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| 2004/3/8 [Politics/Domestic/California, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:12567 Activity:nil |
3/8 Bush gang is furious that they won't be able to steal Florida again:
http://csua.org/u/6c6
\_ I have to hear a rational response to this question: how did
Bush 'steal' Florida - what is your evidence?
\_ Supreme Court decision which effectively awarded Presidency to
one side was unprecedented? The vote was also 5-4, aligned
conservative vs. liberal.
\_ As reported below the key issue was decided 7:2, read
the decision.
\_ CNN: "Broadly speaking, the 7-2 split was over the
question of reversing the Florida court, but the 5-4
split was over the termination of manual recounts."
\_ Please don't rely on CNN for vague explanations.
Read the decision, 7-2 the recounts violated
equal protection. The 5-4 was the remedy.
\_ Which was one of the most perverse
missapplications of the equal protection clause
that I've ever heard of. They basically said
"County A can't have recounts because you're not
doing a recount in County B, which doesn't need
one, and that somehow harms County B."
\_ If you actually read the decision you
would understand the justification.
You're right in the sense they didn't
even need to invoke equal protection,
they should have stuck with Article 2
of the Constitution.
\_ I don't see what in Article 2 would have
stopped a recount. Only that the electors
must give their votes on the day set by
congress. It seems like the SC had no
grounds to stop a recount, only to compel
the electors to reach a decision.
\_ So you would have been happier if the
(R) controlled Florida legislators had
a vote on it instead? That was the
other option at the time which seemed
more legal to me.
\_ Yes, I understand 7-2 was about violating equal
protection, and 5-4 was about the remedy.
However, I still think the 5-4 decision was more
important than 7-2 -- as indicated by all the
media I've seen, conservative and liberal.
Please provide one relatively non-partisan URL
which says otherwise, since your viewpoint is
the one that differs from the accepted view.
\_ The accepted view? As defined by who? I
don't "accept" that view and neither does
anyone else who has actually read the court's
decisions and followed it closely at the time.
\_ Katherine Harris scrubbed 57000 legal voters, almost all
black and Democratic, from the rolls.
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2
\_ Actually, the majority of the voters removed were white.
Given the preexisting rampant voter fraud in Florida
clearly some sort of reform was in order:
http://csua.org/u/5ei
Is it your contention then that most felons, pets and dead
people vote democrat?
\_ Suarez, who committed all these crimes, is a Republican.
\_ Suarez was a Democrat at the time.
Carollo was the Repub. candidate
http://csua.org/u/6cb
\_ Nope Suarez was independent at the time:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2000/11/20/storm.html
my bad
\_ 90% of the purged voters were black. Read the link.
"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."
\_ Step back a second and read his quote. 90.2
of which people - he doesn't specify. He is
either stretching the truth or lying. The best
the ACLU could was 54%, in one county.
http://archive.aclu.org/news/2001/n060601c.html
57,000 legal voters were not removed as you stated
above, that is also a lie. The people removed were either
felons, dead, or did not exist. I reassert what
I said before - a majority of these 57,000 were white
\_ At least 57000, maybe more:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=182&row=2
They were removed from the polls for having names
similar to felons and for being the same race.
Salon says "half were black":
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/11/01/lists/index_np.html
\_ Christ its another article by the same guy. Talk
about being tautological. First he says its 90.2
percent then more than 50%? Very convincing source..
\_ Here is another article then:
http://http://www.democrats.com/view2.cfm?id=6543
Do you have even one source that says that
most of the purged voters were white?
NAACP says "a larger percentage of Black voters
than white voters"
http://http://www.naacp.org/news/archives/2000/florida_lawsuit.shtml
The Nation says 200,000 were either scrubbed
or had their ballots thrown away:
http://http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010430&s=lantigua&c=1
\_ Again you are not referring to the 57,000
people removed. Clearly errors were made, but
your article names only 5 people. Given the
massive, pulitzer prize documented fraud in
Southern Florida clearly reform was necessary.
http://csua.org/u/6c8
\_ That was voter fraud committed by another
Republican. What a surprise.
\_ Suarez was a Democrat at the time.
Carollo was the Repub. candidate
http://csua.org/u/6cb
\_ Wrong. Suarez was never a Democrat.
\_ According to Palm Beach Post (as quoted in http://democrats.com),
~43k 'probable' and 'possible' felons were identified.
Out of that, 6500 names were not exact matches. From that,
5400 appeals were filed, and 2500 were upheld. After the
election, "at least 108" who were purged were later proven
to be legal voters. There were also 996 convicted of
crime in another state, who should have been allowed to
vote in FL, but were not.
\_ From the results of the Federal inquiry:
http://http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch5.htm
At least 8000 were removed that should not have been
for sure, according to Florida state testimony:
"Other voters were disenfranchised because a company
hired by the Department of State to match voter
rolls against other databases to ensure that felons
and the dead could not vote did not properly do so.
Database Technologies included in their list the names
of more than 8,000 voters who should not have been
removed from the voting rolls. However, by the time
the error was caught, it was too late for the counties
to fix it; in fact, the first time many of these voters
realized they had been removed from the voter rolls
was on Election Day."
Still waiting for your evidence that a majority of
those scrubbed were white. Do you have any evidence?
\_ Look I have no idea how to respond to you.
You are all over the map changing your position
every time you add something. First it
was 90.2 percent were black and were removed.
Then it was 50%, then .. fuck if I know.
I'd look forward to responding to a coherent
argument, were it put forth.
Please don't continue
this neurotic stream of consciousness of
links and babble, count to
10 take a deep breath and read my comments
above.
\_ I have posted from differing sources to
prove the overwhelming evidence that makes
my point: a majority of those disenfranchised
were black. Not every source agrees on the
exact percentage and I suspect that your
reading of Palast's 90.2% is correct, but
ALL agree that a majority were black. You
on the other hand, have not posted one
iota of evidence to support your contention
that most were white. Balls in your court.
\_ I figured you would actually be familiar
with the USCCR report...
'Furthermore, whites were twice as
likely as blacks to be placed on the
list erroneously, not the other way
around.' But she's a liar right?
http://http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/appendix/dissent.htm
You can find the rest of the info
for yourself.
\_ That was from the dissent, not the
conlusions. Only two commissioners
signed the dissent out of eight.
You want me to find it myself, eh?
In other words, you can't find it,
mostly because it doesn't exist.
\_ Are you aware of the make up of this
so-called investigative panel? Or
any of the hateful racist shit that
came from these people?
\_ And here's the switch to attacking
the source of the report! Right on
time!
\_ Let me add that is part of
testimony presented before the
Senate - are you implying
Thernstrom perjured herself?
\_ i'm the palm beach post guy, not the white voter guy.
however you cheat. you merely quoted the usccr.gov
report QUOTING fl state senator daryl jones and state
rep chris smith. you are not quoting the report itself.
tsk tsk. the report also stated that clayton roberts,
director of the division of elections, stated that the
problem was addressed and "no person was removed from
the voter rolls based on tat erroneous information."
\_ Fine I will quote the report then:
The most dramatic undercount in the Florida election was
the uncast ballots of countless eligible voters who
were wrongfully turned away from the polls. Statistical
data, reinforced by credible anecdotal evidence, point
to the widespread denial of voting rights. It is
impossible to determine the extent of the disenfranchisement
or to provide an adequate remedy to the persons whose
voices were silenced by injustice, ineptitude, and
inefficiency. However, careful analysis and some
reasonable projections illustrate what happened in Florida.
The disenfranchisement of Florida's voters fell most
harshly on the shoulders of black voters.
http://http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm
\_ note that you are now beating a hasty retreat from your
own 8000 number. i am not contesting that eligible
voters were left off the list. my contention is that
1) the original 57000 was not backed up by fact,
2) the number was way smaller, quoting tampa bay
post "at least 108". i will merely observe that even
8000 is an order of magnitude less than the claimed 57000,
and now you've even backed off from the 8000.
\_ I am not "backing off of it" at all. Everything I
have seen indicates that the vast majority of those
57000 scrubbed were not guilty of any crime. Do you
have any evidence otherwise, other than partisan
sniping by Republican election officials?
\_ 1) i quoted http://democrats.com quoting tampa bay post
with "at least 108". 2) i refuted your bogus claim
from the usccr report. give me something credible
that says 57000. if i could find a http://democrats.com
ref, you can find me something non obviously
partisan, and we're even.
\_ more quoting fun from teh usccr.gov report,
"Although the Commission.s record reflects that
some supervisors of elections registered general
complaints regarding the use of the exclusion lists,
the record does not reflect that the Division of
Elections was flooded with specific examples of
Floridians erroneously identified as felons."
note that i am quoting the CONCLUSION of the report,
instead of dishonestly quoting the report QUOTING
a partisan polician.
\_ No, that is not the conclusion. This is the
conclusion:
http://http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm
I can't even find the line you quote. What
section is it in?
\_ God, this is such old news. It's like the abortion or death penalty or
other hot button issues. Blacks were denied voting rights, well
so were people in the panhandle and the military, the USSC gave
the election to one side 5:4, well no, the key issue was decided
7:2 and the FLSC had previously given it to Gore 5:4, blah, blah
blah until we all drop dead of age and partisanship.
\_ None of these other people had their right to vote
taken from them. Everyone who wished to vote in the
Florida panhandle and showed up on time was able to.
Florida bent over backwards accepting military votes.
They even counted votes that came in late. All the FUD
in the world can't change these facts.
\_ Exactly, blah, blah, blah. It's like abortion or the
death penalty. This is a huge troll going nowhere fast.
\_ Thank you, anti-Bush person, for deleting my post.
\_ I did not delete your post. The coward that refuses to use
motdedit did it.
\_ Fuck motdedit. In the ear.
\_ Miami Herald report: http://http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/2071226.htm
Lead: "Republican George W. Bush's victory in Florida,
which gave him the White House, almost certainly would have
endured even if a recount stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court
had been allowed to go forward."
\_ I agree that 4+ out of 5 articles I've seen on this topic say
"Bush would have won anyway". Anyone have well-supported URLs
against this?
\_ This is about the recount. This has nothing to do with
all the voters being scrubbed from the rolls.
\_ So, find a URL talking about roll-scrubbing in this case
being illegal, and how Gore would have won otherwise.
Points if the URL isn't from ACLU, NAACP, Salon, etc. |
| 5/24 |
|
| csua.org/u/6c6 -> story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=584&e=2&u=/nm/20040308/pl_nm/campaign_florida_dc Yahoo! News - Page Not Found. News Home - Yahoo! Yahoo! News. Search. Document Not Found The document you requested is not found. It may have expired. Try these links: Yahoo! News home page Yahoo! Copyright 2002 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. |
| www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2 Winning the Election The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida by Liam Scheff When future historians want to know what happened to America in 2000, theyll read Greg Palasts The Best Democracy Money Can Buy . The book also uncovers inside documents on the IMF and World Bank, Pat Robertsons unholy money-schemes, and the co-opted US media that wont report what the rest of the world gets on the front page. The book opens with the crime that keeps on stealing the 2000 presidential election. George Bush lost the popular election by 500,000 votes, but won the electoral vote by winning hotly contested Florida, the state that tipped the scales, and the state where his brother Jeb is governor. His tiny 500-vote win there was accompanied by a torrent of hanging chads and unhappy voters, who claimed their votes were stolen. Last week Palast came to Boston to promote the new edition of The Best Democracy I asked him exactly what he uncovered. Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Floridas voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and youre scrubbed from the rolls. My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 902 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime except for being African American. We didnt have to guess about that, because next to each voters 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. 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 $23 million to do the same job. DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive work for the FBI. 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. They didnt 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. 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. DBT matched for race and gender, but names only had to be similar to a certain degree. Although DBT didnt get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, they were very careful to match for race. 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. She was destroyed in the last election by fabricated quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons. Katherine Harris office illegally scrubbed people whod served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and Jeb Bushs 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. 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. The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white. In Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. Voters werent told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly werent permitted to re-vote. When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they werent well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadnt. In Britain, this story ran 3 weeks after the election, when Gore was still in race. 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. So you can say blacks in Gadsden got smarter in one way they elected a black elections chief. |
| csua.org/u/5ei -> www.pulitzer.org/year/1999/investigative-reporting/works/980201_the_outsiders.html They pile into a van and head to the Kinloch Park Middle School to vote every election day. The important things we do as a family together, adds his niece, Olga Hernandez Marco. Well, if its against the law, well have to change next time, Onelio Hernandez said. Willie Darby, 53, who moved to an apartment on Palm Avenue in Hialeah six months ago. He still cast a ballot from his old address in Miamis commission District 3. He changed his registration to Hialeah after being interviewed by The Herald. Ive always felt more in tune with things in Miami than anywhere else, Darby said. He bristled when asked if he thought he could be breaking the law. Look, Im an American citizen and I feel you dont violate the law when you vote, he said. A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE Voting by non-residents also violates state law Voting where you live is a bedrock principle of elections, a guarantee that a citys leaders are chosen by the people who are affected most - those who have to pay the taxes and live with the services. State elections law also enshrines that fundamental rule, saying that voters must be registered at their legal residence, and must live within the borders of a town to vote there. Its a third-degree felony for an ineligible voter to willfully cast a ballot. The Herald already has reported widespread irregularities among the 4,740 absentee ballots cast in Miamis Nov. Thats at the edge of the Everglades - 13 miles from their old precinct. On Election Day, the Roques drive for a half-hour into the city to vote at their old precinct, Iglesia Bautista Resurreccion at Southwest 27th Avenue and 23rd Street. The Roques say they thought they were still eligible to vote in Miami elections because Miami is the address on their mail. But Lillian Roque also said: When we moved, I couldnt vote for the people I liked here. Whatever their reasons, illegal voters have one thing in common: No one has to worry much about being caught. Leahy says his office - overwhelmed by the volume of Dade voters, hamstrung by laws meant to encourage voting - is all but helpless to enforce residency rules. SAFEGUARDS LACKING The law is on the side of nonresident voters When people register or change their address, elections workers simply take them at their word. There are more legal safeguards against a teenager buying a six-pack of beer at a convenience store. Currently as the law stands, there isnt much that we can do about it, Leahy says. We dont know how big the problem is, but the potential problem is very real. Leahy says the department sometimes stumbles across non-resident voters, if mail comes back as undeliverable or if the elections staff finds a change of mailing address. For instance, the elections department found out last February that Santa Cruz, the Miami Beach widow, had apparently changed her mailing address. But Santa Cruz was allowed to vote anyway when she showed up at the polls last November. Leahy says the new motor-voter law meant to encourage voter registration does not allow him to remove such inactive voters. And he says a mailing will catch only people who need a reminder to change their voting registration. Its meant to catch those who just dont understand the process, Leahy said. Home for some voters is outside the county For real Miami residents - who pay some of the highest property taxes in South Florida - this means their decisions are being diluted by a steady stream of out-of-town votes. You have people coming into Miami and affecting the democratic process when they dont know whats going on, said Kenneth Merker, a Northeast Miami community activist and former mayoral candidate. Another fan of Miami politics: David Mariano Cruz, son of postman Mariano Cruz, who lost in his bid last November to unseat Miami Commissioner Willy Gort. Cruz, a Miami-Dade bus driver, says he has lived in a North Miami condominium for eight years - while keeping his address at his parents home on Northwest 26th Street in Allapattah. He says its convenient because the polling place is near the bus headquarters where he works. I live in North Miami, but 99 percent of the time Im there at my parents house, he said. CONVENIENCE A FACTOR For some outsiders, its easier to vote in Miami Rene and Georgina Espinosa kept their Little Havana registration even after they moved to a Flagler Street trailer park in West Dade, just east of Sweetwater. Carollo fans, they said they wanted to make sure they could be counted in his corner. For some of the non-Miami members of the Miami electorate, the big lure of voting in Miami wasnt politics. It was convenience: Eduardo Diaz, 64, moved out of Miami to a trailer park in Homestead more than a year ago. But he kept his old voting address at Southwest Eighth Street and 32nd Avenue because the polling place is a lot closer to his job. I work at the airport, so thats why I vote there, said Diaz, who said he was a Carollo supporter. I thought I was a Miami resident, one voter said Some pleaded ignorance. I thought I was a Miami resident, said Maria Emma Castro de Garzon of unincorporated West Dade, who says she voted for Suarez. Gary voted in District 3, where he lived for 27 years, even though he now lives in a condo in District 2. It was just an oversight on my part, said Gary, an investment banker and potential government witness in the unrelated Operation Greenpalm corruption probe. I failed to change from one city district to another after I moved. Andre Whittle, basketball coach at the Academy for Community Education alternative school, has lived in Carol City, part of unincorporated Northwest Dade, for five years. I live in Carol City, but I never knew that you have to vote in the city where you live, Whittle said. Moreno, the FIU political scientist, believes many voters are in fact innocently confused about the countys two-tier system of government. For instance, every Miami-Dade voter can vote for the office of county executive mayor, while only people who live within a citys borders can vote in city elections. Some of the irregularities are just people who are ignorant and are uninformed of just what theyre supposed to be voting on. TELLTALE SIGNATURES Voters sign at the polls, next to official address Yet Leahy, the elections supervisor, points out a contradiction in the stories of blissful ignorance: When voters show up at the polls, the precinct worker asks them if they still live at the address on their voter registration. They sign the voter book right next to that address - though Leahy says that doesnt count as a legal oath. Still others offer no reason at all: Locksmith Peter Pick, with his wife Eldy, voted out of an apartment building they own in Little Havana. The Picks are longtime activists who work to protect the neighborhood where they really live: Snapper Creek in Kendall. Corporate records list Peter Pick as president of the Snapper Creek Park Lake Association, a homeowners group. Eldy Pick played a leadership role in a 1991 neighborhood effort to chase away an adult video store. They would not speak to a reporter who visited their Kendall Drive home and asked for an explanation of the residency issue. Records show that a ballot was cast in the name of Marjorie Share, who now lives in Surfside - not the address where her vote came from, an apartment house in Miamis commission District 3. She phoned a reporter after a letter was left at her Surfside apartment. She and her husband offered differing explanations of why she could not have voted on Nov. |
| csua.org/u/6cb -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/elections/2000/states/fl/senate/ McCormick I 21,664 0 Joel Deckard REF 17,338 0 Andy Martin I 15,889 0 write-ins 88 0 PRIMARY ELECTION: SEPTEMBER 5, 2000 Votes Percentage Democratic Bill Nelson 692,147 77 Newall Jerome Daughtrey 105,650 12 David B. Higginbottom 95,492 11 Republican Bill McCollum 660,592 81 Hamilton Allen Smith Bartlett 153,613 19 Source: Congressional Quarterly. Primaries Races by State Senate House Governor The Issues Major topics on the political agenda Post Series Deadlock Forgotten Issues Life of George W. Bush Bushs Texas Record Empty Pipeline Front Political News Elections The Issues Federal Page Polls Columns - Cartoons Live Online Online Extras Photo Galleries Video - Audio SEARCH: News Jobs AP Reuters Archives Entertain. |
| www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2000/11/20/storm.html First they provided-and endured-the superabundant drama of Elian Gonzalez. Now all the frustrations of one of the closest elections in American history have made a landing on Palm Beach. Florida is the center of a struggle over the operations of American democracy at every level, from the wisdom of the Electoral College to the arrangement of punch holes on a paper ballot. Fidel Castros Foreign Minister, Felipe Perez Roque, even suggested last week that a new election in Florida would be a good idea. Maybe they could send election monitors from Cuba to ensure the fairness of the vote count. Bush possibly sustaining a lead of fewer than 400 votes after last weeks statewide recount, the outcome in Florida, and thus the nation, has shifted to the most low-tech of fronts. Everything hinges on the absentee votes still drifting in from abroad, which are not expected to be fully counted until this Friday. Even more important, because they could easily reverse Bushs narrow lead, are the manual recounts that have been approved by local electoral commissions in Palm Beach, Broward and Volusia counties. A commission in Miami-Dade was supposed to meet this week to consider a Democratic request for a hand count there as well. But on Saturday, as the tedious process was beginning elsewhere, the Bush campaign asked a federal judge in South Florida to disqualify manual counts anywhere in the state and certify the recount already completed. Democrats quickly put out word that Bush had liked hand counts in Texas. Three years ago, he signed a law recommending them to settle disputed votes. Both parties had been saying for weeks that the presidential campaign would all come down to Florida. Neither of them suspected how much of it would come down to Palm Beach County. Or to the experience of people like Andre Fladell, 52, a Jewish chiropractor. On the way out, when he heard people complain that the ballot had confused them, he assumed they had not paid enough attention. But at lunch later with friends, Fladell says, he broke into a cold sweat when he heard them describe the correct punch hole for Gore-Lieberman. Fladell realized that he too had inadvertently voted for Pat Buchanan, a man who has had, to put it mildly, some problems with Jewish voters. A ballot is supposed to lead me to my vote, says Fladell, who is now a plaintiff in one of several lawsuits seeking to invalidate the Palm Beach vote. Frustration with the Palm Beach ballot had begun to go public even before the polls closed. At the Lucerne Point residence community, poll workers were so overwhelmed by complaints that they had to draw a diagram showing where each tickets punch hole was located. Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach County election supervisor who had signed off on the ballot design, soon arranged for a flyer to be distributed at polling places around the county that would help voters decipher it. LePore, a Democrat, told reporters that day that she had favored the design partly because it permitted larger type that was easier for older voters to read. Two hours later the companys phone clerks began making the first of some 5,000 calls. A TeleQuest spokesman said afterward almost half the people contacted thought they might have made a mistake when they voted. I dont think people understand the complexity of Florida, says Republican Lieutenant Governor Frank Brogan. Over the past decade, the political power of Miamis conservative Cuban Americans has been challenged by an influx of non-Cuban Latinos who lean toward the Democrats. Non-Latino Democrats in the southern end of the state are balanced by white Republicans in the northern Panhandle, while myriad new immigrant groups have allegiances that are still up for grabs. Dario Moreno, a political scientist at Miamis Florida International University, points out that the mix was not usually inflammatory-as long as lightning didnt strike. Lightning was striking everywhere by the early evening of Election Day, as hundreds of optimistic state Republicans gathered to watch the returns in the grand ballroom of the Doubletree Hotel in Tallahassee. In an upstairs suite, the states usually boisterous Republican leaders were thunderstruck. Al Cardenas, the states GOP chairman, was frantically checking returns on a laptop that showed Bush ahead in the few precincts that had reported. Knowing that the loss of Florida could discourage Republicans from bothering to vote in Western states, where the polls were still open, Cardenas put in the first of what would be more than 20 calls that night to Florida Governor Jeb Bush in Austin, Texas, who was following returns on his laptop. Even some Florida Democratic officials were surprised by the early awarding of the state to Gore. One explanation was that initial exit polls had been skewed by an early and especially large turnout of African-American voters for Gore. In the end, they would account for more than 16 of the states overall vote, almost double the usual black vote. Less than an hour after the network announcement, the Republican response began to take shape. Brogan and the other officials in his suite went downstairs to the ballroom to announce that they had serious doubts about the networks projections. A few hours later the networks had taken the state away from Gore and given it to Bush-along with the presidency. After 2 am the returns from two heavily Democratic areas, Miamis Dade County and Broward, where Fort Lauderdale is located, had cut Bushs lead for a while to as few as 200 votes. That was when Florida Democratic leaders started working their phones furiously, calling state attorney general Bob Butterworth, Gores Florida campaign chairman. Butterworth himself was on the phone with senior Gore advisers in Nashville, telling them that the Vice President should not concede. You couldnt help feeling that something was being stolen from us, says a state Democratic chief. At one point during election night, hundreds of votes for Gore had disappeared from the computer count, though they reappeared later. There is a history of election disputes in Volusia, among them the 1996 re-election of sheriff Bob Vogel, when a controversial count of absentee ballots put Vogel ahead of an opponent he had trailed on election night. That led two years later to a Florida Supreme Court decision that said elections in that state could be invalidated merely for reasons of Election Day error, even in the absence of outright fraud, so long as there was doubt that the outcome reflected the will of the voters. But it did not specify when the remedy should involve ordering a new election, something Democrats have talked about for Palm Beach. As the closeness of the vote became apparent, Democratic officials were also concerned about the absentee vote, which they knew could be decisive in an election as close as this one, but which had also been at issue in some famously disputed Florida elections of recent years. In the Miami Beach mayoral race three years ago, incumbent Joe Carollo, a Republican, won 51 of the votes cast at polling places. His challenger, ex-mayor Xavier Suarez, who ran as an independent, won 61 of the absentees, forcing the contest into a runoff that Suarez won with a large number of absentee ballots. Carollo filed suit, claiming that Suarez forged signatures on absentee ballots. When Carollo appealed, arguing he should simply be declared the winner without a new election, the higher court agreed. On Wednesday morning resentment over the Palm Beach screwup was high. The state Democratic Party set up a toll-free number to allow people to call in reports of voting irregularities. If the election was turning into a mystery, then all of Florida would be vacuumed for clues. Questions mounted: When poll workers turned away people with the explanation that there were not enough ballots, when they illegally asked seniors for a Social Security number, was it an innocent mistake or deliberate obstruction? Meanwhile, a statewide recount of the Florida vote was already assured, triggered by a law that requires one for any election in which the winning margin is under one-half of 1 of the vote. It was also ... |
| archive.aclu.org/news/2001/n060601c.html It appears from the executive summary made public today that the commission may have been too gentle on state leaders, said Howard L. The report, according to recent news articles, doesnt take into account the fact that the purging process prior to last Novembers election involved racial and partisan efforts by the state to purge the rolls of politically unfriendly voters, many of whom were black and Hispanic. According to news reports, the commission found that blacks were more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected and acknowledged that injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency plagued the election overall. However, it found no conclusive evidence that state officials intentionally disenfranchised thousands of blacks Hispanic and Haitian voters across the state. But the ACLU said the states purging process was part of an orchestrated project by state leaders to suppress opposition votes. For example, Elections Supervisor for Hillsborough County Pam Iorio has stated that while blacks represent about 15 percent of county wide voters, they made up approximately 54 percent of the voters on the purge list during last Novembers election. As the commission correctly noted, the voting-reform package approved by the Florida legislature and signed by the governor fails to address accessibility issues involving language assistance and barriers affecting persons with disabilities. The 2000 Florida Legislature also failed to address the issue of mass ex-felon disenfranchisement. Among the approved reforms is Secretary of State Katherine Harris responsibility to formulate a plan to educate voters on how to use and operate the optical scanners that will slowly begin to replace the antiquated punch-card ballots in the more populous counties across the state. With much of the state transitioning to new voting technology, voter education will be crucial to avoid the high rate of spoiled ballots seen last November, said Strickland. Aside from working to reform election practices, the Equal Voting Rights Project has addressed the issue of mass ex-felon disenfranchisement by filing a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections for failing to assist ex-offenders with the clemency application process prior to their release from supervision. |
| www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=182&row=2 According to his investigation, up to 57,000 persons, the majority of them African American and Democrats, had their voting rights removed. In his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast tells how the State of Florida hired a company named DBT for four million dollars to remove felons from the electoral list to keep them from voting. Palast demonstrates how Jeb Bushs office asked DBT to grow the list to the max, including voters with similar names and born on the same date as the felons. Thousands of people came to the electoral office to vote only to find out that they were felons. Now I got the info from DBT that there were 94,000 people in this list. If those people have voted, Al Gore would most likely have received the 537 votes that he needed to win. What makes the story so sad and rotten is that the Secretary of State of Florida, Katherine Harris, has agreed that innocent people were removed, but they dragged their feet and have used this same list in this election. According to the settlement from the NAACP lawsuit, the State has to revise the list and return the voting rights to the innocent ones. Jeb Bush arranged to steal the election in 2000 for his brother, and is keeping it stolen for his own re-election. News organizations are fearful about getting info out on a president during war time. DBT has recognized its errors and has decided not to do any more purge lists. I spoke with Bob Butterworth, State Attorney General, and I asked him why didnt he present a lawsuit for this fraud against the state? He told me hes not in charge of the investigation and he cannot arrest anyone. The other people that could do something about it are the US Justice Department, that is John Ashcroft, who got the job because of this theft, or the Supreme Court. Do you think that the 2004 presidential elections will depend on whether Jeb Bush wins or loses this elections? Thats why they have to steal it in 2002 if they want to steal it in 2004. Isnt there anyone doing something to restore the voting rights of these 91,000 innocent felons? The NAACP is sending hundreds of students across the state to supervise the election and to educate people, telling voters that they have the right to ask for a provisional ballot if their name is in the list of purged criminals. That way they could have their vote counted once the list is revised. |
| archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/11/01/lists/index_np.html Salon Premium Gift Subscriptions Newsletter Salon Communities - The Well - Table Talk Salon Blogs Salon Credit Card Salon Publications Salon Gear Reprint Information About Salon Advertise in Salon Investor Relations Customer Service . Table Talk Spirited Salon forums Posts of the week The Well Pioneering members-only discussions Got clutter? Sound Off E-mail Salon Send us a Letter to the Editor Recent Letters . And even though the list has been widely condemned - the company that created it admits probable errors - the same voter scrub list, with more than 94,000 names on it, is still in operation in Florida. Moreover, DBT Online, which generated the disastrously flawed list, reports that if it followed strict criteria to eliminate those errors, only 3,000 names would remain - and a whopping 91,000 people would have their voting rights restored. |
| www.democrats.com/view2.cfm?id=6543 As someone who lived in Florida for 16 years and volunteered on numerous Democratic campaigns while I lived there, I know both the disputed territory and Florida election law extremely well. It pains me greatly that two of the people involved in this unjust attack are none other than two of my favorite Democrats in the entire world, James Carville and Paul Begala. Also involved in this false attack is my favorite journalist Greg Palast, and two authors whose books do an outstanding job of documenting many of the illegal acts that the Bush campaign used to steal the election - Jeffrey Toobin and Jake Tapper. These false attacks range from accusing Al Gore of not fighting hard enough to win in Florida to blaming Al Gore for the pro Bush medias unprecedented campaign against him. They include allegations that Gore abandoned African American voters who were illegally purged off of the Florida voting rolls, that he vetoed public demonstrations, that he did nothing to promote voting reform and counting all of the votes. The truth is that there was nothing short of starting a civil war that Al Gore could have done to have gotten the uncounted, legal votes in Florida counted. In contrast, the Bush campaign broke numerous Florida and federal laws to steal the election in a broad daylight coup detat. Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris grossly abused their offices to aid in the theft of the election. To begin with, Bush and Harris illegally purged thousands of legally registered voters - mostly African American, as well as Hispanic, elderly and women Democratic voters - off the voting rolls in Florida with their illegal felon purge. This illegal purge violated both Florida election law and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was Jeb Bush who sent out a letter to registered Republicans with an older version of the Florida state seal urging them to vote in the comfort of their home by absentee ballot. Florida election law very specifically states that only voters who will be more than 100 miles from home on election day, in the hospital or a nursing home or an election day worker can request an absentee ballot. In addition, Florida election law states that the state seal cannot be used for political purposes. It was Jeb Bush who threatened Florida law firms that they would never get any more business from the state government if they represented the Gore campaign in this dispute. It was Jeb Bush who continued to work behind the scenes to help steal the election as evidenced by his phone records and his also allowing numerous state employees to do the same. These are all clear violations of Florida law, which clearly prohibits elected officials from abusing their public offices for personal purposes. As for Katherine Harris, she clearly violated the Florida constitution, which requires the Florida Secretary of State to enforce all election laws equally across the state. |
| www.naacp.org/news/archives/2000/florida_lawsuit.shtml 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. The Florida State Conference of Branches is comprised of approximately 77 NAACP youth councils, college chapters and adult branches throughout the State of Florida. The NAACP strives to advance the interests of its membership in every area, including the rights of its members and constituency to participate fully in the nomination and election of candidates for elective office. In furtherance of this purpose, the NAACP, through its Florida State Conference of Branches, conducts non-partisan voter registration and education and encourages its members to vote. The NAACP as an organization is aggrieved by Defendants actions because they significantly impede the NAACPs ability effectively to fulfill its institutional purpose of advancing voter registration and voters full participation in the electoral process. Plaintiff NAACP also brings suit on behalf of its individual members in Florida, who have been aggrieved by Defendants failure to comply with federal constitutional and federal and state statutory guarantees and provisions relating to voting and who would have standing to sue in their own right. These members individual interests in fully participating in the electoral process are germane to the NAACPs organizational purpose, and neither the claims asserted nor the relief requested herein requires the participation of the NAACPs members in order to vindicate their individual rights. A significant number of NAACP members, who are eligible voters and voted in the November 2000 election, reside in precincts and counties where a disproportionately large number of ballots were not counted in the Presidential election. NAACP members were also among those voters whose names were wrongfully purged from the voter registration lists, and a significant number of its membership were unable to vote or were impeded in voting on election day because of the unlawful practices complained of herein. She is sued in her official capacity in connection with actions taken under color of state law. As Secretary of State, Defendant HARRIS is the chief election officer of the State of Florida and has responsibility for general supervision and administration of the election laws. In addition, as Secretary of State she has responsibility for the Division of Elections of Floridas Department of State. She has the responsibility to obtain and maintain uniformity in the application, operation, and interpretation of the election laws, and to provide technical assistance to the supervisors of elections on voting systems. LEAHY, MIRIAM OLIPHANT, JOHN STAFFORD, PAM IORIO, ION SANCHO, WILLIAM COWLES, and DEANIE LOWE are the county supervisors of elections for Miami-Dade, Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Leon, Orange, and Volusia counties, respectively. They are sued in their official capacities in connection with actions taken under color of state law. Miriam Oliphant is the successor to Jane Carroll, who was supervisor of elections in Broward County during, and for 32 years before, the November 2000 election. The county supervisors of elections are the official custodians of the voter registration books in Florida and are responsible for registering voters within their respective geographical jurisdictions. The number of Black citizens of Florida who were denied the right to vote in the November 7, 2000, election, or whose right to vote was abridged or impeded, because of Defendants practices complained of herein, is so numerous that joinder of all members is impracticable. On information and belief, tens of thousands of ballots in counties and precincts where substantial numbers of Black citizens reside were not counted in that election. On information and belief, thousands of Black citizens were denied registration, wrongly purged from the voter rolls, and denied the opportunity to vote in that election. These include whether the Defendants applied qualifications or prerequisites to voting or standards, practices or procedures in a manner that denied or abridged class members right to vote in the November 7, 2000 general election. All members of the class were denied the opportunity to vote, to have their votes recorded and counted in an equal and non-arbitrary manner, or had their right to vote impaired by one or more of the actions of the Defendants identified herein. Additional common questions of law and fact include, but are not limited to: whether the Defendants applied a method of recording, processing and tabulating ballots that resulted in the denial of Black voters right to vote; Class certification pursuant to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 23a and b2 is warranted because the Defendants have acted or failed to act on grounds generally applicable to the class, thereby making appropriate final injunctive relief with respect to the class as a whole. Arbitrary and Racially Disparate Adverse Impact of Electoral Systems 33. Defendant Secretary of State KATHERINE HARRIS is the head of the Department of State, which is required to examine all makes of electronic or electromechanical voting systems to determine if they comply with state law. Defendant CLAY ROBERTS is the Director of the Florida Division of Elections and is responsible for adopting uniform rules for the purchase, use, and sale of voting equipment in the state and for voting system standards and certification. Pursuant to this authority, Defendants Harris and Roberts certified numerous voting systems for use in Florida, including several devices involving the use of punch-card ballots. Each county is authorized to select its voting method from the list of systems certified by Defendants Harris and Roberts. In the 2000 presidential election, the percentage of ballots recorded as having no vote non-votes in Florida counties using a punch-card system was 392, while the error rate under the optical-scan systems in use elsewhere in Florida was only 143. Thus, for every 10,000 votes cast, punch-card systems result in 250 more non-votes than optical-scan systems. Plaintiffs JIMMIE PANNELL, JULIA STONER, NATALIE CARNEGIE, ERMA J. ODOM, lawfully registered voters and residents of counties that used punch-card systems, who voted on November 7, 2000, faced a substantially greater risk that their votes would not accurately be recorded or counted than voters who live in counties that did not use punch-card voting systems. As a result of the acts and omissions of Defendants Harris and Roberts, and their own acts and omissions, election officials in counties in Florida with substantial Black populations have disproportionately selected and continue to use punch-card balloting machines. As a consequence, Plaintiffs and other Black voters are significantly less likely to have their votes counted and accurately tabulated than other voters in the state. ODOM are properly registered voters who reside in voting precincts in Miami-Dade County that have substantial percentages of Black voters. They each voted in the general election for the office of President of the United States on November 7, 2000 but are significantly less likely to have had their votes counted and accurately tabulated than voters in predominantly white precincts in Miami-Dade County. Wrongful Purging of Voters from Official Lists of Eligible Voters 52. Pursuant to state and federal law, Defendants Harris, Roberts and the Supervisors of Elections are charged with administering and maintaining the states overall list maintenance programs and the states central voter file. Both state and federal law establish the manner in which the voter registration information must be maintained and the circumstances in which individuals may be purged from the voter rolls. ... |
| www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010430&s=lantigua&c=1 Bush addressed the national NAACP convention in Baltimore and denounced such new forms of racism as racial profiling and redlining. But even as he spoke, a very old, traditional form of racism was being implemented in Florida: the disfranchisement of eligible voters, especially blacks, which helped Bush win that state and the election. Despite one well-reported incident involving a police checkpoint near a polling place, disfranchisement 2000-style did not depend on intimidation. Cattle prods and attack dogs, the legacy of former Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor, were nowhere in evidence. Instead, Florida state elections officials and hired data crunchers used computers to target thousands of voters, many of whom were then purged from the voter rolls without reason. And many thousands more saw their votes thrown out as a result of error-prone voting machines and poorly designed ballots, the results of an underfunded and chaotic electoral system. In all, some 200,000 Floridians were either not permitted to vote in the November 7 election on questionable or possibly illegal grounds, or saw their ballots discarded and not counted. Floridas black leaders, already engaged in an emotional, bitter confrontation with Governor Jeb Bush, George W. Bushs brother, had mounted an unprecedented voter registration effort to defeat candidates they saw as political enemies. According to exit polls, 65 percent more black voters went to the polls in Florida in 2000 than in the 1996 election, and of the votes that were counted, blacks went at least 9 to 1 for Democrat Al Gore. After the US Supreme Court cut off ballot recounts, Bush had a margin of 537 votes out of more than 58 million cast. The closeness of the final count made all votes not cast and not counted that much more crucial. As one example, the Palm Beach Post recently reported that Gore lost 6,600 votes in Palm Beach County alone because of the infamous butterfly ballot, more than ten times Bushs margin of victory. State officials deny racist intent in their actions, but the US Commission on Civil Rights conducted two hearings in Florida in January and February to determine why so many Floridians were denied the right to vote. In a preliminary assessment, the commission noted that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was aimed at subtle, as well as obvious, state regulation and practices that could deny citizens the right to vote because of their race. The commission said it found evidence of prohibited discrimination in Floridas polling process. The NAACP and others filed suit on January 10 against Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was a co-chair of the campaign and is responsible for the conduct of fair elections in Florida, and other Florida officials, charging them with violating the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But no future remedy can undo what happened in 2000, only a portion of which has been revealed through the hearing, the suit and media reports. They done got us, said civil rights veteran Elmore Bryant of Marianna, Florida, referring to the GOP-mandated purge of voter rolls. |
| csua.org/u/6c8 -> www.pulitzer.org/year/1999/investigative-reporting/works/index.html Pulitzer Prizes-INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING, Works 1999. The Miami Herald Staff January 11, 1998:. Buys One Vote. February 1, 1998:. The Outsiders. February 8, 1998:. Dubious Tactics Snared Votes for Suarez, Hernandez. February 9, 1998:. Some Miami Employees Crossed the Line to Vote. February 15, 1998:. Felons Vote, Too -But Its a Crime. February 22, 1998:. Suarez Adviser Investigated in Vote Buying. April 5, 1998:. Nonprofit Agency Collected Absentee Ballots. |
| www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch5.htm Thus, the disenfranchisement 3 of this class of citizens is sometimes overlooked in debates about the electoral process. Since the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, conviction of certain types of crimes supposedly committed more often by African Americans than other ethnic groups resulted in their disenfranchisement. In the November 2000 election, voters lost their rights because of these provisions and how they were implemented. This chapter will provide further details on how the list maintenance law was implemented and its practical effect on Florida voters. HOW FLORIDA CONTRACTED FOR LIST MAINTENANCE The statutory requirement to hire a private agency to assist in purging the voter files was enacted after the incidents of voter fraud in the 1997 Miami mayoral election that included votes cast in the names of deceased persons. The gentleman who originally won that mayors race was turned out of office. There was a Senate select committee appointed to investigate that election. There was an allegation and it was eventually proven that a large number of people who were deceased cast ballotswell, someone cast ballots in the name of some people who were deceased in that election. People who were convicted felons who had lost their right to vote under the Florida Constitution cast ballots in that election, and people who were also registered in another municipality or another county within that area cast ballots in the city of Miami mayors race. Bruder represented the private firm that was awarded a contract to perform state-sponsored list maintenance tasks before the election. His testimony offered a snapshot of the reality of list maintenance activities in Florida, including a description of the process that led to the Division of Elections awarding the contract to his company. Bruder, the Division of Elections initially solicited private entities to bid for its list maintenance contract through requests for proposals. The first request resulted in an award to a private firm named Professional Analytical Systems & Services. Following its award of a contract to Professional Analytical Systems & Services, the Division of Elections, for reasons not evident in the record, submitted a second request for proposal. Bruder was referring to Emmett Bucky Mitchell, former assistant general counsel for the Division of Elections. Bruder did not address the supervisors of elections regarding the content of his June 9, 2000, letter, he offered his views on the letters content to the Commission. Bruder admits that the sentence regarding the use of race and gender was inartfully drafted and may have confused the supervisors of elections. Bruder wrote: What I was trying to convey was that, while race and gender were a part of the database that we received and returned to the Division of Elections, neither were used as matching criteria. As I reiterated at the hearing, DBTs function was simply to provide the data. We had neither the statutory nor the contractual right to remove a single voter from the registration lists. Esser, information systems director for the DHSMV, defined interactive access as rapid two-way communications between an end user and a computer program. In this context, the end user will submit a drivers license numbers to the Departments computer system and receive the information corresponding to that drivers license number within a few seconds. Bruder stated the list created was not inaccurate, but rather it contained false positives. He explained: A false positive is an industry term that means some but not all the data elements match the data provided. The fact that there were names on the list that were not ultimately verified as deceased, registered in more than one place, or convicted felons does not mean the list was inaccurate, but reflects the nature of the search parameters established by the Division of Elections. Roberts also testified that the Division of Elections contacted the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections regarding the contract. He stated: The Association of Supervisors of Elections established a committee on this issue. We got the committee together with people from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, with people from the Board of Executive Clemency, with DBT. We got together to come up with a framework and a methodology that the supervisors could go through in verifying this information, to go through in a methodical way to verify before anyones name was removed from the voter rolls. Bruder recalled that the supervisors of elections present at that meeting wanted to be as exacting as possible on the matches. If I condense it down to a major concern, that was what they were looking for. And being that the Division of Elections was the entity that I was contracting with, they would be the ones that would be giving us the specifications. So they Division of Elections were there, they heard what the supervisors of elections wanted. They had technical representation there also to then give us advice as far as how they wanted us to construct the matching logic. Bruder asserts that DBT Online did, however, make a recommendation as to which states should be added to the felon and clemency exclusion lists. He explained: Clemency from those states that had a similar clemency process as the state of Florida, we identified that and we provided that information to the Division of Elections. And those states that did not have a similar clemency process, we identified that and provided that information to the state. If no Executive Board of Clemency existed in the other state, then DBT Online ran conviction information solely against the Florida Executive Board of Clemency file. If the state where the felon was convicted had an executive board of clemency and a repository type of agreement existed between that state and Florida to reinstate those civil rights, we checked with those boards of clemency to verify that the individual had been granted that right. In a letter to Ed Kast, assistant director of the Division of Elections, Janet H. If a former felon attempting to register to vote in Florida claims that his or her civil rights were restored in another state or that his or her civil rights were not lost in another state, but the individual cannot produce supporting documentation, please refer that individual to my office. My office will attempt to confirm the individuals claim by contacting the state that assertedly restored the individuals civil rights. If possession of civil rights is confirmed, the individual does not need to apply for restoration of civil rights in Florida. Keels insists that her letter merely reiterated the Office of Executive Clemency policy, other mandates suggest that the letter actually changed it. Rule 9 states that felons convicted in a court other than a Florida court must be a legal Florida resident before requesting civil rights restoration. Then director of the Division of Elections, Ethel Baxter, issued the first of a series of memos on August 11, 1998, regarding the list maintenance activities performed by the supervisors of elections. Baxter described the central voter file as the divisions first experience with a statewide database and said that it cannot be a 100 percent accurate list. Baxter made particular note of the concerns with the felony information in the central voter file because of the potential use of aliases. Baxter recommended that the supervisors of elections exercise caution when deciding to remove someone who shows up as a convicted felon on the central voter file. Baxter specifically advised: It is your responsibility to attempt to verify the accuracy of the information on the list, and remove, prior to the next election, any person who is deceased, convicted of a felony, or mentally incapacitated with respect to voting. Baxter advised the supervisors of elections as follows: When notifying voters of potential problems with their registration you should refrain from being accusatory keeping in mind that the information in the list may contain some inaccuracies and is not completely foolproof. Baxter issued another memorandum to the... |
| www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/appendix/dissent.htm Appendix IX THE FLORIDA ELECTION REPORT: DISSENTING STATEMENT BY COMMISSIONER ABIGAIL THERNSTROM AND COMMISSIONER RUSSELL G. REDENBAUGH July 19, 2001 The United States Commission on Civil Rights, charged with the statutory duty to investigate voting rights violations in a fair and objective manner, has produced a report that fails to serve the public interest. Voting Irregularities Occurring in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election is prejudicial, divisive, and injurious to the cause of true democracy and justice in our society. It discredits the Commission itself and substantially diminishes its credibility as the nations protector of our civil rights. Its conclusions are based on a deeply flawed statistical analysis coupled with anecdotal evidence of limited value, unverified by a proper factual investigation. This shaky foundation is used to justify charges of the most serious naturequestioning the legitimacy of the American electoral process and the validity of the most recent presidential election. The reports central findingthat there was widespread disenfranchisement and denial of voting rights in Floridas 2000 presidential electiondoes not withstand even a cursory legal or scholarly scrutiny. Leveling such a serious charge without clear justification is an unwarranted assault upon the publics confidence in American democracy. The statistical analysis in the report is superficial and incomplete. John Lott, an economist at Yale Law School, challenges its main findings. Lott was unable to find a consistent, statistical significant relationship between the share of voters who were African Americans and the ballot spoilage rate. Lott conducted additional analysis beyond the reports parameters, looking at previous elections, demographic changes, and rates of ballot spoilage. Nothing is more fundamental to American democracy than the right to vote and to have valid votes properly counted. Allegations of disenfranchisement are the fertile ground in which a dangerous distrust of American political institutions thrives. By basing its conclusion on allegations that seem driven by partisan interests and that lack factual basis, the majority on the Commission has needlessly fostered public distrust, alienation and manifest cynicism. The report implicitly labels the outcome of the 2000 election as illegitimate, thereby calling into question the most fundamental basis of American democracy. What appears to be partisan passions not only destroyed the credibility of the report itself, but informed the entire process that led up to the final draft. At the Florida hearings, Governor Jeb Bush was the only witness who was not allowed to make an opening statement. Most recently, a request for basic data to which weand indeed, any member of the publicwere entitled was denied to us. The Commission hired Professor Allan Lichtman, an historian at American University, to examine the relationship between spoiled ballots and the race of voters. We asked for a copy of the machine-readable data that Professor Lichtman used to run his correlations and regressions. That is, we wanted his computer runs, the data that went into them, and the regression output that was produced. The Commission told us that it did not existthat the data as he organized it for purposes of analysis was literally unavailable. Professor Lichtman, who knows that as a matter of scholarly convention such data should be shared, also declined to provide it. Even now, five weeks after our first request, we still have not received the multiple regressions and the machine-readable data that were used in them. They are the foundation upon which the Commissions report largely rests. At the June 13 monthly Commission meeting, members of the commission staff and some commissioners argued that this document is not a proper dissent but a dissenting report, and that the commission cannot allow the preparation of a dissenting report. In a July 10 memo, the staff director stated that the Commission does not envision any Commissioner engaging in a complete reanalysis of the staff s work. But it is obviously impossible to write a thorough dissent without reanalyzing the quantitative and other evidence upon which important claims have been based. Perhaps no previous member of the commission has felt the need to write quite such a lengthy critique of a report endorsed by the majority. But the explanation may be that the Commission has never written an important report that so demanded elaborate critical scrutiny. In any event, it is curious that an agency devoted to the protection of minority rights should show so little respect for the freedom of expression of its own members who happen to disagree with the majority on an issue. And that is why it is important to examine, with integrity, possible violations of the electoral process in Florida and other states. When the process is right, participants on another day can revisit the outcomeuse the procedures fair and thus trusted to debate policy or to vote again. But when the process is corrupt, the conclusions themselves current and future are deeply suspect. Lichtman knows that we cannot make meaningful statements about the relationship between one social factor and another without controlling for or holding constant other variables that may affect the relationship we are assessing. Lichtman claims to have carried out a more refined statistical analysis, neither the Commissions report nor his report to the Commission display evidence that he has successfully isolated the effect of race per se from that of other variables that are correlated with race: poverty, income, literacy, and the like. A complex model applied to the Florida data by our own expert, Dr. John Lott, enables us to explain 70 percent of the variance three times as much as Dr. Lichtman was able to account for without using the proportion of African Americans in each county as a variable. Lott was unable to find a consistent, statistically significant relationship between the share of voters who were African American and the ballot spoilage rate. Further, removing race from the equation, but leaving in all the other variables only reduced ballot spoilage rate explained by his regression by a trivial amount. In other words, the best indicator of whether or not a particular county had a high or low rate of ballot spoilage is not its racial composition. Moreover, the majority report speaks repeatedly of the alleged disenfranchisement of minorities or people of color. One section is headed Votes in Communities of Color Less Likely to be Counted. And yet the crucial statistical analysis provided in Chapter 1 entirely ignores Floridas largest minority grouppeople of Hispanic origin. The analysis in the Commissions report thus excluded more Floridians of minority background than it included. Lichtman treats not only Hispanics, but Asians and Native Americans as well as if they were, in effect, white. He dichotomizes the Florida population into two groups, blacks and nonblacks. Lichtman did add one graph dealing with Hispanics in the appendix, but this addition to his statistical analysis is clearly only an afterthought. The Testimony of Witnesses Fails To Support the Claim of Systematic Disenfranchisement Based on witnesses limited and often, uncorroborated accounts, the Commission insists that there were countless allegations involving countless numbers of Floridians who were denied the right to vote. This anecdotal evidence is drawn from the testimony of 26 fact witnesses, residing in only eight of the states 67 counties. In fact, however, many of those who appeared before the Commission testified to the absence of systemic disenfranchisement in Florida. And a witness from Miami-Dade County said she attributed the problems she encountered not to race but rather to inefficient poll workers: I think there are a lot of people that are on jobs that really dont fit them or they are not fit to be in. Without question, some voters did encounter difficulties at the polls, but the evidence fails to support the claim of systematic disenfranchisement. Most of the complaints the Commission heard ... |
| www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm Executive Summary Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election Executive Summary Addressing voting rights issues has been a core responsibility for the United States Commission on Civil Rights since the Commission was founded in 1957. It has general jurisdiction to examine allegations regarding the right of United States citizens to vote and to have their votes counted. These allegations may include, but are not limited to, allegations of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin. Pursuant to its authority, and fulfilling its obligations, members of the Commission staff conducted a preliminary investigation and discovered widespread allegations of voter disenfranchisement in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. The Commissioners voted unanimously to conduct an extensive public investigation into these allegations of voting irregularities. Toward that end, the Commission held three days of hearings in Miami and Tallahassee and, using its subpoena powers, collected more than 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnessesall taken under oathand reviewed more than 118,000 pages of pertinent documents. The Commission carefully selected its subpoenaed witnesses to ensure that it heard testimony on the wide range of issues that had come to light during its preliminary investigation. The Commission also acted to ensure that it heard a broad spectrum of views. It subpoenaed a cross section of witnesses, including Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, members of Governor Bushs Select Task Force on Election Procedures, Standards and Technology, and Floridas attorney general. Additionally, the Commission subpoenaed a number of witnesses who had problems or who had first-hand knowledge of problems during the election, especially those on Election Day. The Commission attempted to ensure that it heard all points of view in a second way. At each of the hearings, it invited the general public to testify once the formal sessions had concluded. There were no time limits on how long these sessions lasted, and they ended only after all witnesses had made their statements and each of the Commissioners present had ample opportunity to ask any and all questions of the witnesses. The witnesses statements and answers to Commissioners questions were under oath. During the three days of hearings, numerous witnesses delivered heartrending accounts of the frustrations they experienced at the polls. Potential voters confronted inexperienced poll workers, antiquated machinery, inaccessible polling locations, and other barriers to being able to exercise their right to vote. The Commissions findings make one thing clear: widespread voter disenfranchisementnot the dead-heat contestwas the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. After carefully and fully examining all the evidence, the Commission found a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act VRA occurred in Florida. The VRA was enacted in 1965 to enforce the 15th Amendments proscription against voting discrimination. It is aimed at both subtle and overt state action that has the effect of denying a citizen the right to vote because of his or her race. Although the VRA originally focused on enfranchising African Americans, the law has been amended several times to also include American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan Natives, and people of Spanish heritage. Additionally, the VRA includes a provision that recognizes the need for multilingual assistance for non-English speakers. Violations of the VRA can be established by evidence that the action or inaction of responsible officials and other evidence constitute a totality of the circumstances that denied citizens their right to vote. The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities. The states highest officials responsible for ensuring efficiency, uniformity, and fairness in the election failed to fulfill their responsibilities and were subsequently unwilling to take responsibility. Disenfranchised Voters Disenfranchised voters are individuals who are entitled to vote, want to vote, or attempt to vote, but who are deprived from either voting or having their votes counted. The most dramatic undercount in the Florida election was the uncast ballots of countless eligible voters who were wrongfully turned away from the polls. Statistical data, reinforced by credible anecdotal evidence, point to the widespread denial of voting rights. It is impossible to determine the extent of the disenfranchisement or to provide an adequate remedy to the persons whose voices were silenced by injustice, ineptitude, and inefficiency. However, careful analysis and some reasonable projections illustrate what happened in Florida. The disenfranchisement of Floridas voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of black voters. The magnitude of the impact can be seen from any of several perspectives: Statewide, based upon county-level statistical estimates, black voters were nearly 10 times more likely than nonblack voters to have their ballots rejected. Estimates indicate that approximately 144 percent of Floridas black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 16 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted. These statewide estimates were corroborated by the results in several counties based on actual precinct data. Poor counties, particularly those with large minority populations, were more likely to possess voting systems with higher spoilage rates than the more affluent counties with significant white populations. There is a high correlation between counties and precincts with a high percentage of African American voters and the percentage of spoiled ballots. For example: Nine of the 10 counties with the highest percentage of African American voters had spoilage rates above the Florida average. Of the 10 counties with the highest percentage of white voters, only two counties had spoilage rates above the state average. Gadsden County, with the highest rate of spoiled ballots, also had the highest percentage of African American voters. Where precinct data were available, the data show that 83 of the 100 precincts with the highest numbers of spoiled ballots are black-majority precincts. The magnitude of the disenfranchisement, including the disparity between black and nonblack voters, is supported by the testimony of witnesses at the Commissions hearings. These witnesses include local election officials, poll workers, ordinary voters, and activists. Among the sworn testimony: One potential voter waited hours at the polls because of a registration mix-up as poll workers attempted to call the office of the supervisor of elections. The call never got through and the individual was not allowed to vote. A former poll worker herself, she testified that she never saw anything like it during her 18 years as a poll worker. A poll worker in Miami-Dade County with 15 years of experience testified, By far this was the worst election I have ever experienced. After that election, I decided I didnt want to work as a clerk anymore. A poll worker in Palm Beach County testified that she had to use her personal cell phone to attempt to contact the election supervisors office. Despite trying all day, she only got through two or three times over the course of 12 hours. A Broward County poll worker testified that in past elections it took about 10 minutes to get through to the elections supervisor. During the course of the November 2000 election, she turned away approximately 4050 potential voters because she could not access the supervisor of elections. A Boynton Beach poll worker explained how his precinct workers turned away about 3050 poten... |
| www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/2071226.htm -> www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/2071226.htm?1c The answer: under almost all scenarios, Bush still would have won. Indeed, in one of the great ironies of the bitter 2000 election, Bushs lead would have vanished only if the recount had been conducted under severely restrictive standards advocated by some Republicans. There is some ammunition in the review for Gore supporters - though it requires calling into question the manual recounts in Broward and Palm Beach counties. The review found that canvassing boards in those counties discarded hundreds of ballots that bore marks no different from those on scores of ballots that were accepted as valid presidential votes. Had those ballots instead been counted as valid votes, allowing dimples, pinpricks and hanging chads, Gore would be in the White House today. VALIDATION CLAIMED The multiple layers of The Heralds findings allowed both parties to claim validation Tuesday of their positions during the protracted election dispute. Marc Racicot expressed satisfaction with the broad results of the review, but rejected any suggestion that additional ballots could have been salvaged and the outcome might have changed. We have a problem with efforts by different people in different places at different times trying to discern what other people really meant to do, Racicot said. They accepted the fact that President Bush won under any reasonable scenario. The decision made by the American people now is numerically confirmed by The Herald and its partners. At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer said: The president believes, just as the American people do, that this election was settled months ago. Bob Poe, chairman of Floridas Democratic Party, said The Heralds review shows that many official tallies were incomplete and inaccurate. My feeling is still that more people went to the polls to vote for Al Gore than went to vote for George W. This tells us that the system has some major flaws that need to be improved. Said Doug Hattaway, a former Gore campaign spokesman: If you count every vote, Gore wins. This study confirms that Floridas election system failed the voters. The Heralds findings underscore the agonizing closeness of last falls presidential election and the vital importance of - and tumultuous debates over - the various standards that can be employed to gauge punch-card ballots. Though this portion of the project examined only undervotes, The Herald, Knight Ridder, several other Florida newspapers and USA Today also are conducting a full review of at least 110,000 overvotes - ballots for which machines recorded more than one presidential candidate. That project should be concluded within a month, but those results will not affect the conclusions of the undercount review because the Florida Supreme Court excluded overvotes from its sweeping recount. In addition, a group of national news organizations and Florida newspapers has hired a University of Chicago research center to conduct a statewide survey of undervotes and overvotes. Regardless of the ballot reviews, debate is likely to continue over the outcome of last years presidential election, the closest in 124 years. While the ballot reviews accentuate how imprecise numbers released on Election Night can be, election officials nationwide say the possibility of human error is so great that it is almost impossible to conduct a mistake-free election. That imprecision is not an issue, they say, except when the results are extremely close - as they were in Florida. His final lead would have fallen to 884 if dimples were counted as presidential votes only on ballots that had dimples in other races. His lead would have dwindled to 363 if votes were counted only when a punch-card chad was detached by at least two corners, perhaps the most common standard applied nationally. And his margin of victory would have disappeared, replaced by a Gore lead of only three votes, if only clean punches were accepted. That nearly invisible Gore advantage - 000005 percent of the 59 million votes cast by Floridians - is so tiny that it leaves the outcome in question. Like the all-inclusive standard, the severely restrictive clean-punch standard is rarely employed. Among two dozen states that impose standards on manual recounts of undervotes, only Indiana insists on cleanly punched chads. Nevertheless, many Republicans have advocated that standard since The Heralds ballot review began more than three months ago. The context in which we viewed this entire recount is that, the election is over and there is only one legal standard for a vote, the standard that was in place when people went in to vote, and that was a clear punch, Portia Palmer, a spokeswoman for the Republican Party of Florida, recently told The Herald. Contrary to popular belief, mismarks for Gore were less likely than mismarks for Bush in punch-card counties. Marks of some type were found in the Bush position on one ballot for every 172 valid Bush punch-card votes; Though some canvassing boards in optical-scan counties conducted such reviews on Election Night, most boards around the state did not. Had all canvassing boards in all counties examined all undervotes, thousands of votes would have been salvaged in Broward County, Palm Beach County and elsewhere long before the election dispute landed in court - and the outcome might have been different, The Herald found. In that scenario, under the most inclusive standard, Gore might have won Floridas election - and the White House - by 393 votes, The Herald found. If dimples were counted as votes only when other races were dimpled, Gore would have won by 299 votes. But if ballots were counted as votes only when a chad was detached by at least two corners the standard most commonly used nationally, Bush would have won by 352 votes. The ballot review also accentuated the latitude local elections officials enjoy under state law to establish standards and practices that can differ from those employed in other counties. For example, nearly all optical-scan systems can alert voters to errors on their ballots - if scanners are deployed in each precinct. But Herald reviewers found that some elections officials intentionally dont use the scanning equipments full capabilities. The result: voters in some counties are able to correct fewer errors than voters in other counties. One consequence of this latitude was clear in Escambia County, where vote tabulating equipment was programmed to flag as undervotes only those ballots on which no votes were apparent anywhere. When Escambia was ordered by the Florida Supreme Court to recount its undervotes, it only examined ballots that fit that limited definition - a total of 16. Nine votes went to Gore and six went to Bush, a net gain of three for Gore. But when The Herald insisted that Escambia identify ballots where no votes were tabulated specifically in the presidential race, the county presented 677 ballots for inspection. Of those, 20 were deemed to be votes for Bush and 45 were deemed to be votes for Gore - a net gain of 25 for the former vice-president. ACCESS REQUESTED The Herald requested access to undervotes in all 67 Florida counties on Dec. Under its agreement with The Herald, BDOs accountants noted what kind of mark was present on each ballot and the marks location, then totaled the marks of various kinds and reported them to The Herald. But BDO made no effort to determine voter intent or whether a mark on a ballot was a legally valid vote. Reporters from The Herald, other Knight Ridder newspapers and USA Today also reviewed every undervote ballot and made separate and independent assessments of their characteristics. That effort was designed as a statistical check of variation between observers, but was not considered in the tabulations BDO reported. Of the 64,248 ballots inspected by BDO, only 42,897 came from precincts affected by the Florida Supreme Court order or from counties that did not complete the recount before the United States Supreme Court issued its stay. The state court specifically excluded from the statewide recount Broward, Palm Beach, Volusia and 139 precincts in Miami-Dade where manual recounts already had been conducted. In addition,... |
| democrats.com Roland X writes, "Tens of millions of Americans will vote for George W Bush no matter what. If a nuclear attack occurs on our soil and executive negligence can be conclusively proven, they'll vote for him. If he personally executes Nancy Pelosi in the Oval Office, they'll vote for him (and think she deserved it). If he piles the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and Jefferson's personal letters on the White House lawn and uses them to light a barbecue on national television, they'll vote for him. Because John Kerry is a Democrat (and a real one, at that). That means he's pro-choice, pro-environment, believes in freedom of religion, supports GLBT rights, and wants to keep the government involved in health care and social programs. His Purple Hearts, record as a prosecutor, and relentless defense of first responders are irrelevant. New Photo Proves 'Military Intelligence' Supervised Torture of Iraqi Prisoners "Abusive treatment under the supervision of military intelligence officers may have been intentionally used as part of the interrogation of Iraqi captives at the Abu Ghraib prison, according to a previously unpublished photograph of US soldiers and other personnel obtained by NBC News. The photograph was taken during the interrogation of several Iraqi prisoners who are depicted naked in a heap on the floor, according to a military police officer who faces a court-martial in connection with alleged abuses at the notorious facility. Graner identified four other soldiers in the photograph, labeled Nos. He now asks, "Do we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home?" He confesses, "I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq -- from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence -- because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. And he gets it right, finally: "There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that's getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so. It has always been more important for the Bush folks to defeat liberals at home than Baathists abroad." BushRice Missed 3 Chances to Kill Al-Zarqawi On 3/2/04, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported: "long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself - but never pulled the trigger." In June 2002, "the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council." Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam. The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late - Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. "Here's a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we're suffering as a result inside Iraq." GOP's Claim that they Want to Suppress Abuse Images to Avoid 'Inflaming Tensions' is Totally Bogus "Top GOP leaders said Wednesday they oppose the release of hundreds of fresh images showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, saying they could compromise the prosecution of those soldiers implicated in the acts and further inflame tensions in Iraq." Funny, concern for inflaming tensions in Iraq hasn't kept Bush and the GOP from rounding up and refusing all legal rights to thousands of Muslims, from trashing the Middle East Road map (said by scores of diplomats to be the most inflammatory action Bush could possibly have taken), from killing hundreds of citizens in Falluja and leveling their homes or from appointing as ambassador to Iraq a man known to have condoned and covered up torture, rape and murder. The final sentence of his memoirs completed, Bill Clinton is back, ripping into President George Bush's handling of the crisis in Iraq, and signalling that he intends to play a role in the race for the White House. Liberated from literature, the old master is limbering up anew for political action. "The gravity of the case endangers peace and national security. Mundarain said that the Venezuelan government would go to the Iberoamerican Federation Ombudsman and to the United Nations to denounce US interference in Venezuelan politics. Venezuela's OAS Ambassador: mercenaries and coup-plotters trying to foment chaos Venezuela's Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Jorge Valero has told OAS delegates that Miami-based anti-Castro groups, mercenaries and Venezuelan coup-plotters are trying to foment chaos in Venezuela by hiring right wing Colombian mercenaries to do their dirty work for them. Valero says some 100 paramilitaries are currently in Venezuelan custody and that they were hired by "the same coup-mongering and terrorist sectors, civilian and military, that hatched the failed coup d'etat against President Hugo Chavez Frias on April 11, 2002." As other administration policy initiatives - such as a manned mission to Mars - have languished in Congress, Bush has emphasized the importance of renewing the Patriot Act this year, even though provisions of the law don't expire until the end of next year. Late last month, Bush launched a national tour to press Congress to reauthorize the controversial law immediately. Many Democrats and some conservatives have criticized the law as overly broad and intrusive." Thus "Torture" is redefined as "abuse," "excesses," and "humiliation." Michael Kunzelman was supposed to reunite with his family this month. Already, 51 percent of the 350,000-strong Army National Guard has been activated since the Sept. But then most of what the corporate media puts out now is rightwing COMMENTARY, not real reporting. At the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, there is concern about the strengthening of the opinion that America got itself into the mud only to help Israel in its endless war against the Arabs. But from the moment the wheel turned, and Iraq became a second Vietnam - a war without reason or purpose - the inevitable fallout from America's weakness has landed on Israel, its satellite in the region. Vietnam Vet Furious that Kerry's Courageous Honesty in Speaking out against War has been Assailed Vietnam vet Jerry DiGrezio Hollis went to Vietnam believing he was striking a blow for freedom and democracy. Additionally, seeing what actually happened there and then reading the hometown newspaper accounts of what the government released to the media was in many instances totally different. " Today, says Hollis, "I am especially frustrated in the fact that Sen. Well, at least until the Green Party placed its loyalty to its principles (principles like not allowing the environment to be raped and pillaged another four years by Bush) over its loyalty to Nader. So then Nader became an Independent, peddling his most passionate principle - promoting Nader - from state to state. Rejected by state after state, Nader, like an aging hooker, decided to take what he could get and now "welcomes" the backing of the Reform Party - a party that embraces many prinicples that run counter to those Nader once said he believed in. Why Didn't Filmed Beheading of Italian Hostage Provoke Same Outrage in US Media and Repugs as Berg? This April 14 report by CBS is typical of the coverage of the filmed beheading by terrorists of Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi. It is dispassionate, brief, and cuts quickly back to other events in Iraq. It is a far cry from the huge play Nick Berg's death is receiving, both in the media and by Repugs like Lindsey Graham or James Inhofe who point to the crime as justification of abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Guess Fabrizio Quattrocchi had the added misfortune of not being killed at a time when his death would be politically expedient for Bush and his pals in the media and Congress. Islamic Group Condemns Berg Slaying Al Jazeera: "The Lebanese political group Hizb Allah has condemned the beheading of an American hostage in Iraq as an ugly crime that flouted the tenets of Islam. However, "Hizb Allah said Berg's killing had diverted... |