Re: Bush won the popular vote HUGE
From Greg Palast's interview from yesterday
HUSTLER: They haven't really told the truth about Bush and the 2000 election, either.
PALAST: I've got brand-new, deeply evil stuff about that in the new book. What happened was that, five months before the election, Katherine Harris, acting under orders from Jeb Bush, knocked 57,000 voters off the rolls. They were suspected of being evildoers and felons and, therefore, not allowed to vote in Florida. Here's the news: Of the 57,000 people, 97% were innocent of crimes, but they were guilty of being black. Half of them were African-American or Hispanic-in other words, Democratic voters. Was the state guessing who the the people of color were? In Florida, it's like South Africa; they list your race right on your registration. There was no guessing. These people not only lost their vote, but lost their president. BBC figures Gore lost 22,000 votes this way, but you didn't read that in the U.S. press. You didn't read in the U.S. press that they say they're going to allow the voters back on in 2003. That means that they were screwed for the election of 2002 as well. I ran the story of the theft of the election on the BBC. Then a hotshot with CBS News calls me and says, "Oh, that's a great story, can we have a piece of it? We want something new." I said, "Yeah, I got something for you: Jeb Bush's office, the governor of Florida, is involved in knocking off the voters too, not just Katherine Harris, and there's a letter dated September 18, 2000, which directs county-election officials to deliberately violate the law and not register a bunch of people who are Democrats. These are people who committed crimes in other states. Jeb can't legally stop them from voting, but he did anyway. And he knows that these people are Democrats, because there's something about going to jail that turns people [into] Democrats, about 93% [of ex-cons vote Democrat.]
HUSTLER: So, people who were either black or who had previously gone to jail were just automatically eliminated?
PALAST: Right. Jeb sent out the letter anyway, September 18, 2000, despite two court orders saying he couldn't do that. I had an insider in his office, some poor woman, shaking, saying, "I gotta read you this letter." She knew about the court orders. Okay, so I said, to CBS, "That's a story." CBS News didn't run the story-one night, two nights. I said, "What happened?" They said, "It didn't stand up." I said, "How do you know the story didn't stand up?" "Well, we called Jeb Bush's office, and they said, 'We didn't do it.'" Oh. Hotshot Dan Rather investigative news team. They said, "The letter doesn't exist. It's not in the computer files; it's in no one's files, not in the governor's files. It's nowhere to be found." Then Katherine Harris writes a hysterical, screeching letter to Harper's Magazine, calling me twisted and maniacal, but she didn't say I was wrong. She said, "Yeah we knocked off these people, but it's not my fault; I got a letter from the governor." I called up her office-I didn't say, "This is Mr. Twisted and Maniacal"-I said, "Um, excuse me, I got a letter from your Secretary of State saying that she had a letter from the governor, before the election, regarding removing people from the voter rolls. Could you fax that to me?" Suddenly, the letter that CBS says doesn't exist is faxed to me. I've got it in my hot little hands, the letter that was in Katherine Harris's desk; so CBS just took an official denial, because they're not gonna say, "The President's brother, the governor of the state of Florida, fixed the election"-that we had a coup d'Ztat by computer.
HUSTLER: What can you tell us about the way the news media counted the ballots in Florida after the election?
PALAST: ABC News ran down after I noticed that 180,000 ballots were not counted in Florida. Never counted, because they were spoiled, as they say. They were not counted because the ballots had mismarks on them. Would you be surprised to find out that most of those ballots were from black voters? Black precincts. Black counties. So Ted Koppel's team goes to investigate, and what they find is that black voters have a tough time figuring out the ballots, because they're not very educated.
HUSTLER: That's what they actually said?
PALAST: They reported on Ted Koppel that the reason so many black votes were voided is that, basically-in very polite, expert terms, in the way Ted always speaks from under his wig-blacks are too fucking dumb to figure out the ballots. But I went down to Tallahassee, and what I found out is that in white areas, when you have a paper ballot, and you make a mistake, it goes into an automatic reader-an optical reader. It comes back as a mistake, and you get another ballot, and you vote again. In black counties, you make a mistake, it goes into the same ballot, it's the same machine, and the ballot is destroyed. The buttons were set differently; so it wasn't that black voters were too dumb to vote. It was that the white reporters were too dumb to ask.
HUSTLER: Isn't it true that even with the fix put in by Jeb and Harris, Gore would have won if there had been a recount of all the ballots statewide?
PALAST: Absolutely. Walking away, Gore won. People thought that they were voting for Al Gore. What they called a ballot that doesn't count is one where Al Gore's name is circled on a paper ballot. And listen to this: People wrote in the name Al Gore because the ballot said, "Write in candidate's name." And they wrote in Al Gore. If you wrote in Al Gore, because he wasn't a write-in candidate, your ballot was voided. And again, you gotta go back to the fact, it's not everybody's ballot that was voided. The blacker the ballot, the higher the chances it will not be counted, and that was the evil of it. That's the modern way: Use computers and mechanisms to steal elections, and if you know the race of a voter, you know the color of their vote.
HUSTLER: Any final words on the state of the American press?
PALAST: Let's put it this way: This is the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and that means it's been 30 years since the Washington Post has broken a major story. I uncovered the story of the purged voters and broadcast it in Britain within three weeks of the election. Al Gore was still in the race. The Washington Post ran my story, seven months later, nicely buried there. W. is reading it in the White House and giggling to himself. For more news and views from Greg Palast, go to www.gregpalast.com.
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PBS stations nationwide will broadcast "Counting on Democracy," featuring Palast's investigation of state manipulation of the vote in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. Local broadcast times for the film, directed by Emmy award-winner Danny Schechter, can be found at at www.GregPalast.com (Events), where you can also read and subscribe to Greg Palast's "London Observer" columns and view his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight.
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