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Adam Smith
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Maryland, USA
Jan 1970
time: 00:36
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quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
In our fair state, it is illegal for ex-felons to vote. In order to do so, they must apply for clemency from the gov. We are one of eight states that do this.
Before 2000, the vetting of names to be stricken from the voter rolls was handled by a local firm, which charged the State of Florida $5,000. State law requires that contracts go to the best bid. No one complained.
In 2000, the bid went to a Republican connected firm that was out of state for several million dollars. More than 50,000 people who were eligible voters, the majority of them Black, were wrongfully stripped of their right to vote. |
From E. J. Dionne's (liberal democrat) column in today's Washington Post
quote:
How many people were unfairly denied the right ot vote under this [felon identification] program? A computer analysis by the Palm Beach Post in 2001 found that of the 19,398 potential voters knocked off the lists, more than 14,600 matched a felon by name, birth date, race, and gender. That left 4,798 unaccounted for. Of the rest, the newspaper's analysis found that at least 1,100 eligible voters were "wrongly purged from the rolls." |
WHile I would not like to see anybody wrongly purged from the voting rolls, I have a number of questions.
Are we talking about the same program here?
Is there something else I am missing?
If you factor in the lower propensity of blacks to vote then the effect on the ultimate outcome becomes even smaller.
Lastly, any comment about the democratic party's current efforrts to keep Nader off the ballot in eight or ten states?
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:36
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http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2
Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida
The Weekly Dig, Boston, MA
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
by Liam Scheff
When future historians want to know what happened to America in 2000, they’ll read Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The book follows the paper trail of perjury, deception and incompetence left by the Bush family, and the billionaires who fund them, as they trample through the world – from mining disaster cover-ups to the California energy scandal to the pre-9/11 intelligence black-out that let a handful of Saudi terrorists slip past the NSA, FBI and CIA.
The book also uncovers inside documents on the IMF and World Bank, Pat Robertson‘s unholy money-schemes, and the co-opted US media that won‘t 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.
What really happened in Florida?
Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered voters. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get to vote.
If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you‘re “scrubbed” from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it’s an uncivilized vestige of the Deep South.
My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime – except for being African American. We didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race.
When I questioned Harris’ office about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, “Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.”
But these people weren’t felons, so why were they scrubbed?
The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely vote as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony “scrub” lists and replaced them with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job. [DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive work for the FBI.]
There are a lot of Joe Smiths in the Florida phonebook. DBT was hired to verify which Joe Smith was a felon and which was not. They were supposed to use their extensive databases to check credit cards, bank information, addresses and phone numbers, in addition to names, ages, and social security numbers. But they didn’t. They didn’t use one of their 1,200 databases to verify personal information, nor did they make a single phone call to verify the identity of scrubbed names.
So where did DBT get their data?
From the Internet. They went to 11 other states’ Internet sites and took names off dirt-cheap. They scrubbed Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off Florida voter John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels, or even J.R. Michaelson. DBT matched for race and gender, but names only had to be similar to a certain degree. Names could be reversed, and suffixes (Jr., Sr.) were ignored, but aliases were included. So the felon John “Buddy” Michaels could knock non-felon Michael Johns or Bud Johnson Jr. off the voter rolls. This happened again and again.
Although DBT didn’t get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, they were very careful to match for race. A black felon named Mr. Green would only knock off a black Mr. Green, but not a single white Mr. Green. That’s how DBT earned its $2.3 million.
Why didn’t DBT use their own databases?
They didn’t, because the state told them not to. Choicepoint vice-president James Lee was grilled by a Congressional committee, headed by Cynthia McKinney, and he admitted everything, but said DBT was following state directives. Florida state officials told DBT to knock off voters by incorrectly matching them with felons.
Congresswoman McKinney led this commission to her own peril. Choicepoint is in her Atlanta district. She was destroyed in the last election by fabricated quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign.
Is this the only way votes were stolen?
No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. Katherine Harris’ office illegally scrubbed people who’d served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and Jeb Bush’s office illegally barred these people from registering to vote at all.
The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black rural counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state, thousands of votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots which are read by an optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark were considered “spoiled“ and not counted. The buttons used to fill out the ballots were set up – with approval from Bush and Harris – to make votes appear unclear to the machine. One in eight ballots in Gadsden was voided by the state.
The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white. There only one in 100 votes was “spoiled.” What made the difference? In Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the black counties, the votes were trucked off immediately. There were no machines on site. Voters weren’t told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly weren’t permitted to re-vote.
When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they weren’t well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadn‘t. He didn’t even bother to ask how the machines were set up. This is the kind of reporting we get in America. In Britain, this story ran 3 weeks after the election, when Gore was still in race. It was in the papers and on TV. In the US, it was seven months before the Washington Post ran it, and then it was only a partial version. (empasis added for Adam Smith.) After the election, Gadsden County replaced its voting commissioner. In 2002 they only lost one in 500 votes. So you can say blacks in Gadsden got smarter in one way – they elected a black elections chief.
What happened to Choicepoint?
Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are being rolled out across the country.
It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting.
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debeest
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The continued misrepresentation of Cynthia McKinney makes me very glad I kept track of Greg Palast's story that explains the truth of the situation. It's one of the most disturbing and outrageous political stories I can remember.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16172
The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney
By Greg Palast, AlterNet
June 18, 2003
Have you heard about Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Congresswoman?
According to those quoted on National Public Radio, McKinney’s “a loose cannon” (media expert) who “the people of Atlanta are embarrassed and disgusted” (politician) by, and she is also “loony” and “dangerous” (senator from her own party).
Yow! And why is McKinney dangerous/loony/disgusting? According to NPR, “McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information.”
The New York Times’ Lynette Clemetson revealed her comments went even further over the edge: “Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.”
That’s loony, all right. As an editor of the highly respected Atlanta Journal Constitution told NPR, McKinney’s “practically accused the President of murder!”
Problem is, McKinney never said it.
That’s right. The “quote” from McKinney is a complete fabrication. A whopper, a fabulous fib, a fake, a flim-flam. Just freakin’ made up.
Hi, Lynette. My name is Greg Palast, and I wanted to follow up on a story of yours. It says, let’s see, after the opening – it’s about Cynthia McKinney – it’s dated Washington byline August 21. “McKinney’s [opponent] capitalized on the furor caused by Miss McKinney’s suggestion this year that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.” Now, I have been trying my darndest to find this phrase . . . I can’t. . .
Lynette Clemetson, New York Times: Did you search the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
Yes, but I haven’t been able to find that statement.
I’ve heard that statement – it was all over the place.
I know it was all over the place, except no one can find it and that’s why I’m concerned. Now did you see the statement in the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
Yeah....
[Note: No such direct quote from McKinney can be found in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.]
And did you confirm this with McKinney?
Well, I worked with her office. The statement is from the floor of the House [of Representatives].... Right?
So did you check the statement from the Floor of the House?
I mean I wouldn’t have done the story. . . . Have you looked at House transcripts?
Yes. Did you check that?
Of course.
You did check it?
[Note: No such McKinney statement can be found in the transcripts or other records of the House of Representatives.]
I think you have to go back to the House transcripts.... I mean it was all over the place at the time.
Yes, this is one fact the Times reporter didn’t fake: The McKinney “quote” was, indeed, all over the place: in the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and needless to say, all the other metropolitan dailies – everywhere but in Congresswoman McKinney’s mouth.
Nor was it in the Congressional Record, nor in any recorded talk, nor on her Website, nor in any of her radio talks. Here’s the Congresswoman’s statement from the record:
“George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11.”
Oh.
And I should say former Congresswoman McKinney.
She was beaten in the August 2002 Democratic primary. More precisely, she was beaten to death, politically, by the fabricated quote.
Months before the 2000 presidential elections, the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 90,000 citizens from the voter rolls because they were convicted felons . . . and felons can’t vote in Florida. There was one problem: 97 percent of those on the list were, in fact, innocent.
They weren’t felons, but they were guilty . . . of not being white. Over half the list contained names of non-whites. I’m not guessing: I have the list from out of the computers of Katherine Harris’ office – and the “scrubbed” voter’s race is listed with each name.
And that’s how our President was elected: by illegally removing tens of thousands of legal African American voters before the race.
But you knew that . . . at least you did if you read the British papers – I reported this discovery for the Guardian of London. And I reported again on the nightly news. You saw that . . . if you live in Europe or Canada or South America.
In the USA, the story ran on page zero. Well, let me correct that a bit. The Washington Post did run the story on the fake felon list that selected our President – even with a comment under my byline. I wrote the story within weeks of the election, while Al Gore was still in the race. The Post courageously ran it . . . seven months after the election.
The New York Times ran it . . . well, never, even after Katherine Harris confessed the scam to a Florida court after she and the state were successfully sued by the NAACP.
So, I can’t say the New York Times always makes up the news. Sometimes the news just doesn’t make it.
At BBC Television, we had Florida’s computer files and documents, marked “confidential” – stone-cold evidence showing how the vote fix was deliberately crafted by Republican officials. Not a single major U.S. paper asked for the documents – not from the state of Florida nor from the BBC. Only one U.S. Congressperson asked for the evidence and made it public: Cynthia McKinney of Atlanta.
That was her mistake.
The company that came up with the faux felon list that determined the presidency: a Republican-tied database company named “ChoicePoint,” one of the richest, most powerful companies in Atlanta.
Before I started with the BBC in London, I took a one-day television training course with the Washington correspondent for Fox News.
We filmed Al Gore. Specifically, we filmed the eleven seconds of Gore’s impromptu remarks . . . which we’d been given two hours earlier by his advance ladies. They wore blue suits.
The man for the Associated Press wrote a lead paragraph of Gore’s impromptu remarks one hour before Al walked in and said them. The network reporter copied down the AP lead line. I copied down the AP lead line.
After we got Al Gore’s eleven seconds and footage of someone in the crowd saying, “Wow, Al Gore really talked different from the way Al Gore usually talks,” we set up in front of the hotel where Al Gore talked. The important network reporter looked sternly into the camera and spoke in a very important voice. I squinted into the camera and spoke in a very important voice.
I can’t remember what I said.
He can’t remember what he said.
No one can remember what we said.
No one should.
Did I mention to you that (ex-)Congresswoman McKinney is black? And not just any kind of black. She’s the uppity kind of black.
What I mean by uppity is this:
After George Bush Senior left the White House, he became an advisor and lobbyist for a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Hey, a guy’s got to work. But there were a couple of questions about Barrick, to say the least. For example, was Barrick’s Congo gold mine funding both sides of a civil war and perpetuating that bloody conflict? Only one Congressperson demanded hearings on the matter.
You’ve guessed: Cynthia McKinney.
That was covered in the . . . well, it wasn’t covered at all in the U.S. press.
McKinney contacted me at the BBC. She asked if I’d heard of Barrick. Indeed, I had. Top human rights investigators had evidence that a mine that Barrick bought in 1999 had, in clearing their Tanzanian properties three years earlier, bulldozed mine shafts . . . burying about 50 miners alive.
I certainly knew Barrick: They’d sued the Guardian for daring to run a story I’d written about the allegations of the killings. Barrick never sued an American paper for daring to run the story, because no American paper dared.
The primary source for my story, an internationally famous lawyer named Tundu Lissu, was charged by the Tanzanian police with sedition, and arrested, for calling for an investigation. McKinney has been trying to save his life with an international campaign aimed at Barrick.
That was another of her mistakes.
The New York Times wrote about McKinney that Atlanta’s “prominent Black leaders – including Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP and former Mayor Maynard Jackson – who had supported Ms. McKinney in the past – distanced themselves from her this time.”
Really? Atlanta has four internationally recognized black leaders. Martin Luther King III did not abandon McKinney. I checked with him. Nor did Julian Bond (the Times ran a rare retraction on their website at Bond’s request). But that left Atlanta’s two other notables: Vernon Jordan and Andrew Young. Here, the Times had it right; no question that these two black faces of the Atlanta Establishment let McKinney twist slowly in the wind – because, the Times implied, of her alleged looniness.
But maybe there was another reason Young and Jordan let McKinney swing. Remember Barrick? George Bush’s former gold-mining company, the target of McKinney’s investigations? Did I mention to you that Andy Young and Vernon Jordan are both on Barrick’s payroll? Well, I just did.
Did the Times mention it? I guess that wasn’t fit to print.
I suppose it’s my fault, McKinney’s electronic lynching. Unlike other politicians, McKinney, who’s earning her doctorate at Princeton School of Diplomacy, enjoys doing her own research, not relying on staff memos. She’s long been a reader of my reports from Britain, including transcripts of BBC Television investigations. On November 6, 2001, BBC Newsnight ran this report with a follow-up story in the Guardian the next day:
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
Probes Before 11 September
Officials Told to 'Back Off' on Saudis Before September 11.
FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11. US intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied.
FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, with which they were linked.
And so on. There was not one word in there that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks in advance. It was about a horrific intelligence failure. This was the result, FBI and CIA/DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) insiders told us at BBC, of a block placed on investigations of Saudi Arabian financing of terror. We even showed on-screen a copy of a top-secret document passed to us by disgruntled FBI agents, directing that the agency would not investigate a “suspected terrorist organization” headed in the US by a member of the bin Laden family. The FBI knew about these guys before September 11 (with their office down the street from the hijackers’ address).
The CIA also knew about a meeting in Paris, prior to September 11, involving a Saudi prince, arms dealers, and al Qaeda. Although the information was in hand, the investigation was stymied by Bush’s intelligence chiefs. This is what McKinney wanted investigated.
Why were the Saudis, the bin Ladens (except Osama), and this organization (the World Assembly of Muslim Youth) off the investigation list prior to September 11, despite evidence that they were reasonable targets for inquiry? The BBC thought it worth asking; the Guardian thought it worth asking – and so did Congresswoman McKinney. Why no pre-September 11 investigations of these characters?
And what was the reason for the block? According to the experts we broadcast on British television, it was the Bush Administration’s fanatic desire to protect their relations with Saudi Arabia – a deadly policy prejudice which, according to the respected Center for Public Integrity of Washington, DC, seems influenced by the Bush family ties, and Republican donors’ ties, to Saudi royalty. McKinney, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, thought the BBC/Guardian/Observer investigation worth a follow-up Congressional review.
According to NPR, her “loony” statement was made on the radio news show Counterspin. (Not incidentally, Counterspin is produced by an NPR competitor, the nonprofit Pacifica Radio Network.) I have the transcript; it’s on the web. Her charge that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks in advance and deliberately covered it up can’t be found.
What can be read is her call for a follow-up on the revelations from the BBC and USA Today on the information about a growing terror threat ignored by Bush . . . and whether the policy response – war, war, war – was protecting America or simply enriching Bush’s big arms industry donors and business partners. Fair questions. But asking them is dangerous . . . to one’s political career.
The BBC report which got McKinney in hot water mentioned the Bush Administration’s reluctance to investigate associates of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which the FBI secret document termed “a suspected terrorist organization.” They may be. They may not be. McKinney’s question was only, Why no investigation?
Just after McKinney’s defeat, the courier of Osama bin Laden's latest alleged taped threat against the United States was busted in Africa: He was on the staff of WAMY. Shortly thereafter, Prince Abdullah, the Saudi dictator, invited WAMY leaders to his palace and told them, “There is no extremism in the defending of the faith.”
So if you listen to U.S. radio and read U.S. papers, you are told this: Abdullah’s protector and godfather, George W. Bush, is sane and patriotic, and McKinney, who wants to investigate these guys, is a loony and a traitor. Got it?
Ted Koppel’s Nightline did a kind of follow-up to the BBC elections story. Our BBC team discovered that of the 180,000 votes never counted in the Florida 2000 presidential race, a sickeningly disproportionate number came from black counties. In Gadsden County, where more than half the population is black, one in eight ballots was marked "spoiled" and, thus, never counted.
Koppel’s team got on the case, flying down to Florida to find out why thousands of black votes were never counted. They talked to experts, they talked to important white people, and Koppel reported this: Many blacks are new to voting and, with limited education, have a difficult time with marking the sophisticated ballots. In other words, ABC concluded, African Americans are too ****ing dumb to figure out how to vote.
Hey, if true, then you have to report it. But it wasn’t. It was a fib, a tall tale, made-for-TV mendacity, polite liberal electronic cross-burning intellectual eugenics.
Here’s the real scoop: All races of voters make errors on paper ballots. But in white counties like Leon (Tallahassee), if you make a stray mark or other error, the vote machine rejects your ballot, and you get another ballot to vote again. But in black counties like Gadsden, you make a mistake and the machine quietly accepts and voids your ballot.
In other words, it wasn’t that African Americans are too dumb to vote but that European American reporters are too dumb to ask, too lazy to bother, too gutless to tell officialdom to stop lying into the cameras.
Back in the edit room with Mr. Washington Network TV Reporter, we were ready to bake the cake, the Gore story. We had all the ingredients.
“Take out your watch,” said the Fox man.
“You get 90 seconds,” he said. “That’s what you get. You got an intro, 40 seconds of narration, two sound bites, and end with a stand-up to camera.”
I repeated, “Forty seconds narrate, two sound bites, stand-up.”
He said, “Two sound bites and a stand-up. Every story. Every time.”
He said, “What do you think?”
I said, “I think I’m leaving the country.”
Greg Palast is an investigative reporter for BBC television and author of the New York Times bestseller, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” (Penguin/Plume 2003). This article is based on his contribution to the compendium, "Abuse Your Illusions," released this month by Disinformation Press. Oliver Shykles, Fredda Weinberg, Ina Howard, and Phil Tanfield contributed research for this report.
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DinoDoc
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AECCP loves Democracy
Sep 1999
time: 23:36
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Bush Knew
Goodbye to All That
Of course these are such a notorious right wing sources they just made up the essays and put her name on it, right? Idiots.
Last edited by DinoDoc on 26-05-2004 at 18:15
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25-05-2004 19:53
This tells me ALL I need to know about the veracity of this author. McKinney was destroyed in the primary because she was a NUT! She was the one who said Bush planned the 9/11 attacks! She was utterly off her rocker!
I LOVE the Palast story that this was all made up because she was an 'uppity' black 
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