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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (729139)	3/4/2006 11:19:39 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Florida's 'Disappeared Voters': Disfranchised by the GOP Gregory Palast According to an April 2, 2001, MSNBC report, Florida state officials have "quietly changed" the policy that purged eligible voters from its rolls. Anita Hodgkiss, with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, said in a message that it was The Nation's investigative reports that "forced the state to change its position on out-of-state ex-felons." In Latin America they might have called them votantes desaparecidos, "disappeared voters." On November 7 tens of thousands of eligible Florida voters were wrongly prevented from casting their ballots--some purged from the voter registries and others blocked from registering in the first instance. Nearly all were Democrats, nearly half of them African-American. The systematic program that disfranchised these legal voters, directed by the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was so quiet, subtle and intricate that if not for George W. Bush's 500-vote eyelash margin of victory, certified by Harris, the chance of the purge's discovery would have been vanishingly small. The group prevented from voting has few defenders in either party: felons. It has been well reported that Florida denies its nearly half a million former convicts the right to vote. However, the media have completely missed the fact that Florida's own courts have repeatedly told the Governor he may not take away the civil rights of Florida citizens who committed crimes in other states, served their time and had their rights restored by those states. People from other states who have arrived in Florida with a felony conviction in their past number "clearly over 50,000 and likely over 100,000," says criminal demographics expert Jeffrey Manza of Northwestern University. Manza estimates that 80 percent arrive with voting rights intact, which they do not forfeit by relocating to Florida. Nevertheless, agencies controlled by Harris and Bush ordered county officials to reject attempts by these eligible voters to register, while, publicly, the governor's office states that it adheres to court rulings not to obstruct these ex-offenders in the exercise of their civil rights. Further, with the aid of a Republican-tied database firm, Harris's office used sophisticated computer programs to hunt those felons eligible to vote and ordered them thrown off the voter registries. Voter demographics authority David Bositis concluded that the purge-and-block program was "a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters." Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC, notes that based on nationwide conviction rates, African-Americans would account for 46 percent of the ex-felon group wrongly disfranchised. Corroborating Bositis's estimate, the Hillsborough County elections supervisor found that 54 percent of the voters targeted by the "scrub" are African-American, in a county where blacks make up 11 percent of the voting population. * Bushies also purged any Floridian voter whose name was the same as an out of state ex felon who had served his time and won his voting rights back. But they concentrated only on typical black names. Wonder why only blacks? Anyway, some 8,000 perfectly legal Floridian voters were denied their right to vote in 2000 simply because someone (who had become a legal voter) had the same name as them in states like - Texas mainly. Wonder how the state of Texas coordinated so nicely on this? 8,000 names from Texas alone were scrubbed.