Take Serious Note Of This

You are demonstrating precisely what I am talking about.

First of all, you don't have the credibility to question Greg Palast's investigations into Florida African-American voter disenfranchisement. He's renowned for taking on powerful people on the left as well as the right. If you read some of what he writes (I recommend for reading his bookThe Best Democracy Money Can Buy) you would learn that he's even harsher on the Democrats and Clinton than he is on the Republicans.

And calling him a liberal simply does not diminish in the least the massive election fraud he discovered in Florida, perpetrated by Katherine Harris and Clay Roberts in Florida's Department of Elections and abetted by Jeb Bush. There's lot detailed at the website (but don't bother reading it; you already have reached a conclusion you like and can't be bothered with the truth).

But if you find yourself constitutionally incapable of accepting what Palast has written then there are lots of other sources which you might find more palatable, if not as exhaustively researched.

Election fraud in Florida (and Georgia, where Diebold machines were also utilized by Choicepoint/DBT) is real.

Read this next part carefully (I intend no disrespect):

It's just ridiculously stupid for you to keep saying "no voter fraud" as if you were five years old, clapping your hands over your ears and singing, "lalala I can't hear you".

And you are not a stupid person, so I really for the life me don't understand why you are doing that.

Except that you might be a blind partisan hack.

Let me get this straight.
You believe that Katherine Harris, Clay Roberts and Jeb Bush deliberately, with forethought, committed voter fraud in Florida so that George Bush would win the election for President?
And you believe that they deliberately committed these criminal acts based on articles and websites that prove to you that this indeed occurred?
Do you also believe that those in power in the Republican Party are in collusion with these criminals?

And if the above is true, then do you believe that John Kerry, Al Gore, and the Democratic Party are not involved with anything like the criminal actions you believe Harris and the Bushes are involved with?

I am really trying to understand this.

Paul Krugman: Too many perils in electronic voting
Paul Krugman

It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops, and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation.

But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.

This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent.

Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading, not just because it reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a suspect election.

Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting machines that leave no paper trail, have banned their use this November.

But Florida, which may well decide the presidential race, is not among those states, and last month, state officials rejected a request to allow independent audits of the machines' integrity.

A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to "undermine voters' confidence" and declared, "The governor has every confidence in the Department of State and the Division of Elections."

Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon list.

Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000, the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered voters; these voters were turned away from the polls.

After the election - determined by 537 votes - it became clear thousands of people had been wrongly disenfranchised.

Since those misidentified as felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning blacks, these errors may have put George W. Bush in the White House.

This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland-security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list.

Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.

The Miami Herald quickly discovered 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list.

Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic.

So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised thousands of legitimate black voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons.

It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.

After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists.

They didn't realize, they said, this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.

But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.

Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent examination of voting machines because he has "every confidence" in his hand-picked election officials.

Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance on other matters related to voting and somehow their errors always end up favoring Republicans.

Why should anyone trust their verdict on the integrity of voting machines, when another convenient mistake could deliver a Republican victory in a high-stakes national election?

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a tainted election would do to America's sense of itself and its role in the world.

In the face of official stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be able to prove one way or the other whether the vote count was distorted - but if the result looked suspicious, most of the world and many Americans would believe the worst.

I'll write soon about what can be done in the few weeks that remain, but here's a first step: If Gov. Bush cares at all about the future of the nation, as well as his family's political fortunes, he will allow that independent audit.

Well, the CEO of Deibold has promised to deliver the State of Ohio to the Shrub in the next election, so i suppose i needn't bother to vote. The ACLU is presently suing the state elections commission to remove voting machines in many of the counties, but their target is 2005, and it won't matter in the coming election.

The fargin' bastiches can bite me, though, i'm voting come hell or high water.

Well, the CEO of Deibold has promised to deliver the State of Ohio to the Shrub in the next election, so i suppose i needn't bother to vote. The ACLU is presently suing the state elections commission to remove voting machines in many of the counties, but their target is 2005, and it won't matter in the coming election.

The fargin' bastiches can bite me, though, i'm voting come hell or high water.

Moishe3rd wrote:

Let me get this straight.
You believe that Katherine Harris, Clay Roberts and Jeb Bush deliberately, with forethought, committed voter fraud in Florida so that George Bush would win the election for President?
And you believe that they deliberately committed these criminal acts based on articles and websites that prove to you that this indeed occurred?
Do you also believe that those in power in the Republican Party are in collusion with these criminals?

And if the above is true, then do you believe that John Kerry, Al Gore, and the Democratic Party are not involved with anything like the criminal actions you believe Harris and the Bushes are involved with?

Yes, yep, you damn straight, and not no but hell no, in that order.

Moishe3rd wrote:

I am really trying to understand this.

Then click on the website and educate yourself.

I'll summarize, based on the latest information (and I'll even use a little bit of lawyerly legalese to give them the benefit of the doubt):

For the past four years, evidence has been piling up that tens of thousands of Florida voters were the targets of a deeply-flawed voter purge process in 2000. Earlier this week, as cited by BiP in the article beginning this thread, came the most damning allegations yet.

Even though state elections officials are responsible for safeguarding all voters' rights, it appears that the Florida Secretary of State's office has known since at least 1998 that the "potential felon" purge process is slanted to treat African-American and Hispanic voters unequally. The result: tens of thousands of African American voters would be knocked off the rolls. Worse, state leaders did nothing to correct the problem.

If these claims are borne out, Florida officials have violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws.

That now makes it the responsibility of the Justice Department to insure the integrity of Florida's elections by conducting an investigation.

Florida officials have tried to claim that the discriminatory flaws in their crooked system were unintentional and accidental. But if this new evidence proves to be true, it blows a hole right through their argument.

The suggestion of political motivation implies that state leaders intentionally allowed the purge problem to persist, discarding their duty to voters in favor of a "divide and conquer" strategy that should insult anyone -- regardless of party affiliation -- who believes that the people have an inherent right to be certain their votes are counted properly.

Any questions?