Widespread systematic voter suppression in large Dem counties in Florida

[berniew1]

Broward County Voter Suppression(biggest dem county with Dem unfriendly Supervisor appointed just before the election)
www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp?sort=state&sel...

1. 58,000 ballots that were supposed to mailed out on Oct. 7 and 8 are late and appear to be missing.
2. 2505 absentee ballots were mailed on Saturday (October 30). Election is on Tuesday(Nov 2). Most had been requested long before the deadline for absentee ballot requests.
3. Absentee voting problems were a "disaster." Voters were unable to confirm the status of their request for an absentee ballot. In some cases, by the time they realized a ballot wasn't on its way,
it was too late. Hundreds of voters couldn't vote because their early orders for ballots disappeared
4. 94% of 78,861 absentee ballots were recorded in favor of Amendment 4, which passed by a thin margin in the county. The votes in question were counted late on election night after a glitch was discovered in the computers tallying absentees.
5. Nine of 14 early-voting polling sites had trouble linking laptops to the main computers that confirm voter eligibility.
6. After waiting in line for several hours, several voters were told late Sunday evening that they would have to come back another day to be able to cast their ballot. The machines had broken down.
7. At least 21 voting machines in Broward County malfunctioned and were replaced Tuesday. Most of them had been used by some voters before being taken out of service
8. An improperly calibrated machine at the polling place at 2501 Coral Springs Dr. in Coral Springs was used by an undetermined number of voters before it was replaced. If they did not
review their ballots, it is possible that some votes were recorded inaccurately. Possibly other malfunctioning machines were also miscalibrated.
9. Several touch-screen voting machines in Broward County malfunctioned this morning when their batteries went dead.
10. ES&S vote tabulating software used for absentee ballots "is not geared to count more than 32,000 votes in a precinct. So what happens when it gets to 32,000 is the software starts counting
backward. Amendment 4 passed in Broward County by more than 240,000 votes rather than the 166,000-vote margin reported Wednesday night. ES&S has known about the problem for two years and done nothing about it. The same software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade Counties
11. Florida voters can't use provisional ballots except in their home precincts, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously ruled Monday. 90 polling places were destroyed by the hurricanes.
Secretary of State Glenda Hood applauded the decision because it will help ensure an orderly election.
12. Broward County accepted on 2428 provisional ballots out of a "ton" of them. In many cases, clerks at the polling places gave provisional ballots to people who could have voted
regularly, deputy registrar Salas said. She thinks many clerks had trouble with last names of voters with compound names -- they simply couldn't find their names in the precinct registers,
even though they were there.
13. The vast majority of provisional ballots -- voters' last chance to have their voices heard -- were rejected. The majority of rejected ballots were cast by people who simply were not registered to vote. Other reasons: voting in the wrong precinct, signatures that didn't match those on file at the elections office and lapsed registrations because voters hadn't responded to address-
verification requests and hadn't voted in at least four years.
14. Broward and Miami-Dade counties both have about 1,058,000 registered voters, but Miami- Dade has 20 early-voting sites, compared with Broward's
15. Every Miami-Dade site is equipped with at least 20 voting machines, while some in Broward have fewer than 10. Some voters wait
4-1/2 hours in Broward to vote.
16. Republicans and their attorneys say they are arming themselves with lists of voters whose registrations appear flawed, preparing to challenge voters on election day. But they refuse to
give the list to officials who want to correct errors ahead of time.
17. University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e-voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election.
18. Documentation of Widespread Voting Irregularities in Broward and other counties www.flcv.com/fla04EAS.html


See Palm Beach County thread for similar voter suppression in Palm Beach and other counties

[SharonAnn]

1. Yep, Jeb's pretty good at this stuff, isn't he?

[cavanaghjam]

2. good work

thanx for the post.

[GreatAuntK]

3. Yes, thanks!

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Associated Press reported that Governor Bush was advised to throw out the flawed felon list BEFORE it went out to county officials, by Jeff Long, Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer expert. The Governor denied this.

It had emerged that the list contained the names of 22,000 black people – most of whom usually vote Democrat – and just 61 Hispanics, who are generally Republican in Florida. The list was sent out to the districts, but the publicity, and the election supervisors didn't know how to research it to make it right - caused it to be scrapped (I think).

[berniew1]

4. Documentation of strange vote results in Fla. counties with suppression

I've been doing an analysis of the Florida election data comparing 2004 results for President to the 2000 results and also to the increase in registration for Dems and Repubs between 2000 and
2004.
The concern about the small optical scan counties appears to be mostly minor as long as one assumes that the 2000 results were accurate. The small Northern Florida counties vote results
looked similar in 2000. Of course most of the results for 2000 were not subjected to a hand count verification and some questioned them at the time.
But there are some big unusual patterns in the big touchscreen counties and a few of the big optical scan counties. They had a big Repub vote swing that was not consistent with the 2000 vote and the Dem and Repub registration increases between 2000 and 2004.
The data and analysis can be found at: www.flcv.com/fla04EA.html
The touchscreen counties with unusual Republican vote increases include: Broward, Hillsboro, Indian River, Lake, Martin, Palm Beach, Pinellas, Sarasota. I don't know whether the provisional ballots were included in the data I used or the extent that they were, so this could be a smaller issue. Charlotte, Lee, Miami-Dade also had similar patterns but to a somewhat lesser degree.
Additionally among the Optical scan counties there were also similar patterns: Bay, Brevard, Manatee, Orange, Osceola, Polk. Citrus, Escambia, Hernando, Marion, Seminole, and St Lucie also had similar pattern but to lesser degree.
The only explanations for this pattern other than irregularities would be that the Repubs hugely beat the Dems in get out the vote or a lot more Dems voted for Bush in 2004 than in 2000. I haven’t confirmed that either of those happened. I heard the Dems thought they had a record get out the vote effort in Florida.

The data I used came from :
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/index.shtml
http://enight.dos.state.fl.us/
http://www.floridacountiesmap.com/counties_list.shtml

[azmesa207]

5. Voter Suppression

So what does Kerry do , oh yea he quit.

[Trahurn]

6. I read of clear voter suppression tactics

I read of clear voter suppression tactics being done in Florida very early in 2004. It included uniformed law enforcement trying to intimidate elderly black people and that was just one example. I kept waiting to read somewhere how outrageous this was and I expected to see a major investigation into conspiracy charges but it never happened. I am certain that if I read something others would have read the same thing. When you have such flagrant suppression and intimidation of voters all who would have clearly voted for Kerry right under our noses and nothing is done about it we then have to accept what we get. This is the nightmare we must now live with because we just sat by and watched it happen.

[digitaldog]

7. who is sitting by and watched it happen............

a lot of prople here are not stuck in the past tense........we're still in the happening phase.

[intheflow]

8. So happening!

I haven't stopped working on it, and it's getting more and more media attention. It's a slow happening, but it's happening for sure!

:)