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Mon 3 May, 2004 09:28 pm
by Gregory Palast
On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.
First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.
The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital. Steen's case was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal record. (My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040517&s=palast
(to read the entire article)
And where I live, dead people and convicts vote in every election. I think a little purging of the lists is in order. Personally, I am all for a background check before you can vote. (I have them when I buy my guns so why can't everyone?)
That article is laughable. The guy picks up a "spoiled" ballot and states that the voter was a black person. I'm not sure exactly how Florida works, but here in Arizona my ballot does not have my name on it. So there's no way the guy could know the race of a voter by looking at a ballot.
Non-eligible voters need to be purged from registration lists, whether they are fictitious names, dead people, or felons. There is nothing racial in such a purge, no matter how the author tries to define it.
The author states that 90.2% were innocent, which I take that to mean they really were not ex-cons. Did he ask them all? Where does this 90% figure come from? Only one case was cited to back up the fact that some people were purged who should not have been.
His "sources" report piles of "dust covered applications stacked up in election offices". What sources? And of course each of these are democratic voters who have a legitimate right to vote, right? None are sitting there unapproved for valid reasons, right?
He says 600,000 are barred from voting because they have a criminal record. Well, guess they should not have committed the crimes. Something tells me a fair share of those 600,000 are republicans. Also, why pick out just the 1.4 million black men who cannot vote in this country due to criminal records? Why not include those who are white, hispanic, etc. Guess that would not help him support the point he is trying to make that a republican governor threw the election using illegal means.
Greg Palast is an excellent, intelligent and valuable journalist and writer.
hi infowarrior- I am not familiar with him, but I plan on reading more of his pieces. He has a website too.
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