GREGORY PALAST, OBSERVER, LONDON: This week, I was hacking my way through the Florida swampland known as the Office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris and found a couple thousand more names of voters electronically 'disappeared' from the vote rolls. About half of those named are African-Americans. They had the right to vote, but they never made it to the balloting booths. [Previously] the Observer discovered that Harris's office had ordered the elimination of 8,000 Florida voters on the grounds that they had committed felonies in other states. None had.
Harris bought the bum list from a company called Choice Point, a firm whose Atlanta executive suite and boardroom are filled with Republican funders. Choice Point, we have learned, picked up the list of faux felons from state officials in - ahem - Texas. In fact, it was a roster of people who, like their Governor, George W, had committed nothing more than misdemeanors.
For Harris, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his brother, the Texas blacklist was a mistake made in Heaven. Most of those targeted to have their names 'scrubbed' from the voter roles were African-Americans, Hispanics and poor white folk, likely voters for Vice President Gore. We don't know how many voters lost their citizenship rights before the error was discovered by a few skeptical county officials, before Choice Point, which has gamely 'fessed-up to the Texas-sized error, produced a new list of 58,000 felons. In May, Harris sent on the new, improved scrub sheets to the county election boards.
Maybe it's my bad attitude, but I thought it worthwhile to check out the new list. Sleuthing around county offices with a team of researchers from internet newspaper Salon.com, we discovered that the 'correct' list wasn't so correct. One elections supervisor, Linda Howell of Madison County, was so upset by the errors that she refused to use the Harris/Choice Point list. How could she be so sure the new list identified innocent people as felons? Because her own name was on it, 'and I assure you, I am not a felon.' Our 10-county review suggests a minimum 15 per cent misidentification rate. That makes another 7,000 innocent people accused of crimes and stripped of their citizenship rights in the run-up to the presidential race. And not just any 7,000 people. Hillsborough (Tampa) county statisticians found that 54 per cent of the names on the scrub list belonged to African-Americans, who voted 93 per cent for Gore.