FLORIDA'S QUEEN KATHERINE HARRIS: BERSERKER
gregpalast.com
KATHERINE HARRIS SAYS PALAST 'TWISTED AND MANIACAL' - in July Harper's Magazine June 25, 2002
By Greg Palast
Have I upset Kate? Darn. The Florida Secretary of State has sent me a heartfelt billet-doux in time for my birthday. Twisted and maniacal? I won't deny it. Most important, she doesn't say I was wrong: her office sent out lists of 57,700 voters - most of them black, almost all of them innocent, to remove from the voter rolls. Harris' letter, despite its berserker tone, is in fact an astonishing confession. Read it all in this month's Harper's Magazine, along with my reply.
Ms Harris begins:
”Greg Palast's Annotation ["Ex-Con Game," March] distorts and misrepresents the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election in Florida in order to support his twisted and maniacally partisan conclusions. To the chagrin of responsible journalists everywhere, Palast's effort implodes under the slightest scrutiny, owing to his abject failure to check the accuracy of his facts.”
Katherine Harris does not deny the central allegations of my Annotation: that her office ordered 57,700 Florida citizens be removed from the voter rolls, despite the knowledge that many, if not most, of these citizens were innocent of all crimes. Rather, she delegates the blame: state law forced her to hire a private firm that compiled this racially corrosive hit list. The Florida secretary of state may cite the law to the fourth decimal, but her interpretation of it-that her office was to provide county officials a list of "potentially ineligible voters"-is chilling. The law required that Harris's office provide a list "identifying" voters who had been convicted of a felony and that it contract with a private entity only to "meet its obligations" under the requirement. Maybe by "potentially" ineligible voters she means thousands like Thomas Cooper, whom her office lists as having been convicted of a felony in the year 2007.
The documents amusingly labeled "Secret"-thank you, Ms. Harris; as a reporter I am well versed in the Sunshine Laws-indicate that payment to her contractor depended specifically on "manual verification using telephone calls." Despite numerous requests from Harper's Magazine and the BBC, Harris has never explained why the private firm was paid millions for this work that was not done. Harris's apocryphal claim that county officials asked to take over this expensive work counters both the correspondence in her files and my own conversations with the county election supervisors.
Even if she wrongly took away the rights of innocent voters, Harris contends, mistakes on the voter rolls favored Al Gore. This odd defense is founded on her claim that, according to the Palm Beach Post, "thousands of felons voted." But the Post's conclusions were based on data used by Harris, with even sloppier methods of verification than hers. Because Harris's list was hopelessly flawed, some counties refused to remove voters from their rolls; therefore, thousands of her "ex-felons" did vote. After the 2000 election, Florida's attorney general promised to arrest any ineligible voter who had gone to the polls, a criminal offense in Florida. So far, the Harris and Post lists have produced, he says, fewer than half a dozen cases, out of thousands accused.
The Annotation's most damning accusation, from the view of civil rights lawyers, is that the state purged ex-convicts who had their right to vote restored by other states. Rather than deny the charge, Harris claims that she was required to do so by a letter from Governor Jeb Bush's Office of Executive Clemency. Oops! Harris has just blown Jeb's alibi. His office, as I mention in the Annotation, assured me that no such letter exists. Indeed, Bush's office produced a letter dated February 23, 2001, with a position opposite Harris's.
Regardless of where Harris seeks to shift the blame, her office clearly did wrong. The NAACP has filed suit over the voter purges uncovered by our BBC and Guardian reports. NAACP v Harris goes to trial in August. Katherine, if you've got an alibi for operating a Jim Crow election operation, tell it to the judge.
Katherine Harris, cochairwoman of Florida's George W. Bush for President campaign and now candidate for Congress, accuses this London reporter of "partisanship." To that, one hardly knows how to respond.
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