tspikes51

In short: there is none.

I just did a report on the fallacies of Fahrenheit 9/11. This is one of the fallacies in it. Here is an excerpt from that section of my report:

One of Moore’s first, and more bogus, claims is that some of Bush’s friends and workers hired a private company, Data Base Technologies (DBT), to purge voters who may have voted for Gore, specifically African-Americans, from the Florida voter rolls. This was generated, according to an article in the Palm Beach Post (Hiaasen, Kane, & Jaspin, 2001) from a 1998 Miami, Florida mayoral election that went haywire because convicted felons were allowed to vote, which is against state law. To prevent this sort of disaster in the future, the Florida legislature ordered the executive branch to remedy the problem by purging all convicted felons from the voter rolls. The executive branch decided to hire Data Base Technologies, a private company, to take care of it. They made a list of 19,398 people who could not vote, and the election officials in each county were expected to use the list. However, DBT wrongly purged around 1,100 eligible voters who’s names either matched that of a convicted felon, felons convicted in other states that restored their civil rights after their sentence was served, or people whose crimes were only misdemeanors, but were shown by records to be felonies. Twenty counties in Florida completely ignored this list, which permitted thousands of felons to vote.
Where then, does Moore draw his conclusion that blacks were disenfranchised when this took place, and how does he know that they would vote for Gore? Moore most likely draws his conclusion from a couple of statistics. First, as published in the same article in the Post (Hiaasen, et. al., 2001), “Blacks make up nearly 49 percent of the felons convicted in the state…so any purge of felons would include a disproportionate number of blacks.” Second, he probably based it on the fact that the NAACP filed a lawsuit claiming disenfranchisement. However, race couldn’t have been a factor in putting names on the list of because the people denied their voting rights, in many cases, did not match the race of the felon that DBT was targeting in the purge. Michael most likely based his claim that the people improperly purged would have voted for Gore from a study reported by the American Sociological Review, (American Sociological Review, 2003) that 68.9% of felons vote Democrat. Therefore Moore draws his conclusion from a weak combination of sources.

I hope this helps.

__________________
"I'm telling you, we need to get rid of a few people or a million."
-Maddox