Ms. Harris almost certainly knew what she was doing and should be investigated for possible federal charges of violating voter rights.
In her defense, Ms. Harris raises a number of red herrings about Democrats pushing through legislation that allowed her to do what she did and of Democrats in similar positions as hers also holding high positions in the Gore campaign. This neither addresses the wisdom of the legislation or the propriety of allowing any state chief elections officer to hold a position in a partisan political campaign. On the other hand, Ms. Harris' behavior before and immediately after the 2000 election speak volumes the folly of both.
Mr. G. W. Bush did not win the 2000 election honestly. The vote in Florida was deliberately rigged. The question becomes:
Who was involved?Many of us are familiar with the excellent work on the Florida election done by investigative reporter
Greg Palast. This is the important thing to note: The Florida election was not stolen so much by Ms. Harris' refusal to recount votes after the election or the judicial manipulation that culminated in the outrageous decision
Bush v.
Gore, but rather Ms. Harris' efforts at getting alleged felons off the voter rolls.
The truth is that voters were targeted for removal from Florida's voter roles. They were Afro-Americans voters who had names similar to convicted felons in other states. Their names were provided to Ms. Harris, then Florida's Secretary of State and also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida by ChoicePoint, a data processing firm with GOP connections. According to ChoicePoint's spokesmen, Ms. Harris was warned about the accuracy of the data she was presented. Nevertheless, Ms. Harris simply had the voters removed without critically reviewing the list. She knew exactly what she was doing. As Mr. Palast said, "Harris's crew lit this database fuse, then acted surprised when it blew up."
For the moment, let us put aside allegations of conspiracy between Ms. Harris, Jeb Bush and the G. W. Bush presidential campaign in the theft of the 2000 election. There can be no doubt that voters were removed from the rolls. There is no mere allegation of a crime here; a crime was actually committed.
Even if every name on the list Ms. Harris received from ChoicePoint was that of a felon, it was the name of a felon convicted in a state other that Florida. Under the law, Florida may ban a felon from voting only if that person was convicted of a felony under Florida law. Ms. Harris had no right to remove any voter from the roll merely because that voter had been convicted of a felony in Texas or Illinois. Yet that is exactly what she said she was doing.
Thus, even by Harris' own admission, she was violating the law. There was nothing casually indiscriminate about this. The fact that most of those on Ms. Harris' scrub list were guilty of no felonies is irrelevant. As long as they were not suspected of being felons convicted in Florida courts, Ms. Harris had no right to instruct county officials to remove their names. If she had no criminal intent and was acting on good faith, she is guilty of some incredible incompetence. If she didn't knowingly violate the law, it is because she didn't know the law that concerned what the Florida Secretary of State could or couldn't do in the first place. However it is sliced and diced, she is responsible for the fiasco that characterized the Florida election of 2000 and should pay a price for it.
Furthermore, there was something about this list that targeted Democratic voters. As one learns in PoliSci 101, Afro-Americans vote for Democrats 90% of the time. That's not a exaggeration; that's a verifiable statistic. We also know that Afro-Americans are convicted of crimes out of proportion to their percentage of the population. Consequently, if one has a list of names of felons and starts to associate those names and other characteristics, such as race and gender, with real voters in Florida, guess what? You're going to scrub a lot of Afro-American voters from the rolls.
It is difficult to conceive how such a scheme could have carried out innocently. Is Ms. Harris really that stupid? Or did she scrub the names of people from the list knowing that they represented a demographic that is associated with voting for Democrats and knowing that she had no legal cause to scrub them? Was there nobody in her office to point this out to her?
It is a federal crime to deny citizens their right to vote based on race. That is what Harris did. She did this deliberately and with malice aforethought. She had means, motive and opportunity. Federal prosecutors should make the decision, but I believe Palast presents enough in his writings, if his facts stand up under a legal investigation, to begin criminal proceedings against Katherine Harris.
At this point, we don't need to ask if there was a coordinated effort to steal the election. We could state a hypothesis based on what has been presented so far that Katherine Harris single-handedly stole the election from Al Gore and presented it to G. W. Bush. Even if Harris did this all by herself, it means that Bush did not win the election honestly.
That leaves the question of whether Katherine Harris committed her crimes alone or with the active assistance of others who were also aware that they were engaging in a plot to illegally deprive Afro-Americans of their right to vote.
It is very unlikely that Harris could have carried out this scheme without active assistance. Palast names some others who may have assisted her who were also in a position to know that as elections officers in Florida they had no right to scrub voter rolls of those convicted of felonies in other states.
However, while Palast makes suggestions, he doesn't go further that stating what he knows. Just because ChoicePoint's corporate officers contribute to GOP campaign coffers does not mean that they would do something as unprofessional as engage in a criminal conspiracy to rob citizens of the right to vote. However, this should be the subject of a wider investigation that is yet to take place.
The results of that investigation aside, should it ever take place, Mr. Palast's writings demonstrate to my satisfaction that G. W. Bush is in the White House as the result of deliberate election fraud perpetrated by his campaign co-chair in Florida. Her name is Katherine Harris and she does not deserve to be running freely anywhere, let alone the corridors of Congress.
Anybody who says Bush won the 2000 election honestly is either a liar or a fool. He won it fraudulently with Ms. Harris' active participation. Whether he or anybody else knew of her activity is a separate question, but an important one.