How the election was stolen for Bush in 2000
And the same in 2004
“In the only county that's a majority African-American,” he adds, “you want a decreased turnout.”
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VANITY FAIR      October   2004 — Amid the media frenzy after the election, one story went untold — the one in the footnote that Scalia had asked Ginsburg to delete from her dissent.   In fact, thousands of African-Americans in Florida had been stripped of their right to vote.
Adora Obi Nweze, the president of the Florida State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., went to her polling place and was told she couldn't vote because she had voted absentee — even though she hadn't.
Cathy Jackson of Broward, who'd been a registered voter since 1996, showed up at the polls and was told she was not on the rolls.
After seeing a white woman casting an affidavit ballot, she asked if she could do the same.
She was turned down.
Donnise DeSouza of Miami was also told that she wasn't on the rolls.
She was moved to the "problem line"; soon thereafter, the polls closed, and she was sent home.
Lavonna Lewis was on the rolls.   But after waiting in line for hours, the polls closed.
She was told to leave, while a white man was allowed to get in line, she says.
U.S. congresswoman Corrine Brow, who was followed into her polling place by a local television crew, was told her ballot had been sent to Washington, D.C., and so she couldn't vote in Florida.
Only after two and a half hours was she allowed to cast her ballot.
Brown had registered thousands of students from 10 Florida colleges in the months prior to the election.
"We put them on buses," she says," took them down to the supervisor 's office.   Had them register.   When it came time to vote, they were not on the rolls!
"Wallace McDonald of Hillsborough County went to the polls and was told he couldn't vote because he was a felon — even though he wasn't.
The phone lines at the N.A.A.C.P. offices were ringing off the hook with stories like these.
"What happened that day — I can't even put it in words anymore," says Donna Brazile, Gore 's campaign manager, whose sister was asked for three forms of identification in Seminole County before she was allowed to vote.
"It was the most painful, dehumanizing, demoralizing thing I've ever experienced in my years of organizing."
For African-Americans it was the latest outrage perpetrated by Jeb Bush's government.
During his unsuccessful bid for governor in '94,Jeb was asked what he would do for the African-American community.
"Probably nothing," he answered.
In November 1999,he announced his One Florida Initiative, in which, with the stroke of a pen, he ended mandatory affirmative-action quotas by cutting off preferential treatment in the awarding of state contracts, university admissions, and government hiring.
Tom Hill, then a state representative, and U.S. congressman Kendrick Meek, then a 33-year-old state senator, staged a 25-hour sit-in outside Jeb 's office."
[The initiative was done] without any consultation from the legislators, students, teachers, the people who were going to be affected," says Meek.   Jeb wasn't moved by their presence.
"Kick their asses out," he told an aide.
(He later claimed to be referring to reporters stationed near the sit-in.)
Energized, African-Americans marched through Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale.
They also registered to vote.
By Election Day 2000, 934,261 blacks were registered, up by early 100,000 since 1996.   Election Day itself felt like payback.
Jesse Jackson immediately took up the cause in the streets of Florida, but at that point the facts were simply too sketchy, too anecdotal, too mixed up with simple bureaucratic ineptness to prove any kind of conspiracy.
Anyone wanting to get Gore into the White House believed that hitching the cause to Jackson was madness; they wanted the middle, not the lefty fringe.
Through a request from Brazile, Gore asked Jackson to get out of the way.
In retrospect, the claims of disenfranchisement were hardly phony.
In January and February 2001,the U.S.Commission on Civil Rights, the highly divided, highly partisan government-appointed group formed in 1957, heard more than 30 hours of damning testimony from more than 100 witnesses.
The report, which came out in June of that year, made a strong case that the election violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The commissioners duly passed their report up to newly installed attorney general Ashcroft.
Little was done.
Strong as the report from the Commission was, it did not yet have the full story.
The disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida was embedded in many facets of the election — from the equipment used to the actions of key local election officials, to the politically motivated manipulation of arcane Florida law, to the knowing passivity of Jeb Bush himself.
Nowhere was that more obvious than in Gadsden County.
Twenty minutes west of Tallahassee, Gadsden is one of Florida's poorest counties.
African-Americans make up 57 percent of the population, the largest percentage of any county in the state.
Even so, the 2000 election was run by a white conservative supervisor, in this case the late Denny Hutchinson.
"He thought things were 'fine as they were,'" says the extra-large and jolly Ed Dixon, Gadsden County commissioner, strolling down the town's early empty main drag in an enormous basketball jersey.
"He never advocated for anything."
Hutchinson's uncle had been supervisor before him.
Denny, though he was a Democrat — a virtual prerequisite for election in Gadsden — spoke openly about giving money to George Bush, according to a source.
When the commissioners wanted to put in more polling places to accommodate the increase in registration, Hutchinson wouldn't budge.
"He never advocated for any increased precincts, even though some of our people had to drive 30 miles to get to a poll," says Dixon.
"In the only county that's a majority African-American," he adds, "you want a decreased turnout."
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VANITY FAIR      October   2004 —
In November 2000, Shirley Green Knight, Hutchinson's deputy, a soft-spoke African-American, had recently defeated him for the office of elections supervisor, though she had yet to assume the office.
After the votes had been tallied, she noticed something strange: more than 2,000 ballots, out of 14,727 cast, had not been included in the registered count.
How had this happened?
Because of a very technical but profoundly important detail.  
The central optiscan machine used in Gadsden had a sorting switch which when put in the "on" position would cause the machine to record overvotes or undervotes in a separate category for possible review.
After the election, Knight says, she learned that Hutchinson had demanded that the switch be kept off.
"I have no idea why he would do that," says Knight.   Seeing how many ballots ever got counted, she urged him to run them through the machine again — this time with the sorting switch on — but he resisted.
Hutchinson was finally over-ruled by the Gadsden canvassing board.
They looked at the rejected ballots.   Sure enough, they were overvotes — and for good reason.
Gadsden had used a variation of the cater-pillar ballot, in which the candidates' names appeared in two columns.
One column listed Bush, Gore, and six others.
The next column listed two more candidates — Monica Moorehead and Howard Phillips — as well as a line that said, "Write-In Candidate."
Thinking they were voting in different races, hundreds of voters had filled in a circle for one candidate in each column, thereby voting twice for president.
Others filled in the circle for Gore and then, wanting to be extra clear, wrote "Gore "in the write-in space.
All these votes were tossed.
In some optiscan counties, such overvotes would have been spit right back at the voter, giving him a chance to correct his mistake on the spot.
But Gadsden, like many other poor counties, used a cheaper system, in which overvotes would only register at the central optical-scanner machine, denying the voter a chance to correct his mistake.
Roberts and Harris should have been aware of this crucial discrepancy.
Neighboring Leo County used the more expensive machinery, and technicians there had warned the Division of Elections well before Election Day of the disparate impact these two different systems would have.
They had even set up a demonstration of the superior machines across the street from the division offices in Tallahassee.
Some of the faulty ballots in Gadsden were counted in those first days after the election as part of the county 's "automatic recount," giving Gore a net gain of 153.
Those votes, at least, were included in the certified state count.
21,000 votes never counted.
Three hours east in Duval County, however, voters weren't as lucky.
Here, in a county that includes Jacksonville, which is 29 percent black, 21,000 votes were thrown out for being overvotes, and here, an overvote was even more likely than in Gadsden.
Prior to the election, the elections supervisor, John Stafford, had placed a sample-ballot insert in the local papers instructing citizens to vote every page.
Any voter who followed this instruction invalidated his or her ballot in the process.
During the critical 72-hour period in which manual recounts could be requested, Mike Langton, chairman of the northeast Florida region for the Gore campaign, spent hours with Stafford, a white Republican.
"I asked John Stafford how many under-and-overvotes there were, and he said, 'Oh, just a few,'" recalls Langton.
Then, shortly after the deadline to ask for a recount had passed, Stafford revealed that the number of over-votes was actually 21,000.
Nearly half of those were from four black precincts that normally vote over 90 percent Democratic.
Today, Stafford remains silent about what happened four years ago.
His assistant, Dick Carlberg, will speak, but only in the presence of his attorney.
He claims he sent an e-mail to the state's Division of Elections two days after the election — before the deadline to ask for a manual recount — informing the Division of Elections of the thousands of overvotes.
"I was told, 'O.K.,' and that was about it," Carlberg says.
If the Gadsden and Duval stories might be characterized as a kind of disenfranchisement by conscious neglect, a much more sinister story began to emerge in the months following the election.
Convicted felon — while out of the country serving in the armed forces
Throughout Florida, people — many of them black men, such as Willie Steen, a decorated Gulf War veteran — went to the polls and were informed that they couldn't vote, because they were convicted felons — even though they weren't.
"The poll worker looked at the computer and said that there was something about me being a felon," says Steen, who showed up at his polling place in Hillsborough County, young son in tow.
Florida is one of just seven states that deny former felons the right to vote, but Steen wasn't a felon.
"I've never been arrested before in my life," Steen told the woman.
A neighbor on line behind him heard the whole exchange.
Steen tried to hide his embarrassment and quietly pleaded with the poll worker, How could I have ended up on the list?
She couldn't give him an answer.
As the line lengthened, she grew impatient.
"She brushed me off and said, 'Hey, get to the side,'" recalls Steen.
The alleged felony, Steen later learned, took place between 1991 and 1993 — when he was stationed in the Persian Gulf.
Steen wasn't the only upstanding black citizen named Willie on the list.
So was Willie Dixon, a Tampa youth leader and pastor, and Willie Whiting, a pastor in Tallahassee.
In Jacksonville, Roosevelt Cobbs learned through the mail that he, too, was a felon, though he wasn't.
The same thing happened to Roosevelt Lawrence.
Throughout the state, scores of innocent people found themselves on the purge list.
The story got little attention at the time.
Only Greg Palast, a fringe, old-school investigator, complete with fedora, was on its trail.
With a background in racketeering investigation for the government, Palast broke part of the story while the recount was still going on, but he did it in England, in The Observer.
None of the mainstream media in the U.S. would touch it.
"Stories of black people losing rights is passé, it's not discussed, no one cares," says Palast, whose reporting on the subject appears in his 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
"A black person accused of being a felon is always guilty."
Felony clause — way to deny black people the vote
How the state ended up with the "felon list " in the first place has its roots in one of the uglier chapters in American history.
In 1868, Florida, as a way of keeping former slaves away from the polls, put in its constitution that prisoners would permanently be denied the right to vote unless they were granted clemency by the governor.
In those days, and for nearly a hundred years after, a black man looking at a white woman was cause for arrest.
The felony clause was just one of many measures taken to keep blacks off the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and "grandfather clauses," by which a man could vote only if his grandfather had.
All these other methods were effectively ended.
But the constitutional provision about former felons remained.
In Florida, there are an estimated 700,000 ex-felons, and 1 in 4 is a black male.
Six years ago, Florida state representative Chris Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, sat outside a local Winn-Dixie grocery store trying to get people to register.
"A lot of black men that looked like me, around my age, would just walk past me and say,' Felony,' 'Felony,' and not even attempt to register to vote," Smith recalls.
Why so many?
In the past few years the majority-Republican legislature has upgraded certain misdemeanors to felonies and also created dozens of new felonies that disproportionately affect the urban poor.
Intercepting police communications with a ham radio is a felony.
So is the cashing of two unemployment checks after the recipient has gotten a new job.
State senator Frederica Wilson, like other black lawmakers in Florida, believes these felonies are "aimed at African-America people."
Meanwhile, black lawmakers have tried in vain to legislate rights restoration to some offenders who have served their sentences.
Wilson recalls one such proposal that was smacked down by Republican state senator Anna Cowin, head of the Ethics and Elections Committee.
"I literally begged her, 'Please just agenda it,'" says Wilson. "She would not agenda it."
"I philosophically did not believe that felons should automatically get their rights restored," says Cowin, "and neither did the governor nor the leadership.
"She adds," It makes elections very expensive too, because you have all these thousands and thousands of people — I mean tens of thousands of people — to send literature to....The people don't come to vote, anyway.   So I think people need to go through a hoop."
James Klinakis, who, like many ex-felons in Florida, is a recovering drug addict, has had some experience with what Cowin calls "a hoop."
For the past five years, Klinakis, the operations director for a drug-rehab program called Better Way of Miami, has been invited by Governor Bush to the annual drug summit, where he advises Bush on drug issues.
For 10 years he has been applying to have his voting rights restored, a process that has included everything from a one-page form to a college-application-size package, complete with references, letters, and soul-searching essays.
Like thousands of others, Klinakis has seen no movement on his case whatsoever.
While some governors, such as Reubin Askew and Bob Graham, restored the rights of tens of thousands of felons who'd served their time, Jeb Bush allowed the backlog of applicants to grow to as many as 62,000 in 2002.
Four million dollars cost to Florida state to acquire felons list.
The law that disenfranchises felons took on a new life after the 1997 Miami mayoral race, in which a number of dead people "voted," as did 105 felons.
Seventy percent of those felons found on voter rolls were registered Democrats.
Weeks later, the state legislature went to work on a sweeping anti-fraud bill.
It called for stricter enforcement of the constitutional provision and stated that "the division shall annually contract with a private entity "to maintain a list of deceased individuals still on the rolls, those adjudicated "mentally incompetent" to vote, and, most important, felons.
The appropriations committee allocated $4 million to the project; no money was appropriated from the state for voter education in 1998,1999,or 2000.
When the state started soliciting bids for the high-tech felon hunt, at least three companies stepped up.
One bid only $10,000
One was Computer Business Services; another, Professional Analytical Systems & Software, bid under $10,000.
After three rounds of bidding, Database Technologies, a Boca Raton company (since merged with ChoicePoint), emerged the winner.
In its proposal, DBT estimated the cost at $4 million, knowing somehow that this was the exact amount the state had provided for the job.
"There has been four million dollars allocated by the state for this project, "DBT senior vice president of operations George Bruder wrote to his boss, C.E.O. Chuck Lieppe, in an e-mail.
"The bid we are constructing will have three different levels for price (a little bird told me this will help)."
The little bird was correct.
Exactly what kind of company was hired to clean up Florida's rolls of felons, or "dirtbags," as one DBT employee referred to them?
DBT supported — and was highly praised by — a now defunct conservative advocacy group called the Voting Integrity Project (V.I.P.).
Touting "voting rights," V.I.P. sprang into action in 1996 in response to the national "motor voter " law, which passed in 1993.
The law had increased voter registration nationwide by an estimated seven million, with minorities constituting a disproportionate number of those new voters.
While some members of the Division of Elections were appalled by the price tag, Secretary of State Sandra Mortham, according to a source formerly inside the division, nursed the felon list along as her pet project.
Ethel Baxter, the director of the division under Mortham and a civil servant for 30 years, working under both Republicans and Democrats, was reportedly skeptical of the idea.
But Mortham, according to this source, instructed her to sign on to it.   (Mortham says that she had no investment in the project, and that, regardless of how Baxter felt, they were obligated to fulfill a legislative action.)
From the start, there were questions about the felon list.   "We were sent this purge list in August of 1998,"says Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho, moving feverishly through his cluttered office.
"We started sending letters and contacting voters, [saying] that we had evidence that they were potential felons and that they contact us or they were going to be removed from the rolls.
Boy, did that cause a firestorm.
"One of those letters was sent to Sancho's friend Rick Johnson, a civil-rights attorney, who was no felon.   "Very few felons," Sancho points out, "are members of the Florida bar."
Sancho decided to get to the bottom of it.
State did just the opposite — it stipulated criteria change from 80 percent to 70 percent name match
"Because after the first year they weren't getting enough names."
Early in 2000 he sat down with Emmett "Bucky "Mitchell, the Division of Elections ' assistant general counsel, and demanded to know why the list contained so many names of innocent people.
"Bucky told me face-to-face that the Division of Elections was working on the problem," recalls Sancho, "that it was the vendor's [DBT 's] problem, and that they were telling the vendor to correct it."
James Lee, chief marketing officer of ChoicePoint, the company that acquired DBT in the spring of 2000, says that the state did just the opposite.
"Between the 1998 run and the 1999 run, the office of elections relaxed the criteria from 80 percent to 70 percent name match," says Lee.   "Because after the first year they weren't getting enough names."
And so, equipped with a database of felons supplied by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (F.D.L.E.), DBT programmers crouched at their computers and started scooping up names, many of which were only partial matches, from the Florida voter rolls and various other databases.
Middle initials didn't need to be the same; suffixes, such as Jr. and Sr., were ignored.
Willie D. Whiting Jr., pastor, was caught because Willie J. Whiting was a felon.
First and middle names could be switched around: Deborah Ann, Ann Deborah — same thing.
Nicknames were fine — Robert, Bob, Bobby.
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The Path to Florida
The spelling of the last name didn't have to be exact, either.
The only thing Willie Steen was guilty of was having a name similar to that of a felon named Willie O 'Steen.
DBT project manager Marlene Thorogood expressed concern in a March 1999 e-mail to the Division of Elections that the new parameters might result in "false positives " (i.e., wrongly included people).
Bucky Mitchell wrote back, explaining the state's position: "Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren't matches and let the [elections] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether."
Guilty until proved innocent, in other words.
In May 2000, supervisors got a new list, for the upcoming election, and discovered that it included 8,000 names from Texas.
But the Texans, now living in Florida, weren't guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors.
DBT took the blame, claiming a computer glitch, and hastily corrected the problem.
How, though, had Texans gotten on the list in the first place?
Texas was a state that automatically restored the rights of felons who had served their time.
According to two separate Florida court rulings rendered before the 2000 election, prisoners who'd had their rights restored in other states retained them when they moved across state lines to Florida.
Instead, the Division of Elections was advised by the Office of Executive Clemency to have DBT include out-of-state ex-felons residing in Florida, even those from so-called automatic-restoration states.
In order to vote, these ex-felons would have to show written proof of clemency from their former state, or re-apply for it in Florida.
Janet Modrow, the state's liaison with DBT, wrote to Mitchell, "On the good side, we can add all the [states] that do have automatic restoration because they will have to get Florida Clemency.
On the bad side, you will still have to check with those [states] that formally give clemency for each hit as before."
Not that the clemency data was complete.
Some of the clemency information had not been computerized, and existed only on three-by-five note cards in what looked like shoeboxes, says Sancho.
This included the thousands of Florida ex-felons who'd had their rights automatically restored under Governor Askew, between 1975 and 1978.
Information of Arrests not convictions
Information from the F.D.L.E. — the starting point for DBT 's "data mining " — was even less reliable.
This was a database of arrests, not convictions.
Thousands were designated as "adjudication withheld " — meaning no conviction.
Others were only misdemeanors.
In sum, says Sancho, "they pulled up the entire universe of all potential felons that they found in everybody 's database."
When the "corrected "list went out to all 67 supervisors in late May 2000, many were stunned.
Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, found her own name on it.
In Monroe County, the supervisor, Harry Sawyer, found his dad on the list, as well as one of his seven employees and the husband of another; none of them were felons.
As a result of the mistakes, a couple of counties, including Broward and Palm Beach, decided not to use the list.
33 verified out of 697
Sancho, whose list had 697 names on it, went through them one by one, scrupulously checking.
"We went for a five-for-five match," says Sancho.   "Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number.   When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33."
Other elections supervisors did no such investigation.
In Bay County, where the list contained approximately 1,000 names, elections officials essentially took it at face value.
Once he got the list, says Larry Roxby, deputy elections supervisor,"it was pretty much a done deal.
"In Miami-Dade, whose lists contained about 7,000 people, Supervisor David Leahy sent out letters, informing people of their felony status and advising that they could come in for a hearing if they wanted to appeal.
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If he didn't hear back from them, these names were simply struck.
Throughout the state, many of these letters came back "undeliverable."
Small wonder: the addresses provided by DBT were often out-of-date.
A few of the more dutiful supervisors found themselves taking on the extra role of citizens 'advocates.
In Hillsborough County, Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio, now the mayor of Tampa, sent out letters to all 3,258 people on her list.
If they appealed, she worked with them to try to keep them on the rolls.
Roosevelt Lawrence was one such person.
"We were going back to the state and saying, 'This gentleman has the following facts: here are the facts, this is what he is saying,'" Iorio recalls.
"'He lived a lawful life for over 40 years and he 's been employed here and done this.'   Twice they said, 'No, that's incorrect.'   In writing....And he never voted in the 2000 election."
Lawrence continued to protest; finally, the F.D.L.E. realized its record on Roosevelt was wrong.
$4 million for shoddy work?
Why was the state prepared to pay $4 million for such shoddy work?
A class-action suit brought by the N.A.A.C.P. and a number of African-American voters in 2001 accused DBT, Harris, and several individual supervisors of disenfranchising black voters.
Beyond the unreliable matching criteria the state had demanded, beyond the flawed data it had provided from the Office of Executive Clemency and the F.D.L.E., evidence and testimony from the suit suggests that the state had failed to properly monitor whether DBT was fulfilling its contract.
For example, the 1998 contract stipulated "manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling."
But DBT vice president George Bruder testified, "I am not aware of any telephone calls that were made."
The suit ended in settlement agreements, in September 2002, that appeared to rectify the problem for the future.
The state agreed to restore to its rolls the out-of-state felons from "automatic restoration" states.
DBT agreed to run the names from the 1999 and 2000 purge lists using stricter criteria, and to provide to Florida's elections supervisors the names of people who most likely shouldn't have been on the list.
The list of potentially wrongly targeted voters came to 20,000 — more than a third of DBT s May 2000 list.
2004 Jeb Bush still not purged list of errors
The supervisors, in turn, were supposed to restore these names to their voting rolls, had they been wrongly purged.
More than two years later, with the election of 2004 looming, Jeb Bush 's government has utterly failed to uphold its end of the bargain.
Virtually none of the 20,000 people erroneously purged from Florida 's rolls have been reinstated in any formalized way.
In September 2003, DBT and the state did manage to finish vetting the list and to send out a so-called filtered list to the elections supervisors to "re-evaluate."
No deadline was imposed for restoring the innocents, and little direction on the subject came from the state.
If supervisors wanted to restore the names, they could; if they wanted to ignore the task, they could do that too.
Some supervisors have worked with the filtered list to restore names.
But others have put it aside; as of June, more than a few had no recollection of ever receiving it.   (After prodding from advocacy groups, the state re-set the list.)
In Miami-Dade, the filtered list had more than 17,000 names.
Of those, to date, only 14 voters wrongly identified as felons have been restored to the voting rolls.
These are just the snarls of the old ex-felon list.
But in Florida, it seems, there 's always another angle.
New purge
Last May the Division of Elections attempted a new purge, with a brand-new felon list.
This list came to 48,000 names.   Accompanying it was a memo to the supervisors from Ed Kast, director of the Division of Elections, informing them to start the purging process.
For Ion Sancho it started another firestorm.
"I asked my staff, 'Look through [the list] and do a cursory exam.
Nothing detailed.
What can you tell me?'
They identified a dozen people who they recognized right off the bat weren't felons,"
Sancho says, storming about his office.
At least the list hadn't been generated by DBT.
But, incredibly, despite a mandate from the embarrassed legislature that no private company should ever again undertake such work for the state, the new list had been prepared with the help of Accenture.
Formerly known as Andersen Consulting, once the consulting arm of Andersen Worldwide, the former parent company of Arthur Andersen, Accenture has contributed $25,000 to Republicans in Florida.
The company is currently the subject of a Department of Justice investigation for possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribing foreign officials.
Its address in Bermuda has prompted some members of Congress to question if the company is dodging taxes.   (An Accenture spokesman says that the company pays taxes in the U.S.)
In 2001, in the wake of the DBT debacle, the legislature, with the support of elections supervisors, passed a law making the association of court clerks responsible for the database used for any and all felon information.
After all, the clerks of the courts were independent officers and the only source with actual conviction data.
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State ignored law — too expensive
But the state ended up ignoring the law, claiming their services were too expensive.
According to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a recently uncovered e-mail showed that, in fact, the clerks of the courts had agreed to meet the price the state wanted.
"The Division of Elections wanted control," concludes Sancho.
So it farmed out work to Accenture — for at least $1.6 million.
Jenny Nash, spokes-woman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, defends the state 's action in hiring Accenture.
"Accenture was brought in to help develop the database," she says."   They do not operate it, own it, or maintain it."
This time, Sancho wasn't the only elections supervisor fed up.
"Why did we wait until the presidential year for this?" Linda Howell, of Madison County, asks.   "I don't think it's our place to have to clean up the state's problem," says Bob Sweat, of Manatee County.
And so, in mid-June, the supervisors, many of them grandmothers with colorful pantsuits and orangey hairdos, gathered in the Key West Hilton hotel for the twice-yearly supervisors' conference to give Ed Kast a piece of their collective mind.
Beverly Hill, of Alachua County, stood up to announce she had found a half-dozen people on the new list who had erroneously appeared in 2000.   "They're back on the list!"
Kay Clem, of Indian River County, reported that among the first 20 names examined "one has no record!  The other has a pending disposition!"
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As if the supervisors weren't already alarmed enough, they had just been advised by Cathy Lannon, of the attorney general's office, not to speak to any of the potential felons on the telephone, in order to avoid off-the-record interactions.
Kast seemed to let the chaos wash right over him.
What did he care?  He had resigned as head of the Division of Elections 24 hours earlier to "pursue other interests."
For weeks, liberal advocacy groups such as the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way urged the supervisors to let them see the list so they could help vet it for accuracy, and avoid a repeat of the debacle of 2000.
On May 12,in one of Kast's last moves in his post, he sent a memo to the supervisors, detailing how to thwart the request, citing statutes about the privacy of voter-registration information and the will of the legislature — even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns.
"This is the closest thing I've ever seen to an intimidation letter to come out of the Division of Elections," says Sancho.   (Kast could not be reached for comment.)
As with many things concerning the Florida government, it would take a lawsuit to get any traction.
In late May, CNN, with the support of Senator Bill Nelson, filed suit against the state for access to the list.   Judge Nikki Clark ordered it released to the public.
48,000 list disproportionately Democrat
It took The Miami Herald just a day to discover that the list, which the state had tried hard to keep under wraps, contained the names of at least 2,119 ex-felons who had been granted clemency in Florida, and thus had had their voting rights restored.
Like the 2000 list, the new one turned out to be disproportionately Democrat.
Then, on July 7, an investigation by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune revealed a startling, new twist.
Of the 48,000 names on the list, only 61 were Hispanics — that's one-tenth of 1 percent.
In Florida, Hispanics make up 11 percent of the prison population, 17 percent of the population at large, and mostly vote Republican.
Whole family dead
Saad Muchawet and his three sons, Haider, Ali and Karar
Why were so few Hispanics on the felon list?
Because the voter-registration application identified Hispanics as such; the F.D.L.E. database did not, so when the two failed to match, the Hispanic ex-felons were excluded from the purge list.
Given the snowballing problems, the state understood it couldn't possibly get away with using the list.
On July 10, it was scrapped.
The Department of State spokeswoman, Nicole de Lara, has claimed that the glitch was "unforeseen" and "unintentional."
But according to Jeff Long, a veteran F.D.L.E. official, starting in 1999 with the preparation of the 2000 purge list, his office informed the secretary of state's office how the F.D.L.E. matched for race.
"We provided an extract of what's in our criminal databases, which included the categories for race," says Long.
"The extract listed five categories for race.   Those codes do not include an 'H ' [for Hispanic]."
Asked who was in receipt of this information, he cites Janet Modrow and voting-systems chief Paul Craft, both of whom are still working in the secretary of state's office.
James Lee of ChoicePoint told Vanity Fair that DBT and state elections officials had actually discussed the glitch.
He, too, cites Modrow as well as Bucky Mitchell.   (Modrow, Craft, and Mitchell could not be reached for comment.)   The matching flaw was discussed yet again, in 2001, at state voter-file meetings, according to Chuck Smith, elections-supervisor employee in Hillsborough County, who attended them.
As for Accenture, whatever flaws emerged were not their problem, claims Meg McLaughlin, president of Accenture's "eDemocracy Services."
"Accenture's contract in no way says that we are to validate the data," McLaughlin said at a recent hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.   "The only thing Accenture was asked and contracted to do was to build the tool."
In spite of the scrapping of the list, the state has informed the elections supervisors that it is still their legal obligation to bar ex-felons from voting in November.
No one is more frustrated than the ex-felons seeking a restoration of their voting and other civil rights.
Sits by bedside
Shot for throwing stones
About 15 percent of the thousands of clemency applicants in the backlog can have their rights restored without a hearing.
The majority must wait to stand before Governor Bush and his cabinet, and plead with him to exercise his "Executive Grace."
These clemency hearings take place just four times a year, and the governor invites between 60 and 130 applicants each time.
On a steamy June day in Tallahassee, one of the lucky few invited to plead her case at the courthouse is Beverly Brown, a black Miamian, who has been applying for seven years.
"Thank you, Governor and Cabinet,"she says, her voice trembling as she looks up at Jeb Bush, in a beige suit, and three of his cabinet members, seated above her on the dais.
"I'm a graduate patient-care technician, and there's nothing more I 'd like to do than to utilize my skills to help others."
She has been lucky enough to have had some private health-care jobs; recently she cared for a young quadriplegic.
But what she'd really like is to get a state license — something she can't do unless her civil rights are restored.
Her convictions, all drug-related and nonviolent, date back almost 20 years, except for a more recent conviction for having been caught with pot.
"Since when have you been drug-and alcohol-free?" Jeb asks flatly, looking up from her file.
"About nine years," says Brown.
"O.K., in 2001 there — you were convicted of marijuana possession?"
"I had — yes, it was in my possession, but it didn't belong to me.   Someone left it in my car."
"I have another question," Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher later asks, looking at her file.   "What is 'wailing rock cocaine '?"
Brown shifts nervously.   "O.K., sir, that is not my charge."
"I just want to know what is 'wailing rock cocaine '?" he asks.
Brow 's face flushes with panic and confusion.   "I have 't the slightest idea."
Bush gives her file another once-over and delivers his verdict.   "I 'd like to take this case under advisement."
It's not a no, but it's not a yes either.   Over the next couple of weeks, Brown will try to find out why the case has been on hold, but she'll get no answers; Bush is not required to give any.
Nonetheless, to prove his magnanimousness, Bush announces that same day that since June 2003, when the backlog was 38,606 ex-felons, the clemency office has gone through more than 30,000 names and restored the rights of 20,861.
Why the sudden progress?
Could it be that he has recently been overcome by the idea of redemption?
The figure, civil-rights advocates believe, is deceptive.
Bush failed to say that the backlog contained an additional 124,000 names.
According to a legal challenge led by the Florida Caucus of Black State Legislators, between 1992 and 2001, 124,000 people had been denied their rights-restoration paperwork and assistance upon leaving prison.
Ordered by a judge, finally, to take a look at these cases, the Executive Clemency Board restored the rights of 22,000 of them.
The figure is similar to the 20,861 Bush claimed he restored from the "backlog."
When pressed, his press secretary, Alia Faraj, admits, "Some of those may cross over. Absolutely."
Meanwhile, people like James Klinakis, who have paid their debt to society, who have gone on to serve in society, but who have no say in society, have feelings that go far beyond Bush v. Gore and what happened in 2000 and what might happen in November.
"I believe the president of the United States would have been different, some years ago, if some people were allowed to vote.
I don't know — that's only an opinion," says Klinakis.   "But I do know this, that I would like the opportunity to be able to vote — for county commissioners, for mayors, and the governor and the presidency.   Whether it's going to change something or not, I don't know, but, at least, I know I had the opportunity to do it."
                          To rebel is right, to disobey is a duty, to act is necessary !
twenty
twenty
         Bush v Gore — an orphan of history              
August 15th 2006
New York Times
Has Bush v. Gore Become the Case That Must Not Be Named?
By Adam Cohen
At a law school Supreme Court conference that I attended last fall, there was a panel on “The Rehnquist Court.”
No one mentioned Bush v. Gore, the most historic case of William Rehnquist’s time as chief justice, and during the Q. and A. no one asked about it.  
When I asked a prominent law professor about this strange omission, he told me he had been invited to participate in another Rehnquist retrospective, and was told in advance that Bush v. Gore would not be discussed.
New Orleans
The ruling that stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush is disappearing down the legal world’s version of the memory hole, the slot where, in George Orwell’s “1984,” government workers disposed of politically inconvenient records.
The Supreme Court has not cited it once since it was decided, and when Justice Antonin Scalia, who loves to hold forth on court precedents, was asked about it at a forum earlier this year, he snapped, “Come on, get over it.”
Dictum
There is a legal argument for pushing Bush v. Gore aside.
The majority opinion announced that the ruling was “limited to the present circumstances” and could not be cited as precedent.
But many legal scholars insisted at the time that this assertion was itself dictum — the part of a legal opinion that is nonbinding — and illegitimate, because under the doctrine of stare decisis, courts cannot make rulings whose reasoning applies only to a single case.
Bush v. Gore’s lasting significance is being fought over right now by the Ohio-based United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, whose judges disagree not only on what it stands for, but on whether it stands for anything at all.
This debate, which has been quietly under way in the courts and academia since 2000, is important both because of what it says about the legitimacy of the courts and because of what Bush v. Gore could represent today.
The majority reached its antidemocratic result by reading the equal protection clause in a very pro-democratic way.
If Bush v. Gore’s equal protection analysis is integrated into constitutional law, it could make future elections considerably more fair.
Value one person’s vote over another
The heart of Bush v. Gore’s analysis was its holding that the recount was unacceptable because the standards for vote counting varied from county to county.
Katrina still here
“Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms,” the court declared, “the state may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”
If this equal protection principle is taken seriously, if it was not just a pretext to put a preferred candidate in the White House, it should mean that states cannot provide some voters better voting machines, shorter lines, or more lenient standards for when their provisional ballots get counted — precisely the system that exists across the country right now.
The first major judicial test of Bush v. Gore’s legacy came in California in 2003.
The N.A.A.C.P., among others, argued that it violated equal protection to make nearly half the state’s voters use old punch-card machines, which, because of problems like dimpled chads, had a significantly higher error rate than more modern machines.
A liberal three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed.
But that decision was quickly reconsidered en banc — that is, reheard by a larger group of judges on the same court — and reversed.
The new panel dispensed with Bush v. Gore in three unilluminating sentences of analysis, clearly finding the whole subject distasteful.
Applying Bush v. Gore to elections
The dispute in the Sixth Circuit is even sharper.
Ohio voters are also challenging a disparity in voting machines, arguing that it violates what the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Daniel Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor, calls Bush v. Gore’s “broad principle of equal dignity for each voter.”
Two of the three judges who heard the case ruled that Ohio’s election system was unconstitutional.
But the dissenting judge protested that “we should heed the Supreme Court’s own warning and limit the reach of Bush v. Gore to the peculiar and extraordinary facts of that case.”
The state of Ohio asked for a rehearing en banc, arguing that Bush v. Gore cannot be used as precedent, and the full Sixth Circuit granted the rehearing.
Hattiesburg
Mississippi
It is likely that the panel decision applying Bush v. Gore to elections will, like the first California decision, soon be undone.
Raw assertion of power
There are several problems with trying to airbrush Bush v. Gore from the law.
It undermines the courts’ legitimacy when they depart sharply from the rules of precedent, and it gives support to those who have said that Bush v. Gore was not a legal decision but a raw assertion of power.
The courts should also stand by Bush v. Gore’s equal protection analysis for the simple reason that it was right (even if the remedy of stopping the recount was not).
Elections that systematically make it less likely that some voters will get to cast a vote that is counted are a denial of equal protection of the law.
The conservative justices may have been able to see this unfairness only when they looked at the problem from Mr. Bush’s perspective, but it is just as true when the N.A.A.C.P. and groups like it raise the objection.
There is a final reason Bush v. Gore should survive.
In deciding cases, courts should be attentive not only to the Constitution and other laws, but to whether they are acting in ways that promote an overall sense of justice.
The Supreme Court’s highly partisan resolution of the 2000 election was a severe blow to American democracy, and to the court’s own standing.
The courts could start to undo the damage by deciding that, rather than disappearing down the memory hole, Bush v. Gore will stand for the principle that elections need to be as fair as we can possibly make them.
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to appoint a President.
     More of the Vanity Fair article:     U.S. Supreme Court appoints a president         
     More of the Vanity Fair article:     Vote count that will never be believed         
Complete article including Vanity Fair images can be downloaded as .pdf document
— click here for part 1 document     (3 Mg file due to images)
— click here for part 2 document
United States voting procedures — how U.S. votes are stolen (continuing) — click here
Published on Monday, July 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Sheldon Drobny
Justice O'Connor's decision in Bush v. Gore led to the current Bush administration's execution of war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East that are as egregious as those committed by the Third Reich and other evil governments in human history.
US destroyed Fallujah as it tries to destroy the rest of Iraq
The lesson is clear.
Those people who may be honorable and distinguished in their chosen profession should always make decisions based upon good rather than evil no matter where their nominal allegiances may rest.
Justice O'Connor was quoted to have said something to the affect that she abhorred the thought of Bush losing the 2000 election to Gore.
She was known to have wanted to retire after the 2000 election for same reason she is now retiring.
She wanted to spend more time with her sick husband.
Unfortunately, she tarnished her distinguished career with the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore by going along with the partisan majority of the Court to interfere with a democratic election that she and the majority feared would be lost in an honest recount.
She dishonored herself and the Supreme Court by succumbing to party allegiances and not The Constitution to which she swore to uphold.
And the constitutional argument she and the majority used to justify their decision was the Equal Protection Clause.
The Equal Protection Clause was the ultimate basis for the decision, but the majority essentially admitted (what was obvious in any event) that it was not basing its conclusion on any general view of what equal protection requires.
The decision in Bush v Gore was not dictated by the law in any sense—either the law found through research, or the law as reflected in the kind of intuitive sense that comes from immersion in the legal culture.
The Equal Protection clause is generally used in matters concerning civil rights.
The majority ignored their basic conservative views supporting federalism and states' rights in order to justify their decision.
History will haunt these justices down for their utter lack of justice and the hypocrisy associated with this decision.
Sheldon Drobny is Co-founder of Air America Radio.
Pelosi
The United States will stand with Israel now and forever.
Now and forever.
29 July 2007
Israel hails US military aid rise
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has confirmed that the United States is planning a significant increase in military and government aid to Israel.
The package would amount to more than US $30bn increase.
       Atrocities —        
       US and Israel atrocities        
       Israel using chemical weapons and phosphorous bombs.        
       Photos of Lebanon attacks on population by Israel        
       Injuries from White Phosphorus bombs        
Unspeakable grief and horror
ÇáäÊÇÆÌ ÇáÃæáíÉ ááÍá ÇáÃãíÑßí ÇáÍÐÑ ááãÞÇæãÉ ÇáÚÑÇÞíÉ Ýí ÇáÝáæÌÉ (ÇáÌÒíÑÉ)
                        ...and the circus of deception killing continues...
Most recent 'Circus of Killing' click here
— 2009
He says, "You are quite mad, Kewe"
And of course I am.
Why, I don't believe any of it — not the bloody body, not the bloody mind, not even the bloody Universe, or is it bloody multiverse.
"It's all illusion," I say.   "Don't you know, my lad, my lassie.   The game!   The game, me girl, me boy!   Takes on interest, don't you know.   T'is me sport, till doest find a better!"
Pssssst — but all this stuff is happening down here
Let's change it!
        Depleted Uranium — its use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Balkans      
       Photos of Iraq children being born deformed    
      U.S. War Crimes — Falluja photos      
      US used chemical and thermobaric weapons in Fallujah     
      IRAN US Confrontation      
      Iraq — US missiles from the sky      
      Some U.S. soldiers speak — Iraq Invasion       

        Siberia, Alaska        
        Dramatic permafrost melt — click here       

       US veteran Mothers against the war:       
       So anyway that filth-spewer and warmonger, George Bush       
       was speaking after the tragedy of the marines in Ohio...         

       Suicide Bombing  Blair, Bush      
       Suicide Bombing is response to foreign occupation      
       Will stop once troops withdraw      

       Doris Colmes escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 — Patriot Act — Iraq photos      

       World Tribunal       
       War Crimes — Illegality of Preventive Attack       
       Unilateral Use of Force       

       Afghanistan - Terror, Torture, Poppy cultivation, Opium       
       He was a young boy       
       and he spent three days in the detainee facilities       

     "None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution       
       could have gone on without her knowledge and approval,       
       and thus complicity.      
     Little of it could have happened without her participation,       
      if not as a leaker herself,      
     at least with her direction and with her scripting."       
      Condoleezza Rice — Iraq — Rove       

       Simple Questions — Iraq June 2005 photos         

       Settlements — Trees — Jayyous — West Bank — Palestine        

      Flag draped U.S. coffins      

      US air strikes and bombings over Iraq — Fallujah and Sadr City photos       
      Fallujah photos — War — lunacy, bewilderment, panic, fear invading body, death       
      Auschwitz, a French village, and the bourgeoisie      
      As Jews we march with the Palestinians and raise their flag!     
     His Majesty King Abdullah — The American Magazine     November 1947     
     Norman Finkelstein, Professor Marc Saperstein and Middle East Journal     
      US once great nation transformed into a neo fascist nightmare      
      U.S. voter fraud 2004      
      Inside Fallujah — A family speaks of the terror      
      Beslan, music and children      
      Yasser Arafat — I shall not look upon his like again      
      NASA scientist shows Bush wired in debate      
       Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million     
            —  ORB, a British polling agency, September 2007          
        U.S. destructive, psychotic fantasy: The War On Terror        
        Falluja    
        U.S. to Israel:        
        - An apocalypse of Evil being created        
        - 500 'bunker buster' bombs        
U.S. Bombing of Fallujah
— the Third World War continued: Chechnya, North Ossetia, Ingushetia

       The Negative Return Economy — a discourse on America’s black budget      
       Fascinating and lucrative    
       Black Budget?   What Black Budget?    

More atrocities - Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying

al-Sadr City

Iraq's real WMD crime - the effects of depleted uranium

World War Two soldiers did not kill Kill ratio Korea, Vietnam. Iraq.

Afghanistan - Terror?
Photos over past three months.

Aid agencies compromised by US actions
      US soldiers sent to Iraq committing suicide      
      NSA coverup - Vietnam - Kerry      

The Iraq War - complete listing of articles, includes images

The House of Saud and Bush

       All with U.S. Money:       
       US and Israel War Crimes       

All with U.S. Money:
Israel agents stole identity of New Zealand cerebral palsy victim.
(IsraelNN.com July 15, 2004) The Foreign Ministry will take steps towards restoring relations with New Zealand. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark today announced she was implementing diplomatic sanctions after two Israelis were sentenced on charges of attempting to obtain illegal passports. Despite Israeli refusal to respond to the accusations, the two are labeled in the New Zealand media as Mossad agents acting on behalf of the Israeli intelligence community.

Foreign Ministry officials stated they will do everything possible to renew diplomatic ties, expressing sorrow over the "unfortunate incident".

Projected mortality rate of Sudan refugee starvation deaths — Darfur pictures

Suicide now top killer of Israeli soldiers

Atrocities files - graphic images

'Suicide bombings,' the angel said, 'and beheadings.'
'And the others that have all the power - they fly missiles in the sky.
They don't even look at the people they kill.'

       The real Ronald Reagan       
       — Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa        

Follow the torture trail...
Photos August 2004
        When you talk with God        
         were you also spending your time, money and energy, killing people?         
       Are they now alive or dead?       
Photos July 2004
US Debt
Photos June 2004
Lest we forget - Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying
Photos May 2004

 American military: Abu Gharib (Ghraib) prison photos, humiliation and torture
- London Daily Mirror article: non-sexually explicit pictures
Photos April 2004
The celebration of Jerusalem day, the US missiles that rained onto children in Gaza,
and, a gathering of top articles over the past nine months
Photos March 2004
The Iraq War - complete listing of articles, includes images
Photos February 2004
US missiles - US money - and Palestine
Photos January 2004
Ethnic cleansing in the Beduin desert
Photos December 2003
Shirin Ebadi Nobel Peace Prize winner 2003
Photos November 2003
Atrocities - graphic images...
Photos October 2003
Aljazeerah.info
Photos September 2003
Kewe Archives kewe archives       kewe archives TheWE.cc