Florida in 2000, Mexico in 2006
It has come to my attention that many Americans still haven't really looked at Election 2000 in Florida. While our mainstream media was hung up on chads and dimpled ballots the real story is what happened prior to the vote when Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris hired a company called ChoicePoint to "cleanse" the rolls of registered voters taking out many potential Democratic votes for the weakest of excuses. This is where the Election in Florida was stolen. The ironic part is that this is documented. The electronic voting machines allow no paper trail - which is why vote fraud relies on them so much now - but in the primitive early days of the Bush administration this required a paper trail to accomplish. Fortunately the BBC journalist Greg Palast was on the case and the story is now a part of history, should mainstream America ever decide to look. Because that didn't happen back in 2000, the same methods and the same company were recently used in Mexico to rig their elections. Sure, there were the statistical "miracles" as in Ohio in 2006, but ChoicePoint somehow wound up with the voting rolls of Mexico which our government claims was for national security reasons to fight terrorism. It is strongly suspected that we didn't take the voting records because we were afraid terrorists would fake their voter registrations. The results were similar: A razor-thin victory for the Bush candidate. Rather than exporting democracy to the world, we are now actively exporting the corruption that gave us Florida in 2000. Next time you ponder how things are going, remember that none of this had to happen, but don't dwell on it. Why worry? On to Election 2006.
posted by Bill McDonald @ 6:54 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
You live in Fantasy Land. Democrats charge that Florida Governor Jeb Bush suppressed the black vote (which went over 90% for Gore), by using police roadblocks on election day to inhibit voting by blacks, and by clearing the voting rolls of felons- in an alleged attempt to remove black voters from the voter lists months before the election. The roadblock charge, loudly broadcast by race warriors Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, among others, has found zero documentary evidence to support it, though it is still repeated as if it were true in black churches and on black-oriented radio stations.
As for felon votes, Florida law prohibited their voting. Had Jeb Bush not taken the action he did before the election, many felons would surely have been able to vote. It is certainly possible that some names which were purged from the voter rolls were of individuals mistakenly identified as felons. But in every election, there are errors in the voting rolls, and some people wind up not voting, or more often, have to prove their eligibility at the polls. If Jeb Bush had been aiming to inhibit a large black turnout, he surely failed. The percentage of all votes in Florida in 2000, which were cast by black voters, was much higher than in previous elections, and the black turnout percentage, fired up by vicious anti-Bush TV and radio advertising, may have exceeded the white turnout percentage. 2. Democrats charge that the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County was designed to confuse voters. This is nonsense. The ballot was designed by a Palm Beach County official who was a loyal Democratic Party member, aiming to make it easier for elderly voters to read the ballot. Sometimes there are unintended consequences when you try to do the right thing. Probably, very few elderly Jewish voters in the county meant to vote for Pat Buchanan for President. But some of them did, and other Palm Beach County voters apparently made a similar mistake.
But the facts of life are that there are no election do-overs for those who make errors when they vote. 3. Democrats charge that many votes for Gore were not counted. Many voters in Florida cast two votes for President (there were about two double votes for each “undervote” in the state). In every state, a vote for two candidates for President disqualifies your vote; and Florida is no exception. So too, with the “undervotes:” if you don’t punch through your punch card ballot completely, the machine won’t read your vote. The machine is politically neutral in kicking out unreadable ballots; the human counters, as was clear during the 37-day process, were not. It may well be that if no voters had made mistakes, either by voting for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, or casting two votes for President, Gore would have won in Florida. But the vote which counts is the vote that is not spoiled, not the might-have-been count, had everyone followed instructions.
Okay, first, I can't be living in a Fantasy Land because you wouldn't be in it. Second you write: "It is certainly possible that some names which were purged from the voter rolls were of individuals mistakenly identified as felons."
Nice of you to concede it was possible anyway. In fact that's what happened. That's how the crime was committed and the election stolen. Try the people who were listed as felons for crimes in years like 2007 that didn't happen yet. When asked Katherine Harris's office told the local election officials to keep the names off and just remove the year. This was rigged.
Look at the move to hire the new company and how much they were paid. It's there if you want to look. Just focus on this one aspect: The purging of the voting rolls. That's where this was rigged.
I'll copy from Greg Palast in the next comment below. Sorry about the Fantasy Land crack. You're welcome in my world any time.
This is from Greg Palast early in his investigation. The final number of wrongfully eliminated votes that mainly leaned Democrat was around 90,000. Way more than enough to swing Florida. The documents didn't copy, but they show what happened, not just the possibility of it happening:
In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.
Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. In Harris's elections office files, next to DBT's sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: "DON'T NEED."
One last comment from Palast. Remember this was several years back.:
DBT claims it warned officials "a significant number of people who were not a felon would be included on the list"; but the state, the company now says, "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified." Last May, Florida's legislature barred Harris from using outside firms to build the purge list and ordered her to seek guidance from county elections officials. In defiance, Harris has rebuffed the counties and hired another firm, just in time for Jeb Bush's reelection fight this fall.
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