This is the fifth in a series examining the six constitutional amendments on Florida's Nov. 4 ballot.

The first constitutional amendment on the Nov. 4 ballot will technically not affect anyone.

If approved by voters, it will remove a provision of the Florida Constitution called the ''Alien Land Law'' that was never enacted or enforced.

''What this does is eliminate constitutional discrimination,'' said state Sen. Steve Geller, a Cooper City Democrat who worked to put the amendment on the ballot. Despite its high-minded goal, Geller predicts it won't be easy to win the 60 percent of the vote needed to remove it from the constitution.

''The problem is, a lot of people are going to be confused and not really know what it does,'' he said.

The amendment is titled ''Declaration of Rights'' and the summary says it will ``delete provisions authorizing the Legislature to regulate or prohibit the ownership, inheritance, disposition, and possession of real property by aliens ineligible for citizenship.''

Geller worries that people will mistakenly interpret the words ''aliens ineligible for citizenship'' to mean ''illegal immigrants'' and come to the wrong conclusion. ''It has nothing to do with illegal immigration,'' he said.

The Alien Land Law was chiseled into the state Constitution in 1926 to allow the Legislature to prevent people barred from citizenship -- at the time, Asian immigrants -- from owning land.

Florida took the idea from a 1913 California law intended to exclude Asians from land ownership amid a fear that laborers who had come to the United States during the westward expansion of the railroads would work for lower wages after those jobs disappeared. The concern: The workers would use their earnings to buy up vast tracts of California farmland.

The California law was declared unconstitutional in 1948 because it violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Yet the Florida version sat on the books through the Constitutional rewrite of 1967 and never surfaced as an issue for two Constitutional Revision Commissions.

''No one understood what it did or why it was needed,'' said Geller, who learned of it from reading a legislative magazine. A legal scholar had written an article that listed Florida among a handful of states that still had the provision, and Geller filed the legislation along with Rep. Ron Brise, a Miami Democrat, to ask voters to remove it.

''Unless you know the history, it's hard to figure this out,'' Geller said.

Florida is now the last state with the language on its books, and it took Geller -- with help from the Hispanic Caucus -- three attempts before the Florida Legislature agreed to put it on the ballot.

Even then, 31 House members voted against putting it on the ballot, reasoning that anyone ineligible for citizenship for criminal reasons should not have the right to own property in Florida. They argued that the law is needed to keep known terrorists or dangerous foreign interests from purchasing property.

But Geller dismisses that argument as outdated. U.S. Supreme Court rulings and subsequent laws already restrict property ownership by terrorists and drug traffickers, he said.

Amendment 1 has received little fanfare, mainly several speeches by Geller to community groups and political organizations.

Winnie Tang, president of the South Florida Chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans, said her organization is doing all it can to get out the word.

''Everyone who hears about it is shocked,'' she said. `` . . . It's been a slow road educating voters they should take it out.''

While there is no organized opposition, Tang worries that voter apathy and confusion will make it difficult to remove a racist vestige of the past.

''This part of the Asian American history is not what you learn from a textbook,'' she said. ``People who hear about it know it's not right, but in today's environment people associate this with illegal immigration or trafficking, and we have to persuade people to look back and not look at today's environment.

''This has nothing to do with anything illegal,'' Tang added.

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