More on Bush Election Stealing

"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. The
NCAACP simply wanted voting rights to be returned to those whom were wrongly
named as felons, but Jeb Bush and Harris continues to refuse to restore their
civil right to vote. Having not learned their lesson, the Florida legislature
voted to bar the secretary of state (Harris) from ever again hiring an outside
firm like DBT to generate a purge list. The legislature directed Harris to turn
over this work to the experts, the Florida Association of Court Clerks. The
problem for Republicans is that the Clerks had done this work before and in a
reasonably fair, accurate and notably unbiased way.

Harris overcame the problem of the new law rather quickly: she broke it. The
law says her office “may not hire an outside firm…�. Yet in August of
2001, Harris’ cronie, Clay Roberts, broke off a deal with the Florida Ass. of
Court Clerks because they were going to spend too much - $750,000, which was
$250,000 more than Harris was willing to spend. Nice sandbagging job Harris,
considering she spent 4 million on Choicepoint:"

http://archive.salon.com/politics/f.../08/04/florida/

Mo

"Hours earlier, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson joined a lawsuit to force state election
officials to reveal the names of 47,000 suspected felons who could be dropped
from voting lists, saying he wanted to be sure mistakes in 2000 are not
repeated. "This year, Ohio and Florida are looked upon as the two states that
could decide the presidential election and we just can't go through this
again," the Florida Democrat said."

Copyright © 2004, South Florida Sun-Sentinel http://www.sun-sentinel.com

Still more

"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."

-- gregpalast.com