BRC on US Election

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[bounced from an unsubbed version of Jose Perez]

American Politics Journal

December 3, 2000

Ignore the Disenfranchised Behind the Curtain!

Supreme Court Sideshow Overshadows Real Election Issues

By Tamara Baker

Saturday, Nov. 2, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) --
The media, particularly the cable media, are having a field
day over the Bush camp's calling the Supreme Court in to
rule for their side. The grand ratings bonanza of impeachment,
complete with many of the same players presiding, has put
smiles of the faces of the networks execs. Various pundits
of various levels of expertise and partisanship are punditing
24/7, with most of them guessing at some sort of divided court
ruling, 5-4 for either Gore or Bush.

But wait a minute!

Buried deep towards the end of a typical
MSNBC.com bloviation on what the Supremes might do
(http://www.msnbc.com/news/497518.asp), we find this:

- - -

But many legal scholars said a Bush win could make little
difference. Florida's election contest laws are so flexible,
they told NBC's Pete Williams, that they would allow Gore's
lawyers to continue with their lawsuits.

"It's just too late for the United States Supreme Court to
do anything meaningful," Terence Anderson of the University
of Miami Law School told Williams. "If it rules for the
Democrats, it has no effect. If it rules for the Republicans,
it has no effect."

- - -

You know, dear readers, I have been wondering: the
Republican Party is bound and determined to win the White
House by any means necessary, up to and including illegally
'correcting' tens of thousands of GOP absentee ballots in
various Florida counties. They have been pressing court
cases in Florida, in Atlanta's 11th Circuit, and in the
US Supreme Court itself.

Why, in the name of heaven, are they sending half-bright
hacks like Ted Olson up against Laurence Tribe, the greatest
legal mind of the past hundred years? Is Ted Olson really
the best they can do? Or is his presence merely a
condescending chuck under the chin to the Federalist
Society, in a case which has no meaning outside of
the court of popular opinion?

Could it be that the Bush move to the Supremes is more
of a swerve, intended to suck away precious media time and
coverage from the real action? Is this intended to smother
the news about the vote-fraud trial in Seminole County, or
the legal action launched by the NAACP, or the shocking
evidence of racially-based voter disenfranchisement that
only foreign papers such as the UK's Financial Times seem
to have the courage to cover properly
(http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3WRE3NLFC&li
ve=true&tagid=ZZZOMSJK30C&subheading=US)?

There's at least one other story currently in media play
whose entire function seems to be to distract from what's
really happening in the Sunshine State. I speak of the
infamous December 2, 2000 'Felons voting illegally in
Florida' story from the AP
(http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/decision2000/lat_felons001202.htm).

That story has to me all the earmarks of a transparent
inoculation attempt.

Against what, you ask?

Against this fact, which has been simmering under the media
radar:

12,000 black Florida voters were wrongly disenfranchised by
Database Technologies, a firm hired by SOS Harris allegedly
to keep felons off the rolls, but which has in practice
stripped the right to vote from thousands of law-abiding
Floridians.

Here's an excerpt from a column by Gregory Palast
(http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,402957,00.html)
of the UK Observer on this subject:

- - -

Blackout in Florida

Vice-President Al Gore would have strolled to victory in
Florida if the state hadn't kicked 12,000 citizens off
the voters' registers five month ago as former felons.

In fact, only a fraction were ex-cons. Most were simply
guilty of being African-American. While 8,000 of those
disenfranchised went through the legal rigmarole of getting
on to the voting list, the rest - enough to have won the
state for Gore - did not.

A top-placed election official (not a Democrat) told me
that the government had conducted a quiet review and found
- surprise! - that the listing included far more African-
Americans than would statistically have been expected, even
accounting for the grievous gap between the conviction rates
of blacks and whites in the US.

The source of this poisonous blacklist: Database
Technologies, a division of ChoicePoint, and hired by
Governor Jeb Bush's frothingly partisan Secretary of State,
Katherine Harris. My thanks to investigator Solomon Hughes
for informing me that DBT is a division of ChoicePoint.
Under fire for misuse of personal data in state computers,
ChoicePoint founder Rick Rozar made a strategic six-figure
soft cash donation to the Republican Party.

- - -

And here are excerpts from a story from the June 22, 2000
edition of the Palm Beach Post:

- - -

Glitch tells hundreds in Florida they are felons

By Marcia Gelbart, Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau

Thursday, June 22, 2000

TALLAHASSEE -- With less than five months left before
November's presidential election, hundreds of Palm Beach
County and Treasure Coast residents came within a few
erroneous keystrokes this week of losing their voting
rights.

A computer error by a Boca Raton company that has a
$4 million contract with the state Division of Elections
mistakenly singled out thousands of Floridians -- including
472 in Palm Beach County and 185 from the Treasure Coast --
as felons in Texas and a few other states. No Floridian
convicted of a felony can vote unless his voting rights
are restored by the Office of Executive Clemency.

Initially, 11,986 people were tagged with out-of-state
felony convictions. But after the mishap was realized,
following angry complaints from people erroneously
identified as muggers, burglars and car thieves,
7,972 people were removed from that list.

- - -

According to the evidence presented in the Palm Beach Post
story, the very company Jeb and Katherine hired to sniff out
ex-felons might itself be chock-full of folks who themselves
can't legally vote under Florida law. Read on:

- - -

...The state hired Database Technologies, with headquarters
on Blue Lake Drive, to analyze various computer files and
identify people who register in more than one county, those
who have died, or those who are felons.

To do so, the company -- whose contracts with the FBI were
suspended in 1999 because of suspected ties of the company
founder to drug smugglers -- has access to various federal,
state and local agency databases, including those from the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

- - -

The Republicans are starting to sound desperate.
Even as they trumpet the latest Pew Research Polls
(http://www.people-press.org/result00rpt.htm) showing a
rise in the number of Americans willing to accept a Bush
presidency, thanks to Katherine Harris' showy certification
of the incorrect Florida vote totals, they carefully omit
mentioning that the number of Americans who suspect Bush of
having used fraud and trickery has grown in the Pew Polls
from 28% to 33%. What would these numbers look like, if the
national US media hadn't chosen to minimize (if not ignore)
the myriad stories of voter disenfranchisement, both in
Florida and elsewhere?

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Politics Journal Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved. ISSN No. 1523-1690

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