Subject: Winning the Election The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud
Winning the Election - The Republican Way - Weekly Dig
http://www.weeklydig.com/dig/content/2846.aspx
Winning the Election The Republican Way
Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida
by Liam Scheff
When future historians want to know what happened to America in 2000, theyīll
read Greg Palastīs The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The book follows the
paper trail of perjury, deception and incompetence left by the Bush family, and
the billionaires who fund them, as they trample through the world - from mining
disaster cover-ups to the California energy scandal to the pre-9/11
intelligence black-out that let a handful of Saudi terrorists slip past the NSA,
FBI
and CIA.
The book also uncovers inside documents on the IMF and World Bank, Pat
Robertson`s unholy money-schemes, and the co-opted US media that won`t report
what
the rest of the world gets on the front page.
The book opens with the crime that keeps on stealing - the 2000 presidential
election. George Bush lost the popular election by 500,000 votes, but won the
electoral vote by winning hotly contested Florida, the state that tipped the
scales, and the state where his brother Jeb is governor. His tiny 500-vote win
there was accompanied by a torrent of hanging chads and unhappy voters, who
claimed their votes were stolen. Last week Palast came to Boston to promote the
new edition of The Best Democracy... I asked him exactly what he uncovered.
What really happened in Florida?
Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris
ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Floridaīs voter rolls on grounds that
they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered
voters. If youīre not on the list, you donīt get to vote.
If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you`
re "scrubbed" from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old
Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; itīs an uncivilized
vestige of the Deep South.
My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at
minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime -
except
for being African American. We didnīt have to guess about that, because next to
each voterīs name was their race.
When I questioned Harrisī office about the high percentage of African
Americans on the scrub list, they responded, "Well, you know how many black
people
commit crimes."
But these people werenīt felons, so why were they scrubbed?
The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely vote
as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were paying
$5,700 to compile their felony "scrub" lists and replaced them with Database
Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job. [DBT is the
Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive
work for the FBI.]
There are a lot of Joe Smiths in the Florida phonebook. DBT was hired to
verify which Joe Smith was a felon and which was not. They were supposed to use
their extensive databases to check credit cards, bank information, addresses and
phone numbers, in addition to names, ages, and social security numbers. But
they didnīt. They didnīt use one of their 1,200 databases to verify personal
information, nor did they make a single phone call to verify the identity of
scrubbed names.
So where did DBT get their data?
From the Internet. They went to 11 other statesī Internet sites and took
names off dirt-cheap. They scrubbed Florida voters whose names were similar to
out-of-state felons. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off
Florida voter John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels, or even J.R.
Michaelson.
DBT matched for race and gender, but names only had to be similar to a certain
degree. Names could be reversed, and suffixes (Jr., Sr.) were ignored, but
aliases were included. So the felon John "Buddy" Michaels could knock non-felon
Michael Johns or Bud Johnson Jr. off the voter rolls. This happened again and
again.
Although DBT didnīt get names, birthdays or social security numbers right,
they were very careful to match for race. A black felon named Mr. Green would
only knock off a black Mr. Green, but not a single white Mr. Green. Thatīs how
DBT earned its $2.3 million.
Why didnīt DBT use their own databases?
They didnīt, because the state told them not to. Choicepoint vice-president
James Lee was grilled by a Congressional committee, headed by Cynthia McKinney,
and he admitted everything, but said DBT was following state directives.
Florida state officials told DBT to knock off voters by incorrectly matching
them
with felons.
Congresswoman McKinney led this commission to her own peril. Choicepoint is
in her Atlanta district. She was destroyed in the last election by fabricated
quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign.
Is this the only way votes were stolen?
No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were
counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. Katherine Harrisī office illegally
scrubbed people whoīd served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and
Jeb Bushīs office illegally barred these people from registering to vote at
all.
The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black rural
counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state, thousands of
votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots which are read by an
optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark were considered "spoiled" and
not counted. The buttons used to fill out the ballots were set up - with
approval from Bush and Harris - to make votes appear unclear to the machine. One
in eight ballots in Gadsden was voided by the state.
The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white.
There only one in 100 votes was "spoiled." What made the difference? In
Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked
incorrectly,
voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the black counties, the
votes were trucked off immediately. There were no machines on site. Voters weren
īt told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly werenīt permitted
to re-vote.
When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks
lost votes because they werenīt well educated, and made mistakes that whites
hadn`t. He didnīt even bother to ask how the machines were set up. This is
the kind of reporting we get in America. In Britain, this story ran 3 weeks
after the election, when Gore was still in race. It was in the papers and on TV.
In the US, it was seven months before the Washington Post ran it, and then it
was only a partial version. After the election, Gadsden County replaced its
voting commissioner. In 2002 they only lost one in 500 votes. So you can say
blacks in Gadsden got smarter in one way - they elected a black elections chief.
What happened to Choicepoint?
Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration
reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are being
rolled out across the country.
It wasnīt reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the
gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and
said, `You got us! Weīll put these people back as soon as we can.ī Weīre
still waiting.
