"Disenfranchisement"

[Comrade]

I've seen a lot of whining about how black people were disenfranchised during the 2000 election.

http://www.glennbeck.com/news/08092004.shtml

[gr8fuldaniel]

The link you provided to Glenn Beck's Website (Which pulled "Facts" directly from his butt) referred to this Report from The U.S Commission on Civil Rights

The U.S Commission on Civil Rights Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 2 First-Hand Accounts of Voter Disenfranchisement ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who are to be the electors of the Federal Representatives? Not the rich more than the poor; not the learned more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the humble sons of obscure and unpropitious fortune. The electors are to be the great body of the people of the United States.[1] Although statistics on spoiled ballots and voter purge lists point to problems in Florida’s election, perhaps the most compelling evidence of election irregularities the Commission heard was the first-hand accounts by citizens who encountered obstacles to voting. The following chapter presents individual accounts of voting system failures. VOTERS NOT ON THE ROLLS AND UNABLE TO APPEAL On November 7, 2000, millions of Florida voters arrived at their designated polling places to cast their votes. Unfortunately, countless voters were denied the opportunity to vote because their names did not appear on the lists of registered voters.[2] When poll workers attempted to call the supervisors of elections offices to verify voter registration status, they were often met with continuous busy signals or no answer.[3] In accordance with their training, most poll workers refused to permit persons to vote whose names did not appear on the rolls at their precinct. Thus, numerous Floridians were turned away from the polls on Election Day without being allowed to vote and with no opportunity to appeal the poll workers’ refusal. The following are a few examples of experiences that Floridians had who were turned away from their polling places. Citizens Who Were Not Permitted to Vote Cathy Jackson, an African American woman, has been a registered voter in Broward County since 1996. Upon registering in Broward County, Ms. Jackson was told that if she ever experienced a problem with her voter registration card, she would be allowed to vote if she could produce a valid driver’s license. Ms. Jackson voted in Broward without any incident using her driver’s license since 1996. However, when she went to her polling place, Precinct 52Z, on November 7, 2000, she was told that her name was not on the list. The poll workers suggested that she travel back to her old precinct in Miami-Dade County to vote. Ms. Jackson did as she was advised even though she had voted in Broward County since she moved from Miami-Dade County in 1996. After waiting 45 minutes at her old precinct, the poll workers in Miami-Dade told Ms. Jackson that her name was not on the rolls and referred her back to Broward to vote. When Ms. Jackson returned to the Broward precinct, the poll workers advised her to wait while they checked her registration status. While she waited, Ms. Jackson observed a poll worker from another precinct within the same polling place allow an elderly white voter, whose name did not appear on the rolls, to fill out an affidavit and vote. When Ms. Jackson asked if she could do the same, the poll workers explained that she could fill out an affidavit, but that she could not vote until they had verified her registration. The phone lines to the supervisor of elections office, however, remained busy for several hours. Ms. Jackson became upset and eventually left to go to work. Undeterred by these delays, Ms. Jackson returned to her precinct after work to try to vote again, but the poll workers were never able to verify her registration status and refused to allow her to vote.

<snip> There are many more examples available at the link provided

CONCLUSION A wide variety of concerns have been raised regarding the use and effectiveness of Florida’s voting system controls during the 2000 presidential election. Many Floridians were denied their opportunity to vote, in what proved to be a historic general election because of the narrow vote margin separating the candidates. Some voters were turned away from their designated polling places because their names did not appear on the lists of registered voters. Other voters discovered that their precincts were no longer being used or had moved to another location, without notice from the supervisor of elections office. In other instances, voters who had been standing in line to vote at their precincts prior to closing, were told that they could not vote because the poll was closed. In addition, thousands of voters who had registered at motor vehicle licensing offices were not on the rolls when they came to vote. The Commission also heard from several voters who saw Florida Highway Patrol troopers in and around polling places, while other troopers conducted an unauthorized vehicle checkpoint within a few miles of a polling place in a predominantly African American neighborhood. The Commission’s investigation demonstrated an urgent need for attention to this issue by Florida’s state and local officials, particularly as it relates to the implementation of statewide election reforms. Without some effective redress, the pervasive problems that surfaced in the 2000 election will be repeated.

[gr8fuldaniel]

You should have posted a link to his hate mail. More verifiable facts there. http://www.glennbeck.com/hatemail/index.shtml

[Comrade]

I read that article you provided, and I really had myself a good laugh. Hearsay in a tiny amount of cases counts as proof that hundreds of millions of blacks were beaten upon approaching the polling booths? Of course it does, when it's against Bush.

[giuliano]

i don't like your article Comrade. it uses lots of slippery language. just because only two people testified as discussed below, is not an indication that the no. of overall people - 108 - was inaccurate.

Furthermore, the Post found no more than 108 "law-abiding" citizens of all races that "were purged from the voter rolls as suspected criminals, only to be cleared after the election." In fact during all the various lawsuits against Florida, only two people testified they weren't allowed to vote because their names were mistakenly on the list.

[gr8fuldaniel]

Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida
by Greg Palast
The Weekly Dig, Boston, MA
Tuesday, April 22, 2003

What really happened in Florida? Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered voters. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get to vote. If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you‘re “scrubbed” from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it’s an uncivilized vestige of the Deep South. My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime – except for being African American. We didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race. When I questioned Harris’ office about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, “Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.” But these people weren’t felons, so why were they scrubbed? The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely vote as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony “scrub” lists and replaced them with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job. [DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive work for the FBI.] There are a lot of Joe Smiths in the Florida phonebook. DBT was hired to verify which Joe Smith was a felon and which was not. They were supposed to use their extensive databases to check credit cards, bank information, addresses and phone numbers, in addition to names, ages, and social security numbers. But they didn’t. They didn’t use one of their 1,200 databases to verify personal information, nor did they make a single phone call to verify the identity of scrubbed names. So where did DBT get their data? From the Internet. They went to 11 other states’ Internet sites and took names off dirt-cheap. They scrubbed Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off Florida voter John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels, or even J.R. Michaelson. DBT matched for race and gender, but names only had to be similar to a certain degree. Names could be reversed, and suffixes (Jr., Sr.) were ignored, but aliases were included. So the felon John “Buddy” Michaels could knock non-felon Michael Johns or Bud Johnson Jr. off the voter rolls. This happened again and again. Although DBT didn’t get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, they were very careful to match for race. A black felon named Mr. Green would only knock off a black Mr. Green, but not a single white Mr. Green. That’s how DBT earned its $2.3 million. Why didn’t DBT use their own databases? They didn’t, because the state told them not to. Choicepoint vice-president James Lee was grilled by a Congressional committee, headed by Cynthia McKinney, and he admitted everything, but said DBT was following state directives. Florida state officials told DBT to knock off voters by incorrectly matching them with felons. Congresswoman McKinney led this commission to her own peril. Choicepoint is in her Atlanta district. She was destroyed in the last election by fabricated quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign. Is this the only way votes were stolen? No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. Katherine Harris’ office illegally scrubbed people who’d served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and Jeb Bush’s office illegally barred these people from registering to vote at all. The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black rural counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state, thousands of votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots which are read by an optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark were considered “spoiled“ and not counted. The buttons used to fill out the ballots were set up – with approval from Bush and Harris – to make votes appear unclear to the machine. One in eight ballots in Gadsden was voided by the state. The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white. There only one in 100 votes was “spoiled.” What made the difference? In Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the black counties, the votes were trucked off immediately. There were no machines on site. Voters weren’t told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly weren’t permitted to re-vote. When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they weren’t well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadn‘t. He didn’t even bother to ask how the machines were set up. This is the kind of reporting we get in America. In Britain, this story ran 3 weeks after the election, when Gore was still in race. It was in the papers and on TV. In the US, it was seven months before the Washington Post ran it, and then it was only a partial version. After the election, Gadsden County replaced its voting commissioner. In 2002 they only lost one in 500 votes. So you can say blacks in Gadsden got smarter in one way – they elected a black elections chief. What happened to Choicepoint? Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are being rolled out across the country. It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting.

[gr8fuldaniel]

Originally posted by Comrade, I read that article you provided, and I really had myself a good laugh. Hearsay in a tiny amount of cases counts as proof that hundreds of millions of blacks were beaten upon approaching the polling booths? Of course it does, when it's against Bush.

That was sworn testimony before the Civil Rights Commission. I never said hundreds of millions of blacks were beaten.

[gr8fuldaniel]

Sad when you have to go overseas to find out whats going on in America. What was that about LIBERAL MEDIA?

From Alternet, interview with Greg Palast And that’s how our President was elected: by illegally removing tens of thousands of legal African American voters before the race. But you knew that . . . at least you did if you read the British papers -- I reported this discovery for the Guardian of London. And I reported again on the nightly news. You saw that . . . if you live in Europe or Canada or South America. In the USA, the story ran on page zero. Well, let me correct that a bit. The Washington Post did run the story on the fake felon list that selected our President -- even with a comment under my byline. I wrote the story within weeks of the election, while Al Gore was still in the race. The Post courageously ran it . . . seven months after the election. The New York Times ran it . . . well, never, even after Katherine Harris confessed the scam to a Florida court after she and the state were successfully sued by the NAACP. So, I can’t say the New York Times always makes up the news. Sometimes the news just doesn’t make it.

[gr8fuldaniel]

From the link you provided:glen beck:

Immediately following the contested 2000 presidential election, The U.S Commission on Civil Rights (hereinafter 'the Commission') conducted a six-month investigation into Florida's election. The result? The Commission found absolutely no evidence of systematic disenfranchisement of black voters. Furthermore, the investigation found no credible evidence that any Floridians were INTENTIONALLY denied the right to vote in the 2000 election.

What really happened: (LINK)The U.S Commission on Civil Rights Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election

Some voters were turned away from their designated polling places because their names did not appear on the lists of registered voters. Other voters discovered that their precincts were no longer being used or had moved to another location, without notice from the supervisor of elections office. In other instances, voters who had been standing in line to vote at their precincts prior to closing, were told that they could not vote because the poll was closed. In addition, thousands of voters who had registered at motor vehicle licensing offices were not on the rolls when they came to vote. The Commission also heard from several voters who saw Florida Highway Patrol troopers in and around polling places, while other troopers conducted an unauthorized vehicle checkpoint within a few miles of a polling place in a predominantly African American neighborhood. The Commission’s investigation demonstrated an urgent need for attention to this issue by Florida’s state and local officials, particularly as it relates to the implementation of statewide election reforms. Without some effective redress, the pervasive problems that surfaced in the 2000 election will be repeated.

But there is really no argument here because Kathryn Harris and the State of Florida lost their case:

Alternet: It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting.

[m3talsmith]

If you want to read some real facts and opinions on the disenfranchised (the facts coming straight from the FEC) read here: http://unstableman.blogspot.com/2004/07/grade-vote.html and here: http://unstableman.blogspot.com/2004/07/fi...gh-draft-1.html

[gr8fuldaniel]

Originally posted by m3talsmith, If you want to read some real facts and opinions on the disenfranchised (the facts coming straight from the FEC) read here: http://unstableman.blogspot.com/2004/07/grade-vote.html and here: http://unstableman.blogspot.com/2004/07/fi...gh-draft-1.html

Neither one of these links have anything to do with the Florida Election disenfranchisement of blacks, purged from the voter rolls

[Comrade]

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/larryel...e20040812.shtml

Here's more

[bishop]

editorials and slanted interviews versus bipartisan investigations.

[gr8fuldaniel]

This is a flat out lie from the link you provided. The same lie your other link tried to pull off. Are they quoting each other?

Link to un credible source There was a six-month investigation by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission . . . also an investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. . . . There was absolutely no truth to any of those allegations . . . not one person who was intimidated . . . (or) had their vote stolen. There was no disenfranchisement . . . no truth to any of those allegations.

Read the Report yourself before you provide another "National Enquirer" type reference. The commission DID find disenfranchisement.
To have highway patrolmen parking their cruisers at polling places, and to set up vehicle inspections near predominantly black neighborhoods is intimidation.

[Mr.Vicchio]

Not a SINGLE VERIFIBLE CASE of voter disenfranchisement has been found to of occured in Flordia in 2000 in terms of blacks being denied the right to vote, beaten, intimidated... typical wacko leftist scare mongering to keep the black vote.

If Jesse Jackson said it, you know its got to be true.. right? Right?

[Technosoul]

That was a great post because it showed the real facts and provided links even for conflicting attempts to slant the facts.

Likewise this message supports the viewpoints I and others made under the post about the UN being asked to monitor the next presidental election.

Thanks for taking the time to find those links and for offering here some of the data revealed on those webpages.

Technosoul.

[gr8fuldaniel]

Originally posted by Mr.Vicchio, Not a SINGLE VERIFIBLE CASE of voter disenfranchisement has been found to of occured in Flordia in 2000 in terms of blacks being denied the right to vote, beaten, intimidated... typical wacko leftist scare mongering to keep the black vote. If Jesse Jackson said it, you know its got to be true.. right?  Right?

Oh Really? Lucy, you gotta lotta splainin to do....

ACLU NAACP v. Katherine Harris et al. Class Action Voting Rights Lawsuit UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF FLORIDA NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, INC. by its FLORIDA STATE CONFERENCE OF BRANCHES, JIMMIE PANNELL, JULIA STONER, NATALIE CARNEGIE, ERMA J. KELLY, JOHN L. CHEEVER, JAMES MARSHALL, LILLIE Q. ODOM, WILLIE STEEN, WALLACE MCDONALD, JERMAINE TERRY, LORINE WALDEN, EMERY TIMBERLAKE, VALERIE BUFORD-WELLS, MICHELLE FLOYD, CONSUELO MARIA GRAHAM, SHERRY EDWARDS, KANDY WELLS, JOANNA CLARK, JANICE KELLY, PLACIDE DOSSOUS and RONDRICK ROSE in their own right and as representatives of all similarly situated citizens and residents of the State of Florida, Plaintiffs, vs. KATHERINE HARRIS, Secretary of State of Florida; CLAY ROBERTS, Director of the Florida Division of Elections;  DAVID C. LEAHY, Miami-Dade County Election Supervisor; MIRIAM OLIPHANT, Broward County Election Supervisor; JOHN STAFFORD, Duval County Election Supervisor; PAM IORIO, Hillsborough County Election Supervisor; ION SANCHO, Leon County Election Supervisor; WILLIAM COWLES, Orange County Election Supervisor and DEANIE LOWE, Volusia County Election Supervisor (all in their official capacities); and CHOICEPOINT, INC., a Georgia corporation d/b/a DATABASE TECHNOLOGIES INC., Defendants. PRELIMINARY STATEMENT 1. This action is brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by its Florida State Conference of Branches ("NAACP") on its own behalf and on behalf of its Florida members, and by individual black voters, whose right to vote in the general election held in the State of Florida on November 7, 2000 was unlawfully denied or abridged. 2. In 2000, the NAACP made extensive efforts to register new voters and to encourage its members to vote.  As a result of the efforts of the NAACP, the NAACP National Voter Fund, and other organizations, turnout among black voters in Florida increased significantly in the November 7, 2000 general election, compared to recent general elections.  However, black voters were confronted with a multitude of non-uniform election practices that impeded their exercise of the franchise or disenfranchised them.  In particular, as a result of the practices complained of in this action, in precincts with substantial numbers of black voters, there were a disproportionate number of ballots with no vote counted for the office of President of the United States, black voters were wrongfully purged from official lists of eligible voters, the voter registration applications of black voters were not processed properly, and registered voters encountered unjustified barriers to voting at their precincts.  Such barriers were caused by, inter alia, the failure to provide a complete official list of eligible voters at each polling place, inadequate processes for verifying the registration of voters not appearing on precinct lists, and the failure to offer voters who moved within the county the opportunity to vote by affirmation or affidavit. 3. Plaintiffs contend that these practices violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, codified at 42 U.S.C. §§ 1973 et seq., the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, codified at 42 U.S.C. §§ 1971(a)(1), 1971(a)(2)(A) and 1971(a)(2)(B), 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and/or the Florida Voting Rights Act, Fla. Stat. Ann. § 104.0515

Kathryn and her thugs lost this one