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Banned
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Originally Posted by tspikes51
Yes. That article will tell you pretty much anything that you want to know about the fiasco in Florida.
Governor- the President has almost nothing to do with the executive branches of individual states. The executive branch makes all of the appointments for various committees, departments, and such, and in this case, they hired a company to be a task force.
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There's a lot more to the story than that......
<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20041017/ap_on_el_pr/florida_felons_voting">http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20041017/ap_on_el_pr/florida_felons_voting</a>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20041030082215/http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=55&row=1">Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program - Salon.com's politics story of the year</a>
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.....More than 50,000 felons were released from Florida prisons last year. About
85 percent must apply to get clemency. A year ago, the court found that about
125,000 inmates who completed their terms between 1992 and 2001 -- out of as
many as 700,000 -- had not been properly notified of their right to clemency.
Gov. Bush can't call the appellate court's ruling judicial activism. The
court didn't make the law; the state did. Here is the wording: "The authorized
agent (of the state) shall assist the offender in completing these forms...
before the offender is discharged from supervision." The court "interpreted"
that to mean the state must "assist the offender." <a href="http://www.freelists.org/archives/lit-ideas/07-2004/msg00472.html">http://www.freelists.org/archives/lit-ideas/07-2004/msg00472.html</a>
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The excuses are scattered amid ruins of voter list plan
By HOWARD TROXLER, Times Columnist
Published July 15, 2004
My question is, did my friends in Gov. Jeb Bush's administration intentionally try to look so goofy over this list of 47,000 names of potential purgees from Florida's voter rolls?
Was there a sale on rubber red noses and floppy shoes down at the Clown Emporium? Was this a plot to keep us all laughing while Karl Rove sneaks into the basement and steals the voting machines?
No sir, no ma'am. They do not get to stand there week after week, all self-righteous, declaring that anybody who questions their list is a fool - they do not get to do it, and then, when the whole ridiculous thing collapses, blithely declare, "Never mind," and walk away whistling like it was ancient history <a href="http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/15/Columns/The_excuses_are_scatt.shtml">http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/15/Columns/The_excuses_are_scatt.shtml</a>
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Florida is one of six states that permanently strip voting rights to felons for life unless they petition to have them restored. One election-law expert who usually represents Democrats said the release of the list will rekindle the debate over disenfranchising voters. <a href="http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/02/State/Felon_voters_list_mad.shtml">http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/02/State/Felon_voters_list_mad.shtml</a>
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<h3>THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME</3> How the 'felon' voter-purge was itself felonious
Harper's Magazine
Friday, March 1, 2002
In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely. <a href="http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1">http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1</a>
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Phony felons. One of the outrages of 2000 was the creation of a list of "possible felons" who were knocked off Florida's voter rolls. Under Florida law, felons can't vote. Thanks to the work of Greg Palast, a left-of-center investigative writer, the public learned that the list of felons that the state gave to local election officials was defective. Local officials were supposed to do additional checking, but some were more diligent than others. Given that the list of "possible felons" was disproportionately from minority groups, minority voters had a much higher chance of being kicked off the rolls.
How many people were unfairly denied the right to vote under this 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." Bush was awarded Florida by a margin of 537 votes over Gore.
Most states do not permanently deny former felons the right to vote, and the few that still do should abandon a practice so often rooted in a racist past. More urgently, states and localities need to make sure that voters who were never felons don't get caught up in a voter purge. Fortunately, there are election officials in Florida wary of a new list of potential felons they recently received from the state. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53222-2004May24.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53222-2004May24.html</a>
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<a href="http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch1.htm">http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch1.htm</a>
Impact of the Purge List
Source: Data collected by Rebecca Kraus, senior social scientist, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June 2001.
Indeed, the persons who successfully appealed to have their names removed from the list provided to Miami-Dade County by the Florida Division of Elections are also disproportionately African American. One hundred fifty-five African Americans (47.4 percent of the total) successfully appealed in response to the June 1999 list, and 84 African Americans (59.2 percent of the total) successfully appealed in response to the January 2000 list. Hispanics accounted for approximately 22 percent of those who appealed in response to both lists. White Americans accounted for 30 percent of those who appealed in 1999 and 26.7 percent of those who appealed in 2000 (see table 1-4). Based on the experience in Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in the state, it appears as if African Americans were more likely than whites and Hispanics to be incorrectly placed on the convicted felons list.
CONCLUSION
The Voting Rights Act prohibits both intentional discrimination and “results” discrimination. It is within the jurisdictional province of the Justice Department to pursue and a court of competent jurisdiction to decide whether the facts prove or disprove illegal discrimination under either standard. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights does not adjudicate violations of the law. It does not hold trials or determine civil or criminal liability. It is clearly within the mandate of the Commission, however, to find facts that may be used subsequently as a basis for legislative or executive action designed to protect the voting rights of all eligible persons.
Accordingly, the Commission is duty bound to report, without equivocation, that the analysis presented here supports a disturbing impression that Florida’s reliance on a flawed voter exclusion list, combined with the state law placing the burden of removal from the list on the voter, had the result of denying African Americans the right to vote. This analysis also shows that the chance of being placed on this list in error is greater for African Americans. Similarly, the analysis shows a direct correlation between race and having one’s vote discounted as a spoiled ballot. In other words, an African American’s chance of having his or her vote rejected as a spoiled ballot was significantly greater than a white voter’s. Based on the evidence presented to the Commission, there is a strong basis for concluding that section 2 of the VRA was violated.
<a href="http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/dissent.htm">http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/dissent.htm</a>
VI. The Commission’s Analysis of the Felon List is Misleading
The report asserts that the use of a convicted felons list “has a disparate impact on African Americans.” “African Americans in Florida were more likely to find their names on the list than persons of other races.” Of course, because a higher proportion of blacks have been convicted of felonies in Florida, as elsewhere in the nation. But there is no evidence that the state targeted blacks in a discriminatory manner in constructing a purge list, or that the state made less of an effort to notify listed African Americans and to correct errors than it did with whites. The Commission did not hear from a single witness who was actually prevented from voting as a result of being erroneously identified as a felon. Furthermore, whites were twice as likely as blacks to be placed on the list erroneously, not the other way around.
The compilation of the purge list was part of an anti-fraud measure enacted by the Florida legislature in the wake of a Miami mayoral election in which ineligible voters cast ballots. The list for the 2000 election was over-inclusive, and some supervisors made no use of it. (The majority report did not bother to ask how many counties relied upon it.) On the other hand, according to the Palm Beach Post, more than 6,500 ineligible felons voted.
Based on extensive research, the Miami Herald concluded that the biggest problem with the felon list was not that it wrongly prevented eligible voters from casting ballots, but that it ended up allowing ineligible voters to cast a ballot. The Commission should have looked into allegations of voter fraud, not only with respect to ineligible felons, but allegations involving fraudulent absentee ballots in nursing homes, unregistered voters, and so forth. Across the country in a variety of jurisdictions, serious questions about voter fraud have been raised.
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Last edited by host; 05-25-2007 at 02:35 PM..
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