CNN Suing Florida to Obtain 2004 Voter Purge List

I just saw it on Inside Politics. No link yet. I'll post as soon as available.

could CNN have been laying in wait?

I hope that makes them think twice about pulling the same stunts in 2004.

:yourock: CNN

I was just thinking today that I'm going to stop reading the CNN website because I was tired of "abuse of Iraqi prisoners" "having sex with Iraqi prisoners" and the fact that anytime they ever refer to "insurgents," they have to put the word "radical" in front of it.

Maybe I'll give them a second chance...

...that someone stood up and questioned these thugs.

Evil thrives when good people do nothing. There should be NATIONAL outrage that even one eligible voter is removed from the voting roles. gee-dubya *SUPPOSEDLY* won Florida by less than 600 votes. How many eligible, legal, democratic voters were removed from the roles??? Thousands, so we are told. Thousands.

Someone's not afraid of Georgie and Jebbie any more.....now if they would only do an on-air interview with Greg Palast....

Looks like Corporate America is ready for a change of Presidents...this one is bad for business....:)

I hope someone does it.

While Florida will ostensibly fight this measure, I'm sure they will be forced to fix the lists behind the scenes. After the lose or settle the case they will release the lists and say "see there was nothing wrong with them!"

n/t

I live in Canada and was raised in the UK (N Ireland)

If your 2000 elections had occurred in any other 'western' country like the UK, Australia, NZ, Europe, the media would have hounded the judiciary, the Government the Congress to the point of resignation, scandal and impeachment.
I watched in disbelief as they just rolled over.
The Media in other countries serves almost as another arm of the peoples' will.

Now CNN is howing some teeth

and other goodies were linked to installing W. The incentive still exists - except some businessmen are worried about W's ruining the economy. hence the slight emergence of the truth (leakers galore too as the rats abandon the ship).

What you said is absolutely correct. And it's sad that most US citizens were to stupid to see it coming. Call me physic, but I knew long before Bush became pResident that all hell would break loose when he was selected. I live in Houston, TX and this is Bush country. I've seen what they did to this city during the 80's when oil companies went bust (the best thing that came out of that was all the executives who committed suicide by jumping out of their high-rise offices downtown). I was here to see the Bushco destroy the Texas economy when he was governor. So I knew exactly what was going to happen when he got to the be White House. The Bushco has left a trail or dirt, scum and trash from here to the WH. After all that Bushco has done wrong for this country, the best thing they could do for us is to do what some executives did in the 80's. Start jumping and fall hard!

if the same thing happened in another country and the 'winner' was someone our government didn't want, the US would be howling foul play, election fraud, and pressing UN resolutions with lickety split timing.

I remember quite clearly that it brought down Richard Nixon.

I have watched the events of the last four years with sick disbelief, not only that this could happen in my country, but that so much of our now-consolidated "news" media engages in self-censorship, or is disinterested, or, particularly in the case of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, has acted as a propaganda arm of the current regime.

There are millions more like me here, and having access to supplemental news via the Internet is a sanity-saver. Whether we can manage to vote these bastards out of office will be an open question until after the election. I say we have to vote them out (and preferably by a landslide that can't be offset by any means) because I don't seriously believe impeachment is possible with the right-wing Republicans controlling Congress. They deserve impeachment, they deserve prosecution -- but I'll settle for electoral defeat.

Hekate

Of all people!

Also, she said that Florida had granted CNN access to view the lists, but CNN was not allowed to film, copy or take notes in any way while they looked at the lists.

These lists should be public record. These are supposedly lists of felons, and a person's criminal record is public record. In addition, these lists were used to purge voter files and voter files are public record.

The only argument that the State of Florida has to prevent these lists from becoming public is a self-incriminating one - that there are names of non-felons on the felon-purge list and the state can be sued for violating the rights of innocent people by releasing the flawed list.

Judy didn't look too pleased regarding it did she? Pretty low key about the whole deal. I'm still waiting for CNN to post the transcript or actually update their website with this story.

audience.

Remember his great expose that demonstrated how many purged voters were actually disenfranchised (eg purged for no reason and should have been able to vote.)

Glad CNN is taking aggressive action on this.

I'd like to see Florida try to stop CNN from photographing the list, and see how far they'll get with it...

It is too late to help the 2004 election unless something radical happens and I just can't see that with Jebbie in control here :/

They are already scrubbing for 2004 and making excuses in Miami-Dade regarding the black boxes, so I really see that nothing has changed nor will change until someone competent becomes governor of Florida and all the Cubanistas(?) get out of power or move out of the state and all the crooked Republicans no longer have a strangle-hold over the politics here.

We moved from Texas to help get Jebbie out of office along with some other reasons. Little did we know how corrupt this state was and we moved from Texas! Not much difference between the two :/

Up in the panhandle redneck riviera area. The county I live in, Escambia County, is so corrupt that 4 of the 5 county commissioners were arrested on corruption charges for a backroom sweetheart land deal that cost the county millions. It's absolutely ridiculous. I moved here from California and I'm going back to visit my dad in Berkeley this week. Ahhhh, Berkeley - great food, great bud, a liberal hotbed - damn, maybe I should move back! Naw, I gotta stay and vote here this year. We need every dem vote we can get. Jeb is a Bush - did you know every single one of his kids plus his wife got arrested for something? Talk about a crime family!!

I lived in Washington State for about ten years and boy do I miss it as well! I keep wanting out too, but if those who are like us and of the same mind leave then we leave the state to nothing but crooks! :cry:

I miss all the people from all over the world, all mixed together with shopping, eating, bus rides and the whole nine yards! I miss the progressive, spiritually minded people who didn't push religion down your throat and call you unpatriotic or evil because you didn't follow the crowd.

I miss all the funky kids with all the piercings, tattoos, hair colors and styles, and dress! I miss hearing all the languages while waiting for a bus, walking down a street, or eating at a restaurant.

I miss all the beautiful water and green stuff, flowers overflowing roofs and balconies and mountains that never end!

Okay, enough... slaps self out of the daydream!

I would not survive outside the beauty of Puget Sound. I know , I 've lived in Fla and the midwest States..All have their own beauty and culture, but I love the rain here, and the Cascades, Mt. Ranier, the boats, Narrows bridge, Pike Market..Seattle.

The beautiful drive we took last weekend..across the Sound and through Port Angeles..The Olympic Natl Forrest is incredible, snow capped peaks still, but the valleys are green and growing. Flowers are everywhere since its been a very warm, early spring. Lots of sunny days an the strawberries & cherries are early too. They're being harvested now.
We drove to the Ocean week before last..Westport.
25 Years ago I played on the sunny beach of the Atlantic. On Singer Island..Palm Beach, Fla.
I loved every day. So here I stand on the shore of the chilly NW Pacific, unbelievable beauty..a diagonal line across the Nation in 25 yrs. LOl
We walked the shoreline at Westport WA...and plan to visit Cannon Beach Oregon this July.
Now THAT's a stunning sight! In case any of you DUers want a heads up for a splendid summer scenic vacation...

The Rhodies are in bloom along with every tree and plant that grows here along the Sound..I'm getting my crabbing gear together..So much to do..I can see why you miss it..
Come for a vist..anyway.

I find Seattle the most boring place to live, with the least economic dynamic for an intellectually driven economy. Please. I will take anywhere east of the Mississippi over this small town with no transportation infrastructure, no housing for artists, no art or music for under $40 a pop. Liberal, dull, yawn.

Are we talking about the same Seattle?

Sorry Sam is a very mediocre museum for the size of the city. Bellevue has better art museum, or did that go out of bizness?

But I've seen lots and lots and....LOTS of great music for under $40...way under.

try the Oregon House for the ultimate stay! They have a website and you can call them to make reservations. Anyone who doesn't know...never travel to the Oregon coast w/o reservations or you will spend the night in your car!

When we lived there we traveled to Alaska (bought 5 acres overlooking 5 glaciers outside of Homer), traveled to Hawaii, various parts of Canada (Hihume Lake is a hoot!), Montana, Idaho, and other parts of Oregon including the awesome Rogue River Valley.

Additionally, I was never sick there even with allergies! Here, I'm sick all the time with sinus headaches/infections, upper respiratory, etc.

If it wasn't that my husband needed to be closer to the east coast for airplane flying time for his job, I would be out of here in a heartbeat!

Thanks and here's to the best summer's in the US...Washington state! I've found my source for the Rainier Cherries btw!

Jeb has been a wonderful recruiter for the Democrats down here. This is not a state anymore, its a fiefdom, run by Prince Jeb and his arrogant toadies. I never seen such arrogance as has been displayed by our current admin and State legislators. They know they own this state lock, stock and barrel, and can say or do whatever they want. I have given up any hope for Florida until Jebs term expires. Thank god for term limits!

Glad to know someone else in Pensacola has some sanity too. :)

St. Pete is were I call home these days. And Am I glad to, it is a very liberal community here. I have been to the redneck riveria often though. I was stationed on and off at NAS Pensacola as well. Used to hang out at the Florabama, that was before it became a major tourist attraction. Last time I was up there, I saw beemers parked out front, go figure!

:toast:

:shrug:

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/28/ip.00.html

Here is the relevant part:

WOODRUFF: In Florida, county election boards are reviewing a list of state felons to determine if they will be properly denied the right to vote in November. Well, today, CNN sued the state for a copy of the list claiming the information should be made public, four years after Florida was at the center of a disputed presidential election. CNN and the public were invited to view the documents and state election headquarters in Tallahassee, but were prevented from making copies or from even taking notes. Civil rights advocates charge that in 2000, thousands of eligible voters were prevented from casting ballots because they were improperly listed as felons.

I took a nap after posting. This criminal state government better cough up the names - I hope the suit can be expedited in the interest of public good. It really says something that they are keeping it a secret, doesn't it? BFEE bastards!

to register to vote weekly. Every week, stop by Department of Motor Vehicles or some other place that accepts voter registrations and fill out another application. Your electorial board won't be real pleased with the extra paperwork, and will put pressure somewhere to stop the felon purging process.

How many felons actually attempt to vote anyway? Isn't this one of those groups that don't bother voting because they feel disenfranchised practically from the moment of conception?

Maybe there shouldn't be voting booths in prisons, that's a different issue, but if a person has paid his debt to society, and his other civil rights are reinstated, shouldn't the right to vote also be reinstated?

It is only southern states that have adopted laws preventing felons from voting, and the rules vary by state. Here in North Carolina, a person convicted of a felony has his/her voting rights restored once all time is served, including probation, and all fines paid. The person must re-register in order to be able to vote. You can vote if you have "done your time and paid your fine," but many people do not know that. I have run into people in this category while registering voters, and it is difficult to convince them that they can legally vote.

I don't know that there is any agency here which purges the voter rolls. I've never heard of one. The voter roles don't actually get purged much here. Voters who have failed to vote for several years become tagged as "inactive" but stay on the rolls. Voters may also cast "provisional ballots" if their names do not appear on the lists when they show up at the polls. If it is later verified that they are registered and eligible to vote, then the vote counts.

Remember - Florida actually had criminal records checked from other states in an effort to purge the voter files. That is a very wide dragnet and leaves a lot of room for error. Plus, Florida required an official restoration of voting rights even from states where voting rights are not denied to felons. Felons who committed their crimes in states which do not take away the right to vote had no way of getting rights restored which were never taken away from them!!!

This is one of those database companies who will gladly sell every single publicly known detail and record about you to interested parties for a price. (You can now buy their software in Florida Sams clubs and in a few other states as well.) It's a major repug corporate donor. And the way they scrub the rolls is absolutely criminal. Greg Palast covers it well:

Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida

Edit

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 , who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job.

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 didn’t. They didn’t 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 states’ 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.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2

Fucking scumbag bastards. But we know that here at DU, don't we. If only we could get the pod people to open their eyes; they'd be shocked, shocked, I tell ya.

Thanks for posting this link. Palast says this process purposely scrubbed black voters from the list if it could find a name of a felon that was similar to the black person's name, and people without felony convictions were scrubbed. That's why Harris contracted out the work, no one had ever done this before. Palast doesn't have any white people coming forward saying they were scrubbed.

Sick, sick sick.

Deforest B. Soaries, Bush's new head of the new Federal Election Assistance Committe (or whatever the name of the thing is, I'm not sure that's right), is African American, although he is a Republican and really into faith based assistance programs.

Bush, George W.,
Walker, George B.
George, Walker B.

That would be odd, finding the candidate on the scrub list.

When renewing my auto registration, I checked what the law is in OK.

Serious. This is a little grassroots thing I'm promoting. Don't wait until election day, or even wait until it's too late to fix things, to find out your right to vote's been taken away. CHECK. Call your Secretary of State office or whoever you need to to find out if you can vote. Do it often enough to catch it soon enough if they purge you later. And tell all your friends in Florida. Don't wait.

I'm not sure what to think of it. Since when did cnn and the rest of the corporate media whores EVER give a shit about the People and democracy? All I remember is them telling us all "to get over it" sore losermans, after the coup. I'm puzzled.

what the motivation could be here? Why the sudden "interest".

...got the ball rolling somewhat, and now CNN has to back it up to some extent. :shrug:

Could it be that CNN actually smells a story here? God, please let that be so!!! Heaven knows that the American media missed this one en masse. Palast's story was run months later in the major newspapers. It got very little coverage here.

A private firm (Choicepoint) purging the public voter files should be a big story. When a news agency (aka the public) is not allowed access to public files provided by the private agency, that should be a big story.

It may have taken the American media four years to get it, but I think they are starting to get it. If nothing else, CNN's ratings have fallen and they may realize that they need to actually start getting news stories to fill in the gaps between their all-important "People in the News" segments.

I heard Greg speak here in L.A. a few weeks ago and he was fantastic!

I made the mainstream media look like fools; he's this guy from the other side of the pond finding out how blacks were systematically disenfranchised while you (CNN) have nothing to say.

Although they will never admit it Greg's reports seriously damaged their prestige and credibility.

If they don't investigate it someone else will.

during a "war," while US soldiers are getting shot at. Sucks to say it, but on Sundays, the only "news" available is Fox. And that ain't real news. Well at least they have some pictures. CNN should be ashamed. They used to be the only source for real news in off hours. Now they are a waste of time.

I don't trust CNN to investigate and report on this subject. They simply are not creditable one way or the other.

They'll do what NYT did to the recount. Nothing to see here..:eyes:

Took a little digging to find it...
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/28/fla.vote/index.html

they're starting to wake from the long slumber they were in post 9/11. Now if CNN would just get rid of Candy Crowley or at least get her off of reporting on Kerry's campaign.

This is music to my ears. :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

The media is finally doing what they are suppose to do.

Investigate
Check out all leads
Check for facts
Report the story

:kick:

wants to change it's image.

They sponsored the exit polling jointly and were 'talked into' abandoning it by you know who. This facilitated the theft.

The corruptions are coming so fast and furious that little is said about the theft of exit polling.

There is usually relativity between the final count and the polls for them to call the election. Well, it is all corrupt now.

Welcome to the Banana Republic States of America.

I am serious. It looks as though the American media may just shy away from doing the exit polls on the theory that the data was bad in 2000. The data wasn't bad, and we know it. The exit polls were right.

So we need to get trained volunteers doing exit polls. And we need to fight for the votes to be counted correctly in case another Florida happens. The Democratic party needs to prepare for the possibility of another Florida situation and get ready to fight like hell. The party also needs to take advantage of the fact that there will be many, many people willing to volunteer this year and exit polling is an excellent use of volunteer manpower.

the civil rights panel headed by Mary Frances Berry , shortly after the coup. No one paid attention to that panel either. Plenty of research could have been done with the information that was brought out there. MFB said that Katherine Harris' testimoney was "laughable"

http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/stories/01/13/fla.hearings/

Later, after he was installed Bush saw to it that his guys were placed on that panel and that it was controlled under Bush's American bully reich.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnists/wickham/2001-12-11-wickham.htm