a while back someone said George Bush 'won' the 2000 election...ummm....right.
I hate going through this (seeing as it takes so long):
The 'rigging' of the election began long before Election Day 2000. In the summer of 1999 Katherine Harris, who was both George W. Bush's presidential campaign cochairwoman
and the Florida secretary of state in charge of elections, paid $4 million to Database Technologies to go through Florida's voter rolls and remove anyone 'suspected' of being a former felon. She did so with the blessing of the governor of Florida, George W.'s brother Jeb Bush - whose own wife was caught by immigration officials trying to sneak $19,000 without declaring and paying tax on it...a felony in it's own right. But of course you Americans don't prosecute felons if they're rich or married to a governing Bush.
The law states that ex-felons cannot vote in Florida. And sadly that means 31% of
all black men in Florida are prohibited from voting because they have a felony on their record. Harris and Bush knew that removing the names of ex-felons from the voter rolls would keep thousands of black citizens out of the voting booth.
Black Floridians, overwhelmingly, are Democrats - and sure enough, Al Gore received the votes of more than 90% of them on November 7, 2000.
That is, 90% of those who were
allowed to vote.
In what appears to be a mass fraud committed by the state of Florida, Bush, Harris, and company not only removed thousands of black felons from the rolls, they also removed thousands of black citizens who had never committed a crime in their life - along with thousands of eligible voters who had committed only misdemeanors.
How did this happen? Harris's office told Database - a firm with strong Republican ties - to cast as wide a net as possible to get rid of these voters. Her minions instructed the company to include even people with 'similar' names to those of the actual felons. They insisted Database check people with the same birth dates as known felons, or similar Social Security numbers; an 80 percent match of relevant information, the election office instructed, was sufficient for Database to add a voter to the ineligible list.
These orders were shocking, even to Bush-friendly Database. They would mean that thousands of legitimate voters might be barred from voting on Election Day just because the had a name that sounded like someone else's, or shared a birthday with some unknown bank robber. Marlene Thorogood, the Database project manager, sent an e-mail to Emmett 'Bucky' Mitchell, a lawyer for Katherine Harris's election division, warning him that, "Unfortunately, programming in this fashion may supply you with false positives," or misidentifications. Never mind that, said ol' Bucky. His response: "Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren't matches and let county election supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether."
Database did as they were told. And before long 173,000 registered voters in Florida were permanently wiped off the voter rolls. In Miami-Dade, Florida's largest county, 66 percent of the voters who were removed were black. In Tampa's county, 54 percent of those who were denied the right to vote on November 7, 2000 were black.
But culling names from Florida's records alone was not enough for Harris and her department. Eight thousand additional Floridians were thrown off the voting rolls because Database used a false list supplied by another state, a state which claimed that all the names on the list were former convicted felons who had since moved to Florida.
It turns out that the felons on the list had served their time and had all their voting privileges reinstated. And there were others on the list who had only committed misdemeanors - such as parking violations or littering. What state was it that offered Jeb and George a helping hand by sending this bogus list to Florida?
Texas.
On November 7, 2000, as black Floridians flocked to the polls in record numbers, many were met with a blunt rebuke: "You cannot vote." In a number of precincts in Florida's inner cities, the polling locations were heavily fortified with police to block anyone on Katherine and Jeb's 'felons list' from voting. Hundreds of law-abiding citizens looking to exercise their constitutional right to vote, mostly in black and Hispanic communities, were sent away - and threatened with arrest if they protested.
George W. Bush would officially be credited with receiving 537 more votes than Al Gore in Florida. Is it safe to say that the thousands of black and Hispanic voters barred from the polls might have made a difference if they had been allowed to vote - and cost Bush the election?
Without a doubt.
On election night, after the polls closed, there was much confusion over what was happening with the counting of the votes in Florida. Finally a decision was made by the man in charge of the election night desk for the Fox News Channel. He decided that Fox should go on the air and declare that Bush had won Florida and thus the election. And that's what happened. Fox formally declared Bush the winner.
But down in Tallahassee, the counting of the votes had not yet been completed; in fact, the Associated Press insisted it was too close to call, and refused to follow Fox's lead.
Not so the other networks. They ran like lemmings after Fox made the call, afraid that they would be seen as slow or out of the loop - even though their own news reporters on the ground were insisting that it was too early to call the election. But who needs reporters when you're playing follow the leader - the leader, in this case, being John Ellis, the man in charge of Fox's election coverage. Who is John Ellis?
He's the first cousin of George W. and Jeb Bush.
Once Ellis made the call and everyone followed suit, there was no going back - and nothing was more psychologically devastating for Gore's chances of winning than the sudden perception that
he was being the spoiler by asking for recounts, withdrawing his concession of defeat, tying up the courts with lawyers and lawsuits. the truth is that during all of this, Gore actually was ahead - he had the most votes - but that was
never how the news media played it.
On election night, after the networks had first - correctly - projected the state of Florida for Gore. The cameras cut to a hotel room in Texas. There sat George W. with his father, the former president, and his mother, Barbara. The old man appeared cool as a cucumber, even though it looked like curtains for Sonny. A reporter asked young Bush what he thought about the outcome.
"I'm not conceding anything in Florida," Junior piped up, semicoherently. "I know you've all the projections, but people are actually counting the votes...the networks called this thing awfully earlier and people are actually counting the votes have different perspective." It was an odd moment in that crazy night of election result coverage. The Bushes, with their relaxed smiles, looked like a family of cats that had just wolfed down a bunch of canaries - as if they knew something we didn't.
They did. They knew Jeb and Katherine had done their job months earlier. They knew cousin John was holding down the fort at Fox election central. And if all else failed, there was always that team Poppy could count on: the United States Supreme Court.
As we all know, that's exactly what happened for the next 36 days. The forces of the Empire struck back, and they did so without mercy. While Gor was stupidly concentrating on getting recounts in a few counties, the Bush team was going after the holy grail - the overseas absentee ballots. Many of these ballots would come from the military, which typically votes Republican, and would finally give Bush the lead that denying the vote to thousands of blacks and Jewish grandmothers hadn't.
While Kim Baker was chanting his mantra - "It is not fair to change the rules and standards governing the counting or recounting of votes after it appears that one side has concluded that is the only way to get the votes it needs." - he and his operatives were doing just that.
A july 2001 investigation by the
New York Times showed that of the 2,490 overseas ballots that ended up being included in the certified election results, 680 were considered to be flawed and questionable. Bush got the overseas vote by a ratio of 4 to 5. By that percentage, 544 of the votes that went to Bush should have been thrown out. Suddenly Bush's winning margin of 537 votes was down to a chilling negative 7.
Within hours of the election, the Bush campaign had launched their attack. The first step was to make sure that as many ballots got in as possible. Republican operatives sent out frantic e-mails to navy ships asking them to dig up any ballots that might be hanging around. Thousands of votes poured in - even some that were signed
after election day. Now all they had to do was make sure that as many of these votes as possible went to W. And so the real thievery began.
According to the
Times, Katherine Harris had planned to send out a memo to her canvassing boards clarifying the procedure for counting overseas ballots. Included in this memo was a reminder that state law required all ballots to have been "postmarked or signed and dated" by election day. When it was clear that George's lead was rapidly sinking, she decided not to send the memo. Instead, she sent out a note that said ballots "are not required to be postmarked on or prior to" election day. Hmmm.
What caused her to change her mind - and the law? We may never know, since the computer records of what happened have been mysteriously erased - a possible violation of Florida's Sunshine Laws. Now, long after the horse has left the barn, Harris has turned over her hard drives to the media for inspection - but only after her own computer consultant "looked them over."
"Equal Representation" Florida style, meant that the rules governing acceptance or denial of your absentee ballot depended on what county you were from. Perhaps that would explain how counties where Gore won, only 2 out of 10 absentee ballots with unclear postmarks were counted; in Bush counties, predictably, 6 out of 10 such ballots made it into the final tally.
When the Democrats complained that ballots that didn't follow the rules shouldn't be counted, the Republicans launched a fierce public relations campaign to make it look as if the Democrats were trying to screw the men and women who were risking their lives for your country. A Republican city council member from Naples was typical in his hyperbole: "If they catch a bullet, or fragment from a terrorist bomb, that fragment does not have any postmark or registration of any kind."
As the
New York Times found out:
344 ballots had no evidence that they were cast on or before Election Day
183 ballots were postmarked in the United States
96 ballots lacked appropriate witness information
169 ballots came from unregistered voters, had envelopes that weren't signed properly, or came from people who hadn't requested a ballot
5 ballots came after the November 17 deadline
19 overseas voters voted on two ballots - and had both counted.
All of these ballots violated Florida law, yet they all were counted.
BUSH DIDN'T WIN! GORE DID.
Author: Michael Moore (Stupid White Men)
There, I hope that clears everything up.
In case you forgot, THE 2000 ELECTION WAS RIGGED!! I could have added more but I wouldn't want to insult your intelligence.
(hope you could read all that without getting too bored)
