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#31
10-25-2004, 08:00 AM
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Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida
The Weekly Dig, Boston, MA Tuesday, April 22, 2003 This was an interview with the author of The Best Democracy that Money Can Buy Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida by Liam Scheff What really happened in Florida? Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered voters. If you’re not on the list, you don’t 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; it’s 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 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.” But these people weren’t 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 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. Although DBT didn’t 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. That’s how DBT earned its $2.3 million. Why didn’t DBT use their own databases? They didn’t, 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 Harris’ office illegally scrubbed people who’d served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and Jeb Bush’s 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’t told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly weren’t permitted to re-vote. When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they weren’t well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadn‘t. He didn’t 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 wasn’t 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! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting Last edited by DeeGeMe; 10-25-2004 at 08:09 AM.. 
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#32
10-25-2004, 08:02 AM
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SILENCE OF THE MEDIA LAMBS:
The Election Story Never Told www.tompaine.com Thursday, May 24, 2001 Here's how the president of the United States was elected: In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren't felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the voters on this "scrub list" were, notably, African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats. Beginning in November, this extraordinary news ran, as it should, on Page 1 of the country's leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the United States, it ran on page zero -- that is, the story was not covered on the news pages. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also was given big television network coverage. But again, it was on the wrong continent: on BBC television, London. Was this some off-the-wall story that the Brits misreported? A lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise black voters; the commission held dramatic hearings on the evidence. While the story was absent from America's news pages (except, I grant, a story in the Orlando Sentinel and another on C-Span), columnists for the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post cited the story after seeing a U.S. version on the Internet magazine Salon.com. As the reporter on the story for Britain's Guardian newspaper (and its Sunday edition, the Observer) and for BBC television, I was interviewed on several American radio programs, generally "alternative" stations on the left side of the dial. How did a hundred thousand U.S. journalists fail to get the vote theft story and print it? Interviewers invariably asked the same two questions, "Why was this story uncovered by a British reporter?" And, "Why was it published in and broadcast from Europe?" I'd like to know the answer myself. That way I could understand why I had to move my family to Europe in order to print and broadcast this and other crucial stories about the American body politic in mainstream media. The bigger question is not about the putative brilliance of the British press. I'd rather ask how a hundred thousand U.S. journos failed to get the vote theft story and print it (and preferably before the election). Think about "investigative" reporting. The best investigative stories are expensive to produce, risky and upset the wisdom of the established order. Do profit-conscious enterprises, whether media companies or widget firms, seek extra costs, extra risk and the opportunity to be attacked? Not in any business text I've ever read. I can't help but note that the Guardian and Observer is the world's only leading newspaper owned by a not-for-profit corporation, as is BBC television. But if profit-lust is the ultimate problem blocking significant investigative reportage, the more immediate cause of comatose coverage of the election and other issues is what is laughably called America's "journalistic culture." If the Rupert Murdochs of the globe are shepherds of the new world order, they owe their success to breeding a flock of docile sheep, the editors and reporters snoozy and content with munching on, digesting, then reprinting a diet of press releases and canned stories provided by officials and corporation public relations operations. Take this story of the list of Florida's faux felons that cost Al Gore the election. Shortly after the UK and Salon stories hit the worldwide web, I was contacted by a CBS network news producer ready to run their own version of the story. The CBS hotshot was happy to pump me for information: names, phone numbers, all the items one needs for a quickie TV story. I also freely offered up to CBS this information: The office of the governor of Florida, brother of the Republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls -- real felons, but with the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, thousands of these legal voters, almost all Democrats, would not be allowed to vote. One problem: I had not quite completed my own investigation on this matter. Therefore CBS would have to do some actual work, reviewing documents and law, and obtaining statements. The next day I received a call from the producer, who said, "I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up." Well, how did the multibillion-dollar CBS network determine this? Why, "we called Jeb Bush's office." Oh. And that was it. I wasn't surprised by this type of "investigation." It is, in fact, standard operating procedure for the little lambs of American journalism. One good, slick explanation from a politician or corporate chieftain and it's case closed, investigation over. The story ran anyway: on BBC-TV. Let's understand the pressures on the CBS producer that led her to kill the story on the basis of a denial by the target of the allegations. (Though let's not confuse understanding with forgiveness.) First, the story is difficult to tell in the usual 90 seconds allotted for national reports. The BBC gave me a 14-minute slot to explain it. Second, the story required massive and quick review of documents, hundreds of phone calls and interviews, hardly a winner in the slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am school of U.S. journalism. The BBC gave me two weeks to develop the story. Third, the revelations in the story required a reporter to stand up and say the big name politicians, their lawyers and their PR people were freaking liars. It would be much easier, and a heck of a lot cheaper, to wait for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to do the work, then cover the Commission's canned report and press conference. Wait! You've watched "Murphy Brown," so you think reporters hanker every day to uncover the big scandal. Bull****. Remember, All the President's Men was so unusual they had to make a movie out of it. Fourth, investigative reports require taking a chance. Fraudsters and vote-riggers don't reveal all their evidence. And they lie. Make the allegation and you are open to attack, or unknown information that may prove you wrong. No one ever lost their job writing canned statements from a press conference. Fifth -- and this is no small matter -- no one ever got sued for not running an investigative story. Let me give you an example close to home. The companion report to my investigation of the theft of the election in Florida was a story about Bush family finances. I wrote in the Guardian and Observer of London about the gold-mining company for which the first President George Bush worked after he left the White House. Oh, you didn't know that George H. W. Bush worked for a gold-mining company after he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992? Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that this company has a long history of suing every paper that breathes a word it does not like -- in fact, it has now sued my papers. I've gotten awards and thousands of letters for these stories, but, honey, that don't pay the legal bills. Finally, there's another little matter working against U.S. reporters running after the hard stories, papers printing them or TV broadcasting the good stuff. I'll explain by way of my phone call with a great reporter, Mike Isikoff of Newsweek. Just before the elections, Isikoff handed me some exceptionally important information about President Clinton, material suggesting corruption in office -- the real stuff, not the interns-under-the-desk stuff. I said, "Mike, why the hell don't you run it yourself?" and he said, "Because no one gives a ****!" Isikoff was expressing his exasperation with the news chiefs who kill or bury these stories on page 200 on the belief that the public really doesn't want to hear all this bad and very un-sexy news. These lambchop editors believe the public just doesn't care. But they're wrong. When I ran my first story in the London Observer about the theft of the Florida vote, Americans by the thousands flooded our Internet site. They set a record for hits before the information-hungry hordes blew down our giant server computers. When BBC ran the story, viewership of the webcast of "Newsnight" grew by 10,000 percent as a result of Americans demanding to see what they were denied on their own tubes. Obviously, some Americans care. Last edited by DeeGeMe; 10-25-2004 at 08:11 AM..
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#33
10-25-2004, 08:05 AM
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[Proof of Coup 2000!] When five voted for millions --by Robyn E. Blumner "One of the darkest hours in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court was Dec. 12, 2000, at 10 p.m., when the five-member conservative majority handed the presidency to George W. Bush over his rival Al Gore... Reporter David Margolick headed a writing team that spoke with a number of former Supreme Court clerks who were there when the Bush case came before the court... Margolick reports that Justice Antonin Scalia was so anxious to shut the recount down that he pressured his colleagues to do so even before the Gore legal team had a chance to respond. That didn't happen, but consideration of the matter was moved up to the next morning. On the 9th, a stay was issued. According to Margolick, the court's more conservative members, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, quickly started 'sending around memos to their colleagues, each of them offering a different rationale for ruling in Bush's favor.' They were 'auditioning arguments,' Margolick wrote. During the first go-round, Margolick reports, an O'Connor clerk told fellow clerks that 'O'Connor was determined to overturn the Florida decision and was merely looking for grounds.' This was a court unhinged from the law, operating in a purely political guise, bereft of legitimacy."
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#35
10-25-2004, 08:28 AM
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 And - what does that have to do with Gore not requesting recounts in Florida counties not favorable to him and/or the counties not using the same standard, thus giving the Court the Equal Protection nail on which to hang its decision. My reading and the plain intent of Florida law says he could, despite what the article the lovely and talented (praise not condesention)Goldie posted And - maybe you are okay with one standard being applied by one ballot reader and a different standard being applied by another. Moreover, if the chad was merely slightly dimpled, who is to say that that denotes intent to vote for that person. The voter could have changed their mind and purposely not pushed the chad through. Yet, dimpled chads were counted. That is just wrong IMO. But, you all are okay with that. I suspect had the dimpled chads swung it to W, you all would not be okay with that   Again, I think the Court should not have taken the case. But, even if it had not taken the case, the Flordia Legislature could have negated the votes and would have voted to send R electoral college delegates, which clearly is what would have happened according to the papers at the time http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLI...election.wrap/Again, if you use that logic you mentioned about the appointees to the Court, then Roe was a coup as well So, do you apply that same illegitamacy argument to Roe. Do you think that people who are against Roe have the right to apply that same argument? I mean although I am all for Roe, the right to privacy is not ever once mentioned in the Const. The Court made it up.
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 save the cheerleader - save the world Last edited by strandinthewind; 10-25-2004 at 08:35 AM..
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#36
10-25-2004, 08:32 AM
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But, I am tired of talking about this because you all will NEVER admit that and instead point to the later recounting of the entire state, which was never at issueand why - well because Gore did not put it at issue
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save the cheerleader - save the world
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#37
10-25-2004, 08:38 AM
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I agree and have never disagreed with the recounting of all of the votes. AND - I still say, that if we looked at stated like NM that were also close, the results could have shifted as well. But, the D's and R's chose to concentrate only on Florida.
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save the cheerleader - save the world
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#38
10-25-2004, 08:51 AM
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Could've fooled me. 
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#40
10-25-2004, 08:56 AM
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Gosh, I love them there conservative values.
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#41
10-25-2004, 08:57 AM
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Again, I have never said Gore did not win in the state wide manual recount. I have always said Gore did not win Florida because he lost his lawsuit and in that lawsuit he set the rules for the recount. The fault is with him in that context. But, you refuse to admit that. You'd rather play wishful thinking and avoid the facts.
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save the cheerleader - save the world Last edited by strandinthewind; 10-25-2004 at 09:02 AM..
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#42
10-25-2004, 08:58 AM
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 I wouldn't call Jason a Repug, I'm leaning more toward apologist.
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#43
10-25-2004, 08:59 AM
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save the cheerleader - save the world
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#44
10-25-2004, 09:00 AM
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save the cheerleader - save the world
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#45
10-25-2004, 09:00 AM
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I love how often my name is invoked in my absence. It gratifies my ego. You guys are handling it pretty well, I say. My joining in would only cause Jason to spin in circles and pull his hair out. Well, I guess that is a good reason to jump into the fray...
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