP in cooperation with the Democratic Party. The local coordinator of Operation Big Vote in St. Louis is being investigated for submitting thousands of fraudulent registration cards. This is a serious matter. Bush carried Missouri by less than 100,000 votes. John Ashcroft lost his Senate election by less than 50,000. In the race for governor, the Democratic candidate won by 21,000 votes.

BLACKS IN GOVERNMENT (BIG), was conceived in 1975 by Black Federal employees of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Parklawn Building, Rockville, Maryland. The organization was incorporated as a nonprofit organization under the District of Columbia jurisdiction in 1976.

BIG promotes Voters’ Education and Registration. BIG is an active participant in "Operation Big Vote," a nationwide campaign to educate Blacks and other citizens of their rights and responsibilities in the national, state and local electoral process.

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What is OBV?

The cornerstone program of the National Coalition is Operation Big Vote, a nationwide nonpartisan, grassroots voter participation program. This program supports intensive voter education, registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities.

Even the shooed-aside Bill Clinton was allowed to pitch in on this, making trips to predominantly black districts and recording 70 different phone messages that were then piped into the homes of potential black voters.

All of this was supplemented by the NAACP’s get-out-the-vote effort, "Operation Big Vote," which was ostensibly nonpartisan but seen by many as a $9 million soft-money contribution to the Gore campaign. Paid staffers and volunteers scoured the country for black voters, targeting the unregistered in shopping malls, nightclubs, black churches, even southern prisons, where they harvested some 11,000. As the election approached, the NAACP’s army manned telephone banks and knocked on doors; messages urging blacks to get to the polls aired on BET and in Magic Johnson Theaters. All of this was pretty much business as usual-except on a new scale. What wasn’t so conventional were the NAACP’s widely aired "issue ads," which didn’t exactly say, but left little doubt about whom the organization thought blacks should vote for.