Like I said, they will stoop to nothing!
I hope the FBI investigation finds all the manipulations.
The story from your link:
salon.com
Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program
Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a firm to vet the rolls for
felons, but that may have wrongly kept thousands, particularly blacks,
from casting ballots.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Gregory Palast
Dec. 4, 2000 | If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his
Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might
want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 names knocked off the Florida
voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State
Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters
may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list of
purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican
ties.
Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list
with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters.
But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only
misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on
the original source of the list -- the state of Texas.
Florida officials moved to put those falsely
accused by Texas back on voter rolls before the
election. Nevertheless, the large number of errors
uncovered in individual counties suggests that
thousands of eligible voters may have been turned
away at the polls.
Florida is the only state that pays a private
company that promises to "cleanse" voter rolls.
Secretary of State Harris approved in 1998 the $4
million contract with DBT Online, since merged
into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta. The creation of the
scrub list, called the central voter file, was
mandated by a 1998 state voter fraud law, which
followed a tumultuous year that saw Miami's mayor removed after voter
fraud in the election, with dead people discovered to have cast ballots.
The voter fraud law required all 67 counties to purge voter registries of
duplicate registrations, deceased voters and felons, many of whom, but
not all, are barred from voting in Florida.
In the process, however, the list invariably targets a minority
population in Florida, where 31 percent of all black men cannot vote
because of a ban on felons. In compiling a list by looking at felons from
other states, Florida could, in the process, single out citizens who
committed felons in other states but, after serving their time or
successfully petitioning the courts, had their voting rights returned to
them. According to Florida law, felons can vote once their voting rights
have been reinstated.
And if this unfairly singled out minorities, it unfairly handicapped Gore:
In Florida, 93 percent of African Americans voted for the vice
president.
In the 10 counties contacted by Salon, use of the central voter file
seemed to vary wildly. Some found the list too unreliable and didn't use
it at all. But most counties appear to have used the file as a resource to
purge names from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or
no -- effort at all to alert the "purged" voters. Counties that did their
best to vet the file discovered a high level of errors, with as many as 15
percent of names incorrectly identified as felons.
News coverage has focused on some maverick Florida counties that
decided not to use the central voter file, essentially breaking the law
and possibly letting some ineligible felons vote. On Friday, the Miami
Herald reported that after researching voter records in 12 Florida
counties -- but primarily in Palm Beach and Duval counties, which
didn't use the file -- it found that more than 445 felons had apparently
cast ballots in the presidential election.
But Palm Beach and Duval weren't the only counties to dump the list
after questioning its accuracy. Madison County's elections supervisor,
Linda Howell, had a peculiarly personal reason for distrusting the
central voter file: She had received a letter saying that since she had
committed a felony, she would not be allowed to vote.
Howell, who said she has never committed a felony, said the letter she
received in March shook her faith in the process. "It really is a mess,"
she said.
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