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

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

''What this does is eliminate constitutional discrimination,'' said Sen. Steve Geller, a Cooper City Democrat who worked to get 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 title of the amendment is ''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 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 Asian laborers who had come to the United States during the westward expansion of the railroads would be willing to accept lower wages after those jobs disappeared. The concern: The workers would use their earnings to buy up vast tracts of California farm land.

The California law was declared unconstitutional in 1948 because it violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. In spite of that, it sat on Florida's books through the constitutional rewrite of 1967 and never surfaced as an issue by 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 first with former Rep. Philip Brutus and then 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 out of their belief 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 out-dated. U.S. Supreme Court rulings and subsequent laws already restrict property ownership by terrorists and drug traffickers, he said.

Since its placement on the ballot, Amendment 1 has received little fanfare. Geller has made several speeches to community groups and political organizations, but there's no organized group promoting it.

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 it's there,'' she said. ``But no one knows it's there, and it's been a slow road educating voters they should take it out.''

While there is no organized opposition against the amendment, 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,'' she added. ``It has to do with removing an unfortunate part of our history.''

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