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Banned
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Hmmm...what could Greg Palast possibly be talking about? <b>Could it be...that a political party with no populist platform....a party that offers no remedy, or even a discussion of the dilemma of a United States</b> where the percentage of wealth controlled by the least wealthy half of the population....150 million people has declined to just 2-1/2 percent, while the top one percent...just 3 million people, controls 33 percent of the total wealth, and the next 9 percent, about 27 million people, controls 37 percent of the total wealth....no answers in response to 45 million folks in the US without any health insurance coverage...<b>could not possibly be "winning" elections by attracting the most legitimate votes?</b>
Consider that, in 2000, we were told that republicans, Bush-Cheney won the popular vote in the state of Florida by about 500 votes, over the rival democratic candidates, Gore-Leiberman. Bush-Cheney had "help", though:
...the flawed history of state of Florida felon "voter purge lists", from Oct., 2004. There is much more info at the link:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...0&postcount=55
....but here are excerpts of two main supporting points from the link, above:
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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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Quote:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/12/felons/
Florida scraps list of suspected felons barred from voting
Monday, July 12, 2004 Posted: 3:59 PM EDT (1959 GMT)
(CNN) -- Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood has decided to scrap a list that was intended to keep more than 47,000 suspected felons from voting in November.
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush agreed with the decision, his spokesman said Monday.
"The list will not be used," said Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Bush, whose state proved key to his brother's victory four years ago.
Hood decided over the weekend to dump the list, which was created by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, after <h3>news stories pointed out that the list included only 61 Hispanic names, DiPietre said.
The state's large Cuban population tends to vote Republican.......</h3>
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Quote:
http://web.archive.org/web/200408111...db0e300e7.html
Jeb's defiance makes case for automatic clemency
Palm Beach Post Editorial
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Gov. Bush is attacking the judiciary with way more than the usual Republican rhetoric. This time, he's resorted to outright defiance.
The governor couldn't have picked a more revealing way to display his anti-court venom than by spurning the July 14 opinion of the 1st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee. The court told the state that it must help felons fill out a form needed to win back the right to vote after serving prison time. Rather than follow the court's dictate, Gov. Bush eliminated the form.
That's the kind of inexcusable defiance that makes Florida the focal point for national anxiety over the upcoming presidential election. Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who was appointed by Gov. Bush and reports to him, already has gone too far in defending an indefensible list of nearly 48,000 ex-felons who may or may not have been banned from voting. Fueling the conspiracy theories that Ms. Hood says are groundless, nearly half the names on the list belonged to African-Americans, who tend to vote for Democrats. Fewer than 100 belonged to Hispanics, who vote more often for Republicans than blacks do. Both parties are making strong appeals to Hispanic voters.
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."
The governor whined that the form duplicates electronic filing methods and did away with the form. But the governor's plan doesn't order the Department of Correction to help inmates file electronically before they are discharged. Instead, it promises only that the state will put a notice in the mail. Rather than help people as they are about to leave custody, the state proposes tracking these transient residents after they leave. Additionally, the state is finding flaws in its central voter database, which lists all Florida voters. The errors on that list compounded the difficulty of screening out felons.
The long-term solution is for Floridians to change the state constitution to automatically restore voting rights of felons. Florida is one of seven states, including Mississippi and Alabama, that do not grant automatic clemency. State legislators chose to offer voters an amendment requiring parental notice of abortions, not one that would lift the Civil War-era ban on voting rights. The ban makes Florida look racist and uninterested in democracy. The governor's actions make him appear to be complicit.
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Quote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...ht/3956129.stm
Last Updated: Tuesday, 26 October, 2004, 17:06 GMT 18:06 UK
E-mail this to a friend Printable version
New Florida vote scandal feared
By Greg Palast
Reporting for Newsnight
A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.
Election supervisor Ion Sancho believes some voters are being intimidated
Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list". ....
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Quote:
http://www.gregpalast.com/bushs-new-...ey-a-criminal/
Bush’s New US Attorney a Criminal?
Published March 13th, 2007 in Articles
BBC Television had exposed 2004 voter attack scheme by appointee Griffin, a Rove aide.
Black soldiers and the homeless targeted.
by Greg Palast
There’s only one thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor. That’s replacing an honest prosecutor with a criminal.
There was one big hoohah in Washington yesterday as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers pulled down the pants on George Bush’s firing of US Attorneys to expose a scheme to punish prosecutors who wouldn’t bend to political pressure.
But the Committee missed a big one: Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove’s assistant, the President’s pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.
Key voters on Griffin’s hit list: Black soldiers and homeless men and women. Nice guy, eh? Naughty or nice, however, is not the issue. Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In October 2004, our investigations team at BBC Newsnight received a series of astonishing emails from Mr. Griffin, then Research Director for the Republican National Committee. He didn’t mean to send them to us. They were highly confidential memos meant only for RNC honchos.
However, Griffin made a wee mistake. Instead of sending the emails — potential evidence of a crime — to email addresses ending with the domain name “@GeorgeWBush.com” he sent them to “@GeorgeWBush.ORG.” A website run by prankster John Wooden who owns “GeorgeWBush.org.” When Wooden got the treasure trove of Rove-ian ravings, he sent them to us.
And we dug in, decoding, and mapping the voters on what Griffin called, “Caging” lists, spreadsheets with 70,000 names of voters marked for challenge. Overwhelmingly, these were Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts.
The Griffin scheme was sickly brilliant. We learned that the RNC sent first-class letters to new voters in minority precincts marked, “Do not forward.” Several sheets contained nothing but soldiers, other sheets, homeless shelters. Targets included the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and that city’s State Street Rescue Mission. Another target, Edward Waters College, a school for African-Americans.
If these voters were not currently at their home voting address, they were tagged as “suspect” and their registration wiped out or their ballot challenged and not counted. Of course, these ‘cages’ captured thousands of students, the homeless and those in the military though they are legitimate voters.
We telephoned those on the hit list, including one Randall Prausa. His wife admitted he wasn’t living at his voting address: Randall was a soldier shipped overseas.....
Quote:
http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/pri...c-7aaa4efa6a3a
Published 12/28/2006
End around
Senators question U.S. attorney appointment.
J. Timothy Griffin was sworn in as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas on Dec. 20, less than a week after his appointment prompted unusual public expressions of outrage from both of the state’s U.S. senators.
The outrage stems from the way Griffin was appointed. Instead of following the normal process, which would involve a presidential nomination and confirmation by the U.S. Senate, the Bush administration utilized a provision in the 2005 reauthorization of the Patriot Act that allows the attorney general to appoint an “interim U.S. attorney” without Senate confirmation. Therefore, Griffin, 38, will serve as interim U.S. attorney until he is formally nominated or replaced by the president.
Interim appointments are usually made to fill vacancies, but Griffin was named to the U.S. attorney post on Dec. 15, while it was still occupied by Bud Cummins.
Cummins resigned on Dec. 20......
..........U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln said, “Clearly, the president and his administration are aware of the difficulty it would take to get Tim Griffin confirmed through the normal process, and therefore chose to circumvent it in order to name him as interim U.S. attorney. This decision denied the Senate the opportunity to carefully consider and evaluate Mr. Griffin’s qualifications and denied the American people the transparency the standard nomination process provides.”
“The White House worked very hard to get him this job and keep him from going under oath and answer questions about his political life,” Teague added. “We’re not saying there should not be a process to name an interim position, but it should be done in good faith that a permanent replacement will be named at some point. The White House has indicated to the senator that Tim Griffin is their person, so the question is, if he is their person, why not nominate him? It’s an effort to keep him from going under oath.”.............
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<b>The 2004 BBC reporting and the emails accidentally sent to www.georgewbush.org:</b>
Quote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...ht/3956129.stm
Last Updated: Tuesday, 26 October, 2004, 17:06 GMT 18:06 UK
E-mail this to a friend Printable version
New Florida vote scandal feared
By Greg Palast
Reporting for Newsnight
A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.
Election supervisor Ion Sancho believes some voters are being intimidated
Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list". ....
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Quote:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pb...30/-1/Help0530
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.d...YT02/704120590
Article published Apr 12, 2007
<b>In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud</b>
ERIC LIPTON AND IAN URBINA
WASHINGTON, April 11 — Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.
Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.....
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