Fwd: Harper's: How Florida Was Stolen

[ravi]

rhisiart at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>>

isnt this rather old news? most of this came out immediately after the 
election, including allegations that the company hired to do the felon 
checking was a texas company with which bush had some connections. the 
flip side of the story, as it was told in jan2000, was that while it is 
true that gore might have won more votes if the felon list had not been 
exaggerated, it was also claimed to be true that some counties, 
controlled by democratic election boards (if that is the right term) 
used the mistakes in the felon list to reject the entire list, thus 
arguably adding to gore's votes.

	--ravi