Many voters in Florida not back on voter rolls

I'll be damned if Jeb is not trying to steal another one.


http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/8759882.htm

Posted on Wed, May. 26, 2004

Many voters not yet back on rolls

BY GARY FINEOUT

gfineout@herald.com


TALLAHASSEE - With less than six months to go before the presidential election, thousands of Florida voters who may have been improperly removed from the voter rolls in 2000 have yet to have their eligibility restored.

Records obtained by The Herald show that just 33 of 67 counties have responded to a request by state election officials to check whether or not nearly 20,000 voters should be reinstated as required under a legal settlement reached between the state, the NAACP and other groups nearly two years ago.

Some of the counties that have failed to respond to the state include many of Florida's largest, including Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach.

Those counties that have responded told the state that they have restored 679 voters to the rolls so far -- more than enough to have tipped the balance of the 2000 election had they voted for Al Gore. President Bush won Florida and the presidency by 537 votes.

-more

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/8759760.htm?ERIGHTS=5886009984038605737miami::davidsaenz@swbell.net&KRD_RM=7osvsopuwpwsquppqtnnnnnnnn|David|N


Posted on Wed, May. 26, 2004

ELECTIONS


Voting law sparks fraud fears

A new law eliminates the witness signature requirement for absentee ballots, creating concerns about voter fraud.

BY GARY FINEOUT

gfineout@herald.com


TALLAHASSEE - Despite concerns that it could open the door to voting fraud, a measure eliminating the witness-signature requirement on absentee ballots was signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Jeb Bush.

Ending the witness requirement has been a top priority for county election supervisors, who contended that many ballots had been thrown out because they lacked a witness signature. About 2,000 absentee ballots were discarded during the Florida 2004 presidential primary because they lacked a witness signature.

Bush said he signed the bill because he was less concerned about ballot fraud than the possibility that an absentee ballot would be thrown out because of a technical defect.

''Every vote should count,'' said Bush, echoing the refrain of Democratic voters during the 36-day stalemate over the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

-more

If you are going to forge a voter signature, you could easily forge a wittnesses' signature.

these numbers of "restored voters" under 700 in 33 counties combined?

Compare that to what investigative Greg Palast found:

THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME How the ?felon? voter-purge was itself felonious
Harper's Magazine
Friday, March 1, 2002

by Greg Palast

In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.

Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. In Harris?s elections office files, next to DBT?s sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: ?DON?T NEED.?

more: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=2


and


Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida
The Weekly Dig, Boston, MA
Tuesday, April 22, 2003

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, they’ll read Greg Palast’s 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.

--snip--
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 didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race.

When I questioned Harris’ office about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, “Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.”

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