>From: greg at gregpalast.com
>To: rhisiart at earthlink.net
>Subject: Harper's: How Florida Was Stolen
>Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 19:36:56 -0500
>
>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 mo!
>ney wisely.
>
><data excerpt>
>Source,Method,Date Run,Voter Cty,Voter ID #,"Voter Full Name","Voter
>DOB","Voter Date Registered","Voter Gender","Voter Race","Felon
>State","Felon County","Felon ID #","Felon ID Sequence","Felon Full
>Name","Felon DOB",Felon Conviction,Felon Gender,Felon Race,,,
>DBT,NAM,200001,BRA,910211,"BUTLER JR, DAVID
>RUSSELL",9/17/59,9/6/91,M,WHI,IL,,N37638,,"BUTLER , DAVID ",9/17/59,,,,,,
>DBT,NAM,200001,BRA,921691,"COOPER , THOMAS
>ALVIN",9/5/73,7/31/92,M,WHI,OH,,A28981400,,"COOPER , THOMAS
>",9/5/73,1/30/07,M,BLA,,,
>DBT,NAM,200001,HIL,885071,"DIXON JR, WILLIE
>G",10/3/31,9/12/85,M,BLA,FL,,15536,88,"DIXON , WILLIAM
>G",10/3/31,11/20/81,M,WHI,P,P,P
>DOE,NAM,200001,PUT,153410,"JACKSON JR, JOHNNY
>",12/8/51,10/28/97,M,BLA,FL,PUT,982189,1,"JACKSON JR, JOHNNIE
>",12/8/51,6/9/88,M,BLA,,,
>DOE,NAM,200001,HIL,551856,"MCDONALD , WALLACE
>",2/11/37,6/24/76,M,BLA,FL,HIL,28043,1,"MCDONALD , WALLACE
>",2/11/37,6/12/59,M,BLA,,,P
></data except>
>
>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."
>
>Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for
>which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida’s
>elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by
>moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race. Harper's
>found 325 names on the list with conviction dates in the future, a fact
>that did not escape Department of Elections workers, who, in June 2000
>emails headed, "Future Conviction Dates," termed the discovery, "bad
>news." Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet
>Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that "blanks would be preferable
>in these cases." (Harper's counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one
>county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify
>only 34 as actual felony convicts. Some counties defied Harris'
>directives; Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the
>purge list after she found her own name on it.
>
>Rev. Willie Dixon (3), seventy, was guilty of a crime in his youth; but
>one phone call would have told the state that it had already pardoned
>Dixon and restored his right to vote. On behalf of Dixon and other
>excluded voters, the NAACP in January 2001 sued Florida and Harris, after
>finding that African-Americans-who account for 13 percent of Florida's
>electorate and 46 percent of U.S. felony convictions -were four times as
>likely as whites to be incorrectly singled out under the state's
>methodology. After the election, Harris and her elections chief Clay
>Roberts, testified under oath that verifying the lists was solely the work
>of county supervisors. But the Florida-DBT contract (marked "Secret" and
>"Confidential") holds DBT responsible for "manual verification using
>telephone calls." in fact, with the state’s blessing, DBT did not call a
>single felon. When I asked Roberts about the contract during an interview
>for BBC television, Roberts ripped of his microphone, ran into his!
> office, locked the door, and called in state troopers to remove us.
>
>Johnny Jackson Jr. (4), thirty-two, has never been to Texas, and his
>mother swears he never had the middle name "Fitzgerald." Neither is there
>evidence that John Fitzgerald Jackson, felon of Texas, has ever left the
>Lone Star State. But even if they were the same man, removing him from
>Florida’s voter rolls is an unconstitutional act. Texas is among the
>thirty five states where ex-felons are permitted to vote, and the "full
>faith and credit" clause of the U.S. Constitution forbids states to revoke
>any civil rights that a citizen has been granted by another state; in
>fact, the Florida Supreme Court had twice ordered the state not to do so,
>just nine months before the voter purge. Nevertheless, at least 2,873
>voters were wrongly removed, a purge authorized by a September 18, 2000
>letter to counties from Governor Bush's clemency office. On February 23,
>2001, days after the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights began investigating
>the matters, Bush's office issued a new letter allowing !
>these persons to vote; no copies of the earlier letter could be found in
>the clemency office or on its computers.
>
>Wallace McDonald (5), sixty-four, lost his right to vote in 2000, though
>his sole run-in with the law was a misdemeanor in 1959. (He fell asleep on
>a bus-stop bench.) Of the "matches' on these lists, the civil-rights
>commission estimated that at least 14 percent - or 8,000 voters, nearly 15
>times Bush's official margin of victory - were false. DBT claims it warned
>officials "a significant number of people who were not a felon would be
>included on the list"; but the state, the company now says, "wanted there
>to be more names than were actually verified." Last May, Florida's
>legislature barred Harris from using outside firms to build the purge list
>and ordered her to seek guidance from county elections officials. In
>defiance, Harris has rebuffed the counties and hired another firm, just in
>time for Jeb Bush's reelection fight this fall.
>
>###
>
>Click <a
>href="http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1">here</a> to
>see the article.
>
>Special thanks to Fredda Weinberg for cracking the Florida computer files
>and crunching the numbers as well as to all the volunteer researchers who
>contributed to this investigative effort.
>
>Read the complete and latest material on the ethnic purge that fixed the
>election in Palast's new book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, out this
>week from Pluto Press.
>
>At http://www.GregPalast.com you can read and subscribe to Greg Palast's
>London Observer columns and view his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight.
>
>Chat online with Greg Palast Friday March 8, 2002 8 PM EST
>Register at http://www.democrats.com to participate
>
>AOL Users
><a href="http://www.democrats.com">http://www.democrats.com</a>
>
>============================================
>If you would like to have your e-mail address removed from this mailing
>list. Cut and paste the following URL into your browser address bar. This
>will automatically remove from the mailing list and you will receive no
>further mailings.
>http://www.gregpalast.com/emailremove.cfm?id=1661