The day after the election

[estranged4life]

and I will again for the LAST time, If Al "I created the Red Sox, The Cards, The DH, The Cards lack of pitching & clutch hitting & The Red Sox 2-0 lead in the World Series" Gore WOULD HAVE won his home state Tennessee, Al "My personality is as stiff as Pee-Wee Herman in a porn theater" SNORE could have conceded Flori-DUH to George "Gimme Gimme Sweet War" Shrub and won the election...

But that is 4 years ago and I PRAY to GOD that I wont have to hear this **** after a possible Franken-Kerry election...But for some reason I believe I will! I just know the Repubs will pull something is Shrub loses and vice-versa with the Demos if Franken-Kerry loses.

Man, I hate politics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Brian "Thank GOD for DVD's..." j.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

BULLSH*T

Gore requested a limited recount in limited counties and then did not ask for the same standard in each county. If he had asked for the whole state or even those counties under the same standard, then the Court could not have reached the Equal Protection argument it did. But, Gore was slimey about it and he thought he was being clever by ignoring the Repub. friendly panhandle and requesting recounts in D friendly south Florida.

Don't condescend to me. And don't tell me not to bother. I AM TRANSCRIBING THIS BY HAND. This is an important issue and I will not allow you to spew the Faux news party line about this so as to muddy the issue for other people who do not know this.
This is from David Margolick's Vanity Fair article published in the October 2004 issue. It is a good fifteen pages long and very much worth the read. Obviously, I am transcribing excerpts:

By contrast, (Warren) Christopher's Republican counterpart, James Baker, another ex-secretary of state, dug in like a pit bull. Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in "mischief." Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky ground. "We're getting killed on 'count all the votes,'" he told his team. "Who the hell could be against that?"
Baker saw his chance that Thursday November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a COUNTY BY COUNTY basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. THE REQUESTS HAD TO BE BASED ON PERCEIVED ERRORS, NOT JUST THE CANDIDATE'S WISH TO SEE THE RECOUNTS DONE. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. BUT HE CHOSE THEM BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE THE PROBLEMS WERE. Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrat's strategy gave Baker the sound bite he'd been seeking: Gore was just cherry -picking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought it's strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

and HELLO:

The consortium determined that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the ongoing recount to go through, George W. Bush would still likely have ended up in the White House. That's because the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court - as well as the more limited recount asked for by Democratic candidate Al Gore - only involved so-called undervotes, ballots that when counted mechanically registered no choice for president.

Gore lost Florida for himself - period. He was a fool and it showed. AND - we have paid the price.

No, he obeyed the law and got screwed over by the US Supreme Court. Please see post #17.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

No here is the law in Florida

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html



I am just joking (although that is the law now )

I read nothing in Fla. Stat. §102.166 (2000) that says Gore could not ask for manual recounts in all of Florida. But, I will keep looking.

DO not bother. I have already posted the article. And when it's all said and done, I'm right at the end of the day.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by estranged4life

But that is 4 years ago and I PRAY to GOD that I wont have to hear this **** after a possible Franken-Kerry election...But for some reason I believe I will! I just know the Repubs will pull something is Shrub loses and vice-versa with the Demos if Franken-Kerry loses.

You most certainly will hear it because in many states, they are using touch screen voting machines with no paper backup.

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

You most certainly will hear it because in many states, they are using touch screen voting machines with no paper backup.

Oklahoma uses a simple connect the arrow with a felt ink pen ballot...Never heard a single complaint on TV about our states simple system since those type of ballots replaced the ol' clicking lever/button ballots.

Man, I'm gonna laugh hearing the local 80-90 yrs. old citizens once again ripping on the 'tards of Flori-DUH and their ballot casting stories:

"I want my vote to count but a UFO beamed the ballot box outta the polling office and replaced it with votes for Bush...Dammit I hate living near the bermuda Triangle."

Brian "4 more years=No more years" j.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

and HELLO:

The consortium determined that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the ongoing recount to go through, George W. Bush would still likely have ended up in the White House. That's because the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court - as well as the more limited recount asked for by Democratic candidate Al Gore - only involved so-called undervotes, ballots that when counted mechanically registered no choice for president.

More from Margolick's Vanity Fair article:

A year after the election, a consortium of newspapers examined the ballots and reported that had the Supreme Court not intervened in the recount, Bush still would have won the election by the slimmest of margins, a headline that gave comfort to Democrats and Republicans alike. There was only one problem. The newspapers had looked at only the undervotes, which the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to be examined for the recount. But there were also more that 113,000 overvotes. Later examination by the same papers of the overvotes-which Judge Lewis says he would have been inclined to consider- determined that Gore would have edged out Bush had they been considered.

[gldstwmn]

So to the original question, I cannot answer it because that is not what took place in the 2000 election. There was a coup d'etat.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Gore requested a limited recount in limited counties and then did not ask for the same standard in each county. If he had asked for the whole state or even those counties under the same standard, then the Court could not have reached the Equal Protection argument it did.

He couldn't have asked them all to use the same standard when they were not voting on the same types of ballots. Some ballots were butterfly ballots and another part of the state used "Optiscan" ballots, ballots that were marked with a pencil, like the Iowa tests one would take in grade school. The Florida law called for "voter intent" to trump all.

Once again, from the Margolick VF article:

The day before Thanksgiving, the Bush campaign turned to the United States Supreme Court. Claiming that the situation in Florida had denigrated in a "circus," it asked the high court to stop everything, and cited two highly techinical federal issues for it to consider. The first, based on an obscure law from 1887, prohibited states from changing the rules after the date of that election. the second, a jurisdictional issue, was that by stepping into the case the Florida Supreme court has usurped the Florida legislature's exclusive powers to set the procedures for the selectinf electors, as provided for by Article II of the United States Constitution. The Bush lawyers claimed too, that the selctive recounts violated constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection-meaning the different criteria for recounting the ballots did not give equal rights to all voters.
Bush's petition for certiorari-that is for the court to take the case-went inititally to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose task it was to consider all emergency motions from Florida, Georgia and Alabama. For Kennedy, then 64, a man known to relish the pomp and circumstance of the Suprme Court and his own often crucial role in close cases, weighing such a momentous matter must have been glorious indeed. Batting aside a Thanksgiving Day pleas from the Gore campaign to pass on the case, Kennedy urged his colleagues to take it on, suggesting that the Court was absolutely the essential arbiter of such weighty matters. He conceded, though, that Bush face an uphill struggle on the law.
When Kennedy's memo circulated, one flabbergasted clerk had to track down Justice John Paul Stevens on the golf course in Florida and read it to him over the phone.
Under the Court's rules, Kennedy needed only three votes bseide his own for the Court to hear the matter. Quickly, the four other who make up the Court's conservative block signed on: Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor. In an unsigned order the day after thanksgiving, the Court agreed to consider the two more technical arguments, spurning the equal protection claim...

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

But, in any event, the Court determined it and Gore gave them the way to do so. So, by law, Gore lost Florida - period end of dicussion no matter what anyone says. Again, if we do not respect the Court and its controversial decisions, then Roe has no application

I cannot hammer this post enough. Once again from David Margolick's VF article:

The Court's proceedings are shrouded in secrecy, and the law clerks, who research precedents, review petitions, and draft opinions, are normally notoriously, maddeningly discreet. In addition, Rehnquist makes them all sign confidentiality agreements, then reiterates the point to them in person. A suprising number of clerks talked to Vanity Fair for this article, however. they all drew clear limits on what they would say. They would not discuss conversations with their respective justices, nor disclose any documents they might have retained..
"In this administration, the F.B.I. is likely to come after us," one explains. to the inevitable charges that they broke their vows of confidentiality, the clerks have a ready response: by taking on Bush v. Gore and deciding the case as it did, the Court broke it's promise to them. "We feel that something illegitimate was done with the Court's power, and such an extrordinary situation justifies breaking an obligation we'd otherwise honor," one clerk says.

Therein lies the problem, my friend. The United States Supreme Court had no business taking such a case.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

. Again, if we do not respect the Court and its controversial decisions, then Roe has no application

The only justice on this Supreme Court who was around for Roe was Rehnquist and he dissented. They're trying their damndest to overturn it. Justice Stevens is 85 years old and if anything happens to him while W is in office then it is done for. We're f*cked on a whole lot of other issues as well. It is imperative that he is not reelected.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

Don't condescend to me. And don't tell me not to bother. I AM TRANSCRIBING THIS BY HAND. This is an important issue and I will not allow you to spew the Faux news party line about this so as to muddy the issue for other people who do not know this.
This is from David Margolick's Vanity Fair article published in the October 2004 issue. It is a good fifteen pages long and very much worth the read. Obviously, I am transcribing excerpts:

By contrast, (Warren) Christopher's Republican counterpart, James Baker, another ex-secretary of state, dug in like a pit bull. Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in "mischief." Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky ground. "We're getting killed on 'count all the votes,'" he told his team. "Who the hell could be against that?"
Baker saw his chance that Thursday November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a COUNTY BY COUNTY basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. THE REQUESTS HAD TO BE BASED ON PERCEIVED ERRORS, NOT JUST THE CANDIDATE'S WISH TO SEE THE RECOUNTS DONE. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. BUT HE CHOSE THEM BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE THE PROBLEMS WERE. Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrat's strategy gave Baker the sound bite he'd been seeking: Gore was just cherry -picking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought it's strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.

I was not condescending to you - I was condescending to DeeGee

(I am just joking - BTW)

The article proves my point. This quote:

A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a COUNTY BY COUNTY basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. THE REQUESTS HAD TO BE BASED ON PERCEIVED ERRORS, NOT JUST THE CANDIDATE'S WISH TO SEE THE RECOUNTS DONE. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. BUT HE CHOSE THEM BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE THE PROBLEMS WERE.

shows that Gore could have requested hand recounts in other counties, but did not. Certainly there were problems in other counties

Moreover, the writer you site is incorrect. Again, the Florida law said:

B. Florida's Recount Provisions

Because the margin between the two leading candidates was
less than one-half of one percent of the total votes cast for that
office, Florida law required an automatic recount of the ballots.
Fla. Stat. § 102.141(4). No specific process is required under
Florida law for this recount. Most counties conducted this
recount by simply repeating whatever process, usually machine,
they had used to count the ballots initially. A few counties,
however, conducted hand recounts. At the end of this initial
automatic recount, the margin between the two leading
candidates for President of the United States was reduced from
the initially stated 1,784 votes to 300 votes.

Florida law provides that its counties may conduct a further
manual recount to address "an error in the vote tabulation which
could affect the outcome of the election." Fla. Stat.
§ 102.166(5). In any county, any candidate "may file a written
request with the county canvassing board for a manual recount."
Id. § 102.166(4)(a). The statute requires that the request
"contain a statement of the reason the manual recount is being
requested." Id. Any such request "must be filed with the
canvassing board prior to the time the canvassing board certifies
the results for the office being protested or within 72 hours after
midnight of the date the election was held, whichever occurs
later." Fla. Stat. § 102.166(4)(b).

The purpose of the manual recount is to determine
whether there is "an error in the vote tabulation which could
affect the outcome of the election." Fla. Stat. § 102.166(5). If
a county canvassing board decides to grant a request for a
manual recount, it need not initially order a county-wide recount.
Rather, an initial recount only "must include at least three
precincts and at least 1 percent of the total votes cast for such
candidate or issue * * * . The person who requested the recount
shall choose three precincts to be recounted, and, if other
precincts are recounted, the county canvassing board shall select
the additional precincts. Id. § 102.166(4)(d). The statute further
provides that:

If the manual recount indicates an error in the vote
tabulation which could affect the outcome of the
election, the county canvassing board shall:

(a) Correct the error and recount the remaining
precincts with the vote tabulation system;

(b) Request the Department of State to verify the
tabulation software; or

(c) Manually recount all ballots.

Fla. Stat. § 102.166(5) (emphasis added).

Manual recounts must be conducted in accordance with the
procedures set forth in Section 102.166(7). Those procedures
require that the county canvassing board appoint counting teams
of at least two electors who are members of different political
parties to manually recount the ballots. If a counting team is
unable to determine a voter's intent in casting a ballot, the ballot
must be "presented to the county canvassing board for it to
determine the voter's intent." Fla. Stat. § 102.166(7)(a)-(b).

http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/suprem...resp.gore.html

Nowhere in there do I see where Gore was legally prohibited from requesting every county in the state perfrom a manual recount. Please show me where it says that Instead, Gore chose the counties he knew were favorable to him.

In any event, Gore set the issue and then asked for no uniform standard to be applied. That is why he lost the case. I cannot see why you all cannot just admit that.

Again, I am not saying that Florida, the R's, or the Court behaved properly. I am just saying Gore tried to be clever and it bit him in the a$$. Now we are paying the price.

But, enough of this rehash - at least for me

My original intent was to ask:

If W wins the popular vote and Kerry wins the electoral vote, will the liberals be okay with that. I ask this because many people griped and alleged how unfair it was that the electoral college elects the President even when that goes against the voice of the people. So, will those same people be okay with that when it falls to their favor?

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

The only justice on this Supreme Court who was around for Roe was Rehnquist and he dissented. They're trying their damndest to overturn it. Justice Stevens is 85 years old and if anything happens to him while W is in office then it is done for. We're f*cked on a whole lot of other issues as well. It is imperative that he is not reelected.

Honey - you are preaching to the choir. I detest W. I think he destroys everything he touches. But, that was not my point.

My point was even though I think the Court should not have taken the Florida election case because, inter alia, Florida had a mechanism to resolve its own issues without Federal interference, when the Court determined it, it was the law and I respect that even though I disagreed and still disagree with it.

[DeeGeMe]

And how many of the Supreme Court justices had been appointed by W's Daddy? You don't think that they felt like they "owed" him something?????

Let's look at this another way--say that this election happened in another country--say. . . for the sake of argument. . . why not Iraq. . for instance. And that one of the candidate's running just happened to be the son of a former president of the country. And in the state (provence, whatever) that the brother of the candidate just happened to be Governor of, there had been a "purge" of registered voters-mostly of minorities who happened to vote heavily in favor of the opposing party. So the case goes to the state supreme court in the state that the brother runs and has a majority of judges who were handpicked by the same political party as the candidate. Then the case is sent to the Supreme Court, who just happens to have judges appointed by the candidate's father (and one of whom happens to be a hunting buddy of the candidate's running mate). Would any of you think that this was a legitimate election? Of course not, you'd see it for exactly what it was--a coup. So what happened in the US where we stood by and let this happen???? Could it be that we had "media' like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the right-wingers spreading lies and misinformation in order to swing public opinion towards W?

[DeeGeMe]

Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program - Salon.com's politics story of the year
www.Salon.com
Monday, December 4, 2000
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version


If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list that included purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.

Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters.

But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the list -- the state of Texas.

Florida officials moved to put those falsely accused by Texas back on voter rolls before the election. Nevertheless, the large number of errors uncovered in individual counties suggests that thousands of eligible voters may have been turned away at the polls.

Florida is the only state that pays a private company that promises to "cleanse" voter rolls.The state signed in 1998 a $4 million contract with DBT Online, since merged into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta. The creation of the scrub list, called the central voter file, was mandated by a 1998 state voter fraud law, which followed a tumultuous year that saw Miami's mayor removed after voter fraud in the election, with dead people discovered to have cast ballots. The voter fraud law required all 67 counties to purge voter registries of duplicate registrations, deceased voters and felons, many of whom, but not all, are barred from voting in Florida.

In the process, however, the list invariably targets a minority population in Florida, where 31 percent of all black men cannot vote because of a ban on felons. In compiling a list by looking at felons from other states, Florida could, in the process, single out citizens who committed felons in other states but, after serving their time or successfully petitioning the courts, had their voting rights returned to them. According to Florida law, felons can vote once their voting rights have been reinstated.

And if this unfairly singled out minorities, it unfairly handicapped Gore: In Florida, 93 percent of African-Americans voted for the vice president.

In the 10 counties contacted by Salon, use of the central voter file seemed to vary wildly. Some found the list too unreliable and didn't use it at all. But most counties appear to have used the file as a resource to purge names from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or no -- effort at all to alert the "purged" voters. Counties that did their best to vet the file discovered a high level of errors, with as many as 15 percent of names incorrectly identified as felons.

News coverage has focused on some maverick Florida counties that decided not to use the central voter file, essentially breaking the law and possibly letting some ineligible felons vote.

On Friday, the Miami Herald reported that after researching voter records in 12 Florida counties -- but primarily in Palm Beach and Duval counties, which didn't use the file -- it found that more than 445 felons had apparently cast ballots in the presidential election.

But Palm Beach and Duval weren't the only counties to dump the list after questioning its accuracy. Madison County's elections supervisor, Linda Howell, had a peculiarly personal reason for distrusting the central voter file: She had received a letter saying that since she had committed a felony, she would not be allowed to vote.

Howell, who said she has never committed a felony, said the letter she received in March shook her faith in the process. "It really is a mess," she said.

"I was very upset," Howell said. "I know I'm not a felon." Though the mistake did get corrected and law enforcement officials were quite apologetic, Howell decided not to use the state list anymore because its "information is so flawed." She's unsure of the number of warning letters that were sent out to county residents when she first received the list in 1999, but she recalls that there were many problems. "One day we would send a letter to have someone taken off the rolls, and the next day, we would send one to put them back on again," Howell said. "It makes you look like you must be a dummy."

Dixie and Washington counties also refused to use the scrub lists. Starlet Cannon, Dixie's deputy assistant supervisor of elections, said, "I'm scared to work with it because of lot of the information they have on there is not accurate."

Carol Griffin, supervisor of elections for Washington, said, "It hasn't been accurate in the past, so we had no reason to suspect it was accurate this year."

But if some counties refused to use the list altogether, others seemed to embrace it all too enthusiastically. Etta Rosado, spokeswoman for the Volusia County Department of Elections, said the county essentially accepted the file at face value, did nothing to confirm the accuracy of it and doesn't inform citizens ahead of time that they have been dropped from the voter rolls.

"When we get the con felon list, we automatically start going through our rolls on the computer. If there's a name that says John Smith was convicted of a felony, then we enter a notation on our computer that says convicted felon -- we mark an "f" for felon -- and the date that we received it," Rosado said. "They're still on our computer, but they're on purge status," meaning they have been marked ineligible to vote.

"I don't think that it's up to us to tell them they're a convicted felon," Rosado said. "If he's on our rolls, we make a notation on there. If they show up at a polling place, we'll say, 'Wait a minute, you're a convicted felon, you can't vote. Nine out of 10 times when we repeat that to the person, they say 'Thank you' and walk away.

They don't put up arguments." Rosado doesn't know how many people in Volusia were dropped from the list as a result of being identified as felons.

Hillsborough County's elections supervisor, Pam Iorio, tried to make sure that that the bugs in the system didn't keep anyone from voting. All 3,258 county residents who were identified as possible felons on the central voter file sent by the state in June were sent a certified letter informing them that their voting rights were in jeopardy. Of that number, 551 appealed their status, and 245 of those appeals were successful.

Some had been convicted of a misdemeanor and not a felony, others were felons who had had their rights restored and others were simply cases of mistaken identity.

An additional 279 were not close matches with names on the county's own voter rolls and were not notified. Of the 3,258 names on the original list, therefore, the county concluded that more than 15 percent were in error. If that ratio held statewide, no fewer than 7,000 voters were incorrectly targeted for removal from voting rosters.

Iorio says local officials did not get adequate preparation for purging felons from their rolls. "We're not used to dealing with issues of criminal justice or ascertaining who has a felony conviction," she said. Though the central voter file was supposed to facilitate the process, it was often more troublesome than the monthly circuit court lists that she had previously used to clear her rolls of duplicate registrations, the deceased and convicted felons. "The database from the state level is not always accurate," Iorio said. As a consequence, her county did its best to notify citizens who were on the list about their felony status. "We sent those individuals a certified letter, we put an ad in a local newspaper and we held a public hearing. For those who didn't respond to that, we sent out another letter by regular mail," Iorio said. "That process lasted several months."

"We did run some number stats and the number of blacks [on the list] was higher than expected for our population," says Chuck Smith, a statistician for the county. Iorio acknowledged that African-Americans made up 54 percent of the people on the original felons list, though they constitute only 11.6 percent of Hillsborough's voting population.

Smith added that the DBT computer program automatically transformed various forms of a single name. In one case, a voter named "Christine" was identified as a felon based on the conviction of a "Christopher" with the same last name. Smith says ChoicePoint would not respond to queries about its proprietary methods.

Nor would the company provide additional verification data to back its fingering certain individuals in the registry purge. One supposed felon on the ChoicePoint list is a local judge.

While there was much about the lists that bothered Iorio, she felt she didn't have a choice but to use them. And she's right. Section 98.0975 of the Florida Constitution states: "Upon receiving the list from the division, the supervisor must attempt to verify the information provided. If the supervisor does not determine that the information provided by the division is incorrect, the supervisor must remove from the registration books by the next subsequent election the name of any person who is deceased, convicted of a felony or adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting."

But the counties have interpreted that law in different ways. Leon County used the central voter file sent in January 2000 to clean up its voter rolls, but set aside the one it received in July. According to Thomas James, the information systems officer in the county election office, the list came too late for the information to be processed.

According to Leon election supervisor Ion Sancho, "there have been some problems" with the file. Using the information received in January, Sancho sent 200 letters to county voters, by regular mail, telling them they had been identified by the state as having committed a felony and would not be allowed to vote. They were given 30 days to respond if there was an error. "They had the burden of proof," he says.

He says 20 people proved that they did not belong on the list, and a handful of angry phone calls followed on Election Day. "Some people threatened to sue us," he said, "but we haven't had any lawyers calling yet."

In Orange County, officials also sent letters to those identified as felons by the state, but they appear to have taken little care in their handling of the list. "I have no idea," said June Condrun, Orange's deputy supervisor of elections, when asked how many letters were sent out to voters. After a bit more thought, Condrun responded that "several hundred" of the letters were sent, but said she doesn't know how many people complained. Those who did call, she said, were given the phone number of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement so that they could appeal directly to it.

Many Orange County voters never got the chance to appeal in any form. Condrun noted that about one-third of the letters, which the county sent out by regular mail, were returned to the office marked undeliverable. She attributed the high rate of incorrect addresses to the age of the information sent by DBT, some of which was close to 20 years old, she said.

Miami-Dade County officials may have had similar trouble. Milton Collins, assistant supervisor of elections, said he isn't comfortable estimating how many accused felons were identified by the central voter file in his county. He said he knows that about 6,000 were notified, by regular mail, about an early list in 1999. Exactly how many were purged from the list? "I honestly couldn't tell you," he said. According to Collins, the most recent list he received from the state was one sent in January 2000, and the county applied a "two-pass system": If the information on the state list seemed accurate enough when comparing names with those on county voter lists, people were classified as felons and were then sent warning letters. Those who seemed to have only a partial match with the state data were granted "temporary inactive status." Both groups of people were given 90 days to respond or have their names struck from the rolls.

But Collins said the county has no figures for how many voters were able to successfully appeal their designation as felons.

ChoicePoint spokesman Martin Fagan concedes his company's error in passing on the bogus list from Texas. ("I guess that's a little bit embarrassing in light of the election," he says.) He defends the company's overall performance, however, dismissing the errors in 8,000 names as "a minor glitch -- less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the electorate" (though the total equals 15 times Gov. George W. Bush's claimed lead over Gore).

But he added that ChoicePoint is responsible only for turning over its raw list, which is then up to Florida officials to test and correct.

Last year, DBT Online, with which ChoicePoint would soon merge, received the unprecedented contract from the state of Florida to "cleanse" registration lists of ineligible voters -- using information gathering and matching criteria it has refused to disclose, even to local election officials in Florida.

Atlanta's ChoicePoint, a highflying dot-com specializing in sales of personal information gleaned from its database of 4 billion public and not-so-public records, has come under fire for misuse of private data from government computers.

In January, the state of Pennsylvania terminated
a contract with ChoicePoint after discovering the firm had sold citizens' personal profiles to unauthorized individuals.

Fagan says many errors could have been eliminated by matching the Social Security numbers of ex-felons on DBT lists to the Social Security numbers on voter registries. However, Florida's counties have Social Security numbers on only a fraction of their voter records. So with those two problems -- Social Security numbers missing in both the DBT's records and the counties' records -- that fail-safe check simply did not exist.

In its defense, the company proudly points to an award it received from Voter Integrity Inc. on April 1 for "innovative excellence [in] cleansing" Florida voter rolls. The conservative, nonprofit advocacy organization has campaigned in parallel with the Republican Party against the 1993 motor voter law that resulted in a nationwide increase in voter registration of 7 million, much of it among minority voters. DBT Online partnered with Voter Integrity Inc. three days later, setting up a program to let small counties "scrub" their voting lists, too.

Florida is the only state in the nation to contract the first stage of removal of voting rights to a private company. And ChoicePoint has big plans. "Given the outcome of our work in Florida," says Fagan, "and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country."

Especially if that president is named "Bush." ChoicePoint's board and executive roster are packed with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken Langone, a company director who was chairman of the fund-raising committee for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's aborted run against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Langone is joined at ChoicePoint by another Giuliani associate, former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir.

And Republican power lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber lobbies for ChoicePoint in Washington. Just before his death in 1998, Rick Rozar, president of a Choicepoint company, CDB Infotek, donated $100,000 to the Republican Party.

(Alicia Montgomery, Daryl Lindsey and Anthony York contributed to this story.)

[email protected]