PHILADELPHIA -- For all the titanic civil rights victories the NAACP has scored in its 95-year history, there is one struggle that has outlived segregated schools and black-only water fountains: getting black Americans to vote on Election Day at rates equal to whites.

In the last presidential election, about half of the eligible black electorate cast a vote, 7 percentage points less than among whites.

The registration and get-out-the-vote drives, always a focus when the NAACP meets at its annual convention, are of particular importance in a presidential election year. That's why the 8,000 or so delegates, members and visitors at the 2004 convention, at downtown Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Convention Center, found an exhibition concourse filled with booths offering people who weren't registered a chance to do so.

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Volunteers from Right To Vote, a group that wants to remove voting barriers for former felons, were there, as were representatives from the NAACP's re-enfranchisement committee. Those groups, along with the NAACP National Voter Fund, Project Vote Smart, Rays of Empowerment, the Sentencing Project, the League of Women Voters, the Center for Voting and Democracy, Black Youth Vote and others all projected a vital, common message:

Register, vote and be heard.

Blacks, for the most part, are registered Democrats, and the great majority of them plan to vote for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Many in the NAACP are still sore about the 2000 election, convinced that President Bush stole it from Vice President Al Gore by wrongly purging blacks from the Florida voter rolls, claiming they were felons even though some of them were not.

Nationally, 1.4 million black men -- about 13 percent -- can't vote because of prior felony convictions, a rate seven times the U.S. average.

In Florida, current and former felons can't vote. (In Pennsylvania, jailed felons can't vote, but those on probation or parole can, once they re-register.)

Because of what happened in Florida, the NAACP and other groups will dispatch thousands of volunteers to polling places across the country to advise voters of their rights and responsibilities, and to serve as arbiters between voters and local election officials, said Carlton Atkinson, a volunteer with People for the American Way.

"We're just trying to prevent voter disenfranchisement," he said. "Many people, we find, don't know their rights." For example, voters can request a sample practice ballot so they know how it works, are allowed to receive voting assistance once in the voting booth, and should be allowed to vote if they are in line once the polls officially close, Atkinson said.

Before blacks, or anyone else, can vote, they must first register. The NAACP's voter fund hopes to sign up 300,000 new voters across the country between now and November's general election. Pennsylvania will be one of the focal states, along with Florida, Ohio, New Jersey and six others.

James Daniels, an NAACP voter empowerment coordinator, told delegates yesterday that "registering people is great. But if you register them and you don't get them out to vote, what have you done? Get them out to the polls." Do that, he said, and "we can shake up America."

Yesterday, the third full day of the conference, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume avoided calling out Bush by name during his address to delegates, but he was critical of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war, the economy, public education funding and much in between.

"Our fight over the last 95 years has been a fight to ensure a system of government that affirmatively affords the basic guarantees of citizenship to everyone," Mfume said during his president's address. "[Yet] African Americans, Latinos and poor whites are still the last hired and the first fired. When the U.S. economy catches a cold, we get pneumonia.

"Our government must be less concerned about rebuilding Iraq's economy, and more concerned about rebuilding our own."

Bush, citing animosity from NAACP leaders, turned down an invitation to speak at this year's conference, though he spoke four years ago when he was campaigning for the presidency. Bush won 8 percent of the black vote in 2000.

"The current leadership has made their political decisions clear in very harsh ways. I describe my relationship with the current leadership as basically nonexistent because of their rhetoric," Bush said last week.

Bush, if he is defeated in November, or if he wins in November and continues to turn down invitations from the NAACP, would be the first president since Herbert Hoover not to address the NAACP convention at some point during his presidency.

To Louise Simpson, an NAACP board member, that's a metaphor for the political process. She told delegates that politicians won't pay attention to the black community unless they have a reason to do so. "When it becomes predictable that blacks will vote, politicians will come to us," she said. "We won't have to come to them."

Kerry is scheduled to speak at the NAACP convention on Thursday, the last full day of the convention. Also scheduled to speak is comedian Bill Cosby, who last week browbeat some members of the African-American community, igniting discussion and controversy in the process.

Ericka Dunlap, Miss America 2004, and Ruben Studdard, of reality television's American Idol fame, will also appear at the conference.