How did the bushes block the black voters of Florida?

[TheDonkey]

Help!

I'm trying to refute this, "Bush won Florida fairly" attack. Does anyone have info about how exactly Bush stole the election almost 4 years ago (specifically the Black Caucus' reasoning).

It still burns me up :grr:!!!

[Stephanie]

1. Look here

www.gregpalast.com

[fleetus]

3. More specifically...

Greg Palast lays it all out in Chapter 1 of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Bring your notepad to the library or book store and formulate your argument. Or just buy the book. Either way you will have some great facts to build your case. No chads necessary.

[Minstrel Boy]

4. Palast has put chapter one up as a pdf.

The story of the purging of the rolls is all here:

http://www.gregpalast.com/bestdemocracymoneycanbuychapter1.pdf

[EstimatedProphet]

2. They had the votes tossed...

for a lot of black voters because their names were "similar" to convicted criminals.

[camero]

5. Here's one that explains alot of it.

http://www.weeklyplanet.com/2003-07-24/news_feature.html


When Kimberly entered her polling place in November of 2000, she expected to cast her vote for president. She had her voter ID card stating she was a registered Democrat and she had just voted in a primary several months before. But when she handed her card to the poll worker, she discovered her name was not on the rolls. Kimberly had been tossed from the voter's rolls because she was an ex-felon, one of an estimated 600,000 in Florida who are unable to vote.

" if people had a similar name to an ex-felon, they were stopped from voting," said Larry Hyman, an organizer of the Tampa Bay Restoration of Rights Workshop, to be held this Saturday at the Enoch Davis Center in St Petersburg. "There were many mixed signals in the 2000 election. That's why we've organized this workshop, to help everyone who is an ex-felon know how they can get their civil rights restored and be able to vote."

Five months before the now infamous presidential election of 2000, Florida's Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida's voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Harris had hired a private company called Choice Point to purge the central voter list.

[Eric J in MN]

6. 57,000 names were purged from the FL voter rolls

http://www.gregpalast.com/columns.cfm?subject_id=1&subject_name=Theft%20of%20Presidency


57,000 names were purged from the FL voter rolls.

These people were labelled "suspected felons" and given no chance to prove their innocence. They were just told on Election Day 2000 that they couldn't vote because they were suspected felons.

Their names were matched with a list of names of felons, but there was usually no Social Security Number. Also, the date of the convictions were in some cases in the future, or before the person was born.

Many of the purged voters were black, but one DU-er who is white said that he was purged.

As of December 2003, there are still 39,000 people in Florida waiting to have their names restored to the voter rolls.

[Rebellious Republican]

7. Here is a great site on Florida Politics its huge and has archives

most Florida News Paper articles. www.whoseflorida.com It also has a searchable feature for archives. I think you will find it a treasure trove of info.

On Edit, The serch feature can be a little frustrating if you are not used to it, you can also use the email feature, and ask for assistance from the site administrator.

[lovedems]

8. This is fun...

http://www.ericblumrich.com/gta.html

[Taeger]

9. The Best Democracy Money can Buy

Greg Palast liked the Bush chapters so much, they're on his website for free.

It wasn't just ONE scam. It was a LOT of simultaneous scams that each contributed to the theft.

1) The voter "scrub" roles. Brother Jeb dismissed the company doing a felon search for $5,500 a year and hired DBT Online for $4.5 million. The contract stipulated that they would "vette" the data and do verification phone calls. Meanwhile the Bush henchman "a little birdie" instructed DBT Online to NOT do those checks. They were instructed to make the list AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.

The lists were sent to county election officials who would "scrub" democratic voters. How did they know what party the voters were from ... it's in their election registration!!!

2) Manufacturing Jeb Bush votes from absentee ballots. Votes from Republicans were "re-created" in a fashion that made the "recount" look strictly objective. Basically, they'd take damaged ballots and "re-create" a ballot that the counting machine would read properly.

3) Black polling places were understaffed and underfunded. Some of them closed pre-maturely.

4) Accu-vote machines in democratic precints were set so they would ACCEPT mis-marked ballots. In Republican counties, the machines were set to reject those ballots allowing those voters an opportunity to fix their ballot.

This WAS NOT an accident. Poll workers report that machines were set up to demonstrate for Jeb Bush himself.

5) The infamous butterfly ballot that was stealthfully created by a recent convert from Republican to Democrat. The ballot was NEVER printed in the paper as required by law. Shortly after the election, the lady prompty switched back to the Republican party.

6) The chief election officer of Florida was also the Chairmen of the Committee to elect Bush in Florida: Katherine Harris.

7) Republicans misrepresented the vote counting efforts. They categorized them as "vote hunting". In fact the standard of the law was being followed. Indeed, Republicans had done much worse to "repair" absentee ballots in Republican counties.

8) Republicans brought in ringers to protest and shut down vote counting efforts. Republicans instructed their canvassers to

9) The Supreme Court invented a new definition for "equal protection" that interpreted any effort that could "unelect" George Bush as unfair to George Bush.

10) Finally, Diebold may have had the ULTIMATE say in the 2000 election. A voting machine in a Repulican county reported an 18,000 vote lead for Al Gore. This is the reason that voter news service called the election for Al Gore.

Later, the polling place retracted those numbers. The flash card used to store votes was found to be faulty. The "error" was corrected by Diebold personell and 18,000 votes dissapeared for Al Gore as well as the "faulty" flash card.


Furthermore, similar shenanigans were undertaken in Tennessee. Black voters were scrubbed from the roles and black precincts were "hobbled" by polls that openend late and were understaffed or had broken voting apparatus.

For details, buy Greg Palast's "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".

http://www.gregpalast.com


There is no doubt that Republicans have crossed the line into full fledged, full scale election fraud efforts. The Diebold machines have been reported as having MAJOR problems in Mississippi. Machines were being cycled with untested code and the machines largely refused to pass tests. http://www.blackboxvoting.com

[PragMantisT]

10. I read about it in "Stupid White Men"

Pretty disgraceful.
Any class action suits developing in this case?

[TheDonkey]

12. Welcome to DU PragMantisT!

:hi: :hi:

:toast:

[TheDonkey]

11. Thanks, the info was a great help!

:)

[icymist]

13. In the book 'Supreme Injustice' , Alan M. Dershowitz,2001,

on page 213, footnote 20, outlines an investigative report from The Guardian(London)explains how Florida Sec. of State Harris "hired a conservative group to purge all ex-felons from the voter rolls. The group eliminated black voters with a vengeance, including some blacks whose voting rights had been restored, others who had been convicted of mere misdemeanors and were eligible to vote, and still others who were convicted in other states and may also have been eligible to vote."
Then something else happened. Tactics used to suppress the votes of the black populace not seen since the time of the southern segregation days played into this election as Dershowitz describes "Other blacks who remained on the voter lists were kept from voting or having their votes counted with tactics that ranged from the use of old voting machines in minority areas (which produced high levels of uncounted votes in those areas) to the employment of police roadblocks and other forms of intimidation in black areas on Election Day."
What I, personally, find most troubling is the complacency of the American people towards an administration that used such tactics in the past. With the 2004 election just on the horizon to be conducted with newly conceived, untested, and (reportedly) error prone touch screen voting machines, the question that should be on the minds of the masses is 'do you trust these people?'