See, even though it wasn't clear to me at the time from the news, the most disturbing thing that happened in the Florida election had to do with thousands of people being illegally dropped from the voter registry. A great many of these, perhaps a majority, were African-American. Seems the lists being used of felons in Florida were full of errors - Oops!
OK - mistakes happen. Guess what? Looks like things haven't gotten much better. Below is an account of the current fiasco, by an author who obviously has a point of view. It's OK, though, you can corroborate this by searching google news for news accounts over the past couple days:
quote: Yet, what could possibly look more suspicious than Jeb Bush's latest attempt to purge ineligible felons from Florida's voter rolls? As everyone knows, the same exercise in 2000 caused thousands of eligible citizens -- including a disproportionate number of black voters likely to vote Democratic -- to be wrongly dropped from rolls in an election that decided the presidency by 537 votes.
You'd think such an embarrassingly tainted election would have compelled Bush to make an extreme commitment to developing a process so free of suspicion that even the most jaded critic would be satisfied.
Not in Florida, not in 2004 and not where the Bush family dynasty is concerned. Bush didn't bother to create a multipartisan effort to produce a fair and transparent purge process, nor did he make his list readily available to all. Rather, he developed it behind closed doors and kept it hidden, forcing media organizations and rival parties to sue for its release.
Then in no time flat, thousands of eligible voters wrongly targeted for removal were discovered. Numerous county elections supervisors openly revolted, saying they wouldn't perform the purge based on a list of such questionable accuracy.
Then it was discovered that the list of 47,000 people included only 61 Hispanics -- a group friendly to Republicans. Bush, unable to continue defending the effort, scrapped it entirely, leaving list-purging to the counties.
The episode alone should have been enough to arouse the suspicion of all Floridians, regardless of party. But what truly astounds was the casualness of Bush's reaction. What should have been a shocking, constitutional outrage was, in Bush's words, ``an oversight and a mistake.''
An oversight? A mistake? Forgetting to mail the electric-bill payment is an oversight. Making a right turn on red where it isn't allowed is a mistake. Undermining the fundamental right to vote in a way that would help your brother's presidential campaign -- just as it helped him four years ago -- would be an abomination. The properly suspicious U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called for an investigation into whether black and Democratic voters were targeted for removal.
Yet Jeb Bush's reaction amounted to, Oops. My bad. No big deal. Get over it.
Bush even suggested that critics who smelled something foul were merely caught up in the ''political process,'' trying to twist a minor incident to their advantage. Hmmm. That effectively divides the world according to Jeb into those willing to buy his ''innocent mistake'' defense and those who have nefarious political motives for questioning the governor.
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The numbers are vague for the level of outrage. What percentage of blacks? How do they know the names are hispanic? It was reported to me that if Katherine Harris were elected no black people in Florida would be able to vote. What happened to that idea?
I wonder how they are going to solve the problem of long lines at closing time again. That is what really annoyed me.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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there'll be more stories in the next few days on this, but the omission refers to surnames that were identifiably hispanic. They're admitting it's a problem - I don't really understand the rationale for the exclusion.
They don't have exact numbers on the racial breakdown, but the complaints of people who were unfairly prevented from voting due to the use of those lists of felons last time came mainly from the African-American community. And it's not surprising, given the stats on black men and incarceration. (This is a raw sore with me now - I have a friend who is going through what can only be described as police harrassment - to put it mildly - due to the color of his skin and living in the wrong neighborhood.)
The outrage comes from the fact that it was a major problem - turning away registered voters on the basis of erroneous information. And they didn't bother to do a better job this time, even after the NAACP went to court over it.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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But, but, but George W. Bush said that all the black people should vote for him! He told them that his administration has done nothing but help them all these years!
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You know, I don't care if the voters erroneously placed on the list were black, brown, yellow, blue, or green with red polka dots. How the hell are such huge blocks of voters erroneously showing up on purge lists like that? And why isn't it being more stringently watched after the debacle of 2000? "Bush is trying to steal the election" isn't a good enough explanation for me. Someone should have this information.
Posts: 1170 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Someone probably does have informatuion. I think they're trying to keep this hush-hush. It would look really bad for them. If Jeb Bush was just like, oops--my bad, and someone says, hey wait--I'm sure he'll do something like "hey look--there's Osama!" or some other distraction.
Posts: 463 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:I wonder how they are going to solve the problem of long lines at closing time again.
I never heard about this aspect of the Florida vote in 2000, or if I did I've forgotten. I am assuming from the subject of the thread that some voters in line at closing time were turned away from the polls. If so, that's just not right.
The way we do it here in Fresno County, CA, is that if there are people in line at closing time, one of the poll workers is sent to stand at the end of the line so that no one else can get into line. Then, all those who were already in line go ahead and vote before the closing process begins. If it takes time, it takes time. I know I've worked in precincts where there were twenty or twenty-five people in line at closing, and it takes some time - sometimes as much as half an hour or so - but everyone there by closing time gets to vote.
Actually, the whole idea of turning anyone away from the polls has always bothered me immensely. And, as precinct inspector, I've had to do that in the past, due to the person's name not being on the voter roster. If they claim they have registered to vote, I have always given them the phone number of the registrar of voters and urge them to call right then and see if they can get it straightened out.
But we don't have that problem here anymore. I don't know if it is statewide - I assume it is - but we have what is called a Provisional Ballot. If someone comes in to vote and isn't on our precinct's voter roster, and we can't find out where their precinct is, they can still vote. They have to produce ID, and they have to fill out some personal information on a special ballot envelope (name, address, DOB, DL number) and take an oath that the information is true and correct. Then they vote, put their ballot in the envelope and it goes into the ballot box.
When the ballots get downtown, they are checked against voter registration rolls and against signatures on voter rosters from election day and absentee ballots received. If the voter is, indeed, registered and did not vote any other ballot on election day or by absentee, their vote is counted. Presumably if they lied about anything, the law goes after them for lying or trying to vote twice or whatever.
It takes time and effort, but that way no one is turned away on election day. Occasionally someone worries that having personal information on the envelope compromises their right to a secret ballot, but the ballots are separated from the envelopes after being checked but before the ballots are counted.
Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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The list, barring the hispanic mistake, was disproportionate depending on what you compared it to. To the state at large, there were too many blacks and democrats. To the prison population, there were too many whites and republicans. Statistics are always iffy.
The part that bothers me is that the media freaked like all these people were getting purged. The list was a starting point for the county elections supervisors. There were supposed to make sure the people really were felons, contact them, then purge them. Bush didn't even expect it to be done before the election.
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. At least it got Bush to streamline the clemency process.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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Greg Palast detailed the 2000 Florida election a while back. As I recall, Jeb Bush first privatized the voting process -- turned it over to a private corporation, which Republicans applaud for its supposed greater efficiency. It's cheaper because we don't oversee it and privatization supposedly gets the lowest possible contract for the job by submitting it to the private sector.
In any case, one of the first things that company did was classify voters not just by name and address, but by race. Then Jeb Bush goes on to, against Florida Supreme Court orders, ban all ex-convicts from voting. The company goes through the list and bans everyone "likely" to be an ex-con -- that is, people similar to the ex-cons.
One of Palast's examples, I believe, cited a black woman who, by virtue of having the same common last name as an ex-con and the same skin color, was barred from voting.
I believe 6,000 people were illegally prevented from voting in the last presidential election -- half of them black, more than 90% of them registered Democrats. Bush was declared the victor by the Supreme Court when they stopped the counting while he was ahead by slightly over 500 votes. Of course, Kathleen Harris was beside herself with worry for a fair election.
Gosh, I can't imagine Bush would want to keep the colored people from voting again.Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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What I don't get in these revisitations of recent electoral history is the assumption that Florida's black voters would have voted for Gore. Where's the evidence? I mean, OJ currently resides there, right? Wouldn't he get some write-ins?
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I have a difficult time imagining Jeb Bush is such a stupid politician that he would know about such voting practices and permit them to continue. It seems far more likely to me that once the process was privatized, he didn't hear much more about it.
Setting aside the question of whether or not he is an evil socially conservative Republican, I can't imagine he is so stupid as to hear about that and think it could be kept secret. It's the voting process, it can't be kept secret. And no one expected the Election to be nearly that tight.
So not only does Gov. Bush have to have been an evil villain to have had complicity in the debacle, he has to have been stupid as well. A strange mixture of stupidity and Machiavellian brilliance, actually. Similar to the flip-flops on Dubya.
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quote:In any case, one of the first things that company did was classify voters not just by name and address, but by race. Then Jeb Bush goes on to, against Florida Supreme Court orders, ban all ex-convicts from voting.
You need to cite this - it's pretty inflammatory, and directly contradicts what I've read (but can't find the source for other the the F 9/11 minute-by-minute thread, naturally). Jeb was acting under orders from the Florida courts to purge felons from the voter rolls. That was what he privatized, not voting itself.
The list debacle has always sounded more like incompetence than malice to me. Matching up people across different lists is one of the most deceptively difficult database jobs around. You can't just use names; too many people share them. Absent a unique ID, such as SSN, you basically have to match as many attributes as possible, such as name, DOB, and, yes, race. I actually cannot conceive of a way that would have achieved a respectable purge short of manual matching by real people. The difficulties are great enough that it probably shouldn't have been tried.
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From what I know of the U.S. Constitution, there is no clause in there saying "criminals loose the right to vote." Isn't the real issue that Florida's disenfranchisement laws violate federal law? Isn't that the real problem?
Even if this isn't in violation of federal law, isn't there a problem with it? These people still pay taxes and are still subject to law, and yet they aren't represented.
Posts: 903 | Registered: May 2003
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The info comes from Greg Palast's book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
quote:In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered local elections supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from registeries on grounds they were felons not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren't felons, at most a handful. However, the voters on this "scrub list" were, notably, African American (about 54 per cent) and most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats.
[. . .]the office of the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, brother of the Republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls -- real felons, but with the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, another 40,000 legal voters (in addition to the 57,700 on the purge list), almost all Democrats, could not vote.
[. . .] Add it up. The dead-wrong Texas list, the uncorrected "corrected" list, plus the out-of-state ex-con list. By golly, it's enough to swing a presidential election. I bet the busy Harris, simultaneously in charge of both Florida's voter rolls and George Bush's presidential campaign, never thought of that.
[. . .] [from a graphic demonstrating the ChoicePoint scrub list] This is one screen page from the computer 'scrub' list of thousands tagged for removal from voter registration rolls.
The key is race. On the full list, more than half are Black, mostly innocent citizens with common names (Jackson, Butler, Roberts, Ramos, Smith) matching a birthday and race with one of several million listed felons. JC Smith (#346) shares initials, race and birthday with a felon Smith. Despite teh possibility there is more than one Smith in Florida, the state paid for, but refused to use several methods of verification. As a result, the list is at best 15% wrong (company claim) or 90.2% wrong (from statistical sampling). Either way, the errors were enough to swing the election from Gore to Bush.
Over the contracto's objection, the state purged voters whose names are close, but not exact matches, to felons. Johnny Jackson Jr. (#354) lost his vote because John Fitzgerald Jackson committed a crime in Texas.
On the unlikely chance that Jackson of Florida is the same Jackson who served time in Texas, Florida now admits it had no right to take away his vote. In this small sample, Jackson of Texas, Butler of Illinois (#357) and Cooper of Ohio (#360) had the right to vote no matter what their record. This error alone cost Gore six times as many votes as Bush's official victory margin.
...and this is all before page 20, when Palast gets into another 40,000 missing from the list. Bush "won," by the way, by a little over 500 votes. But Palast doesn't even go into depth over the Supreme Court's crap.
He does, however, go further into how Florida banned (largely black) people from voting -- Texas, for example, provided a 100% mistaken list of 8,000 supposed felons which was never fully corrected. Also, "the state's private contractor, ChoicePoint, generated a list of 1,704 names of people who, earlier in their lives, were convicted of felonies in Illinois and Ohio. Like most American states, these two restore citizenship rights to people who have served their time in prison and then remained on the good side of the law.
"Florida strips those convicted in its own courts of voting rights for life. But Harris's office concedes, and county officials concur, that the state of Florida has no right to impose this penalty on people who have moved in from these other states. (Only 13 states, most in the Old Confederacy, bar reformed criminals from voting.)
"Going deeper into the Harris lists, we find hundred more convicted from the 35 other states that restored their rights at the end of sentences served. If they have the right to vote, why were these citizens barred from the polls? Harris didn't return my calls. But Alan Dershowitz did. The Harvard law professor, a renowned authority on legal process, said: 'what's emerging is a pattern of reducing the total number of voters in Florida, which they know will reduce the Democratic vote.'"
Then, later, he goes on to discuss a new revelation:
quote:The disfranchisement operation began in 1998 under Katherine Harris's predecessor as Secretary of State, Sandra Mortham. Mortham was a Republican star, designated by Jeb Bush as his lieutenant governor running mate for his second run for governor.
Six months prior to the gubernatorial contest, the Florida legislature passed a "reform" law to eliminate registration of ineligible voters: those who had moved, those who had died and felons without voting rights. The legislation was promoted as a good government response to the fraud-tainted Miami mayoral race of 1997.
But from the beginning, the law and its implementation emitted a partisan fragrance. Passed by the Republican legislature's majority, the new code included an extraordinary provision to turn over the initial creation of "scrub" lists to a private firm. No other state, either before or since, has privatized this key step in the elimination of citizens' civil rights.
In November 1998 the Republican-controlled Office of the Secretary of State handed the task to the single bidder, Database Technologies, now the DBT Online Unit of ChoicePoint Inc. of Atlanta, into which it merged last year.
The elections unit within the Office of the Secretary of State immediately launched a felon manhunt with a szeal and carelessness that worried local election professionals. The Nation has obtained an internal Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections memo, dated August 1998, which warns Mortham's office that it had wrongly removed eligible voters in a botched rush "to capriciously take names off the rolls". However, to avoida public row, the suerpvisors agreed to tkeep their misgivings within the confines of the bureaucracies in the belief that "entering a public fight with [state officials] would be counterproductive".
That November, Jeb Bush had an unexpectedly easy walk to the governor's mansion, an election victory attributed, ironically, to his endorsement by Black Democratic politicians feuding with their party.
Over the next two years, with Republicans in charge of both the governorship and the Secretary of State's Office, now under Harris, the felon purge accelerated. In May 2000, using a list provided by DBT, Harris's office ordered counties to purge 8,000 Florida voters who had committed felonies in Texas. In fact, none of the group was charged with anything more than misdemeanors, a mistake caught but never fully reversed. ChoicePoint DBT and Harris then sent out "corrected" lists, including the names of 437 voters who had indeed committed felonies in Texas. But this list too was in error, since a Texas law enacted in 1997 permits felons to vote after doing their time. In this case there was no attempt at all to correct the error.
The wrongful purge of the Texas convicts was no one-of-a-kind mishap. The Secretary of State's Office acknowledges that it also ordered the removal of 714 names of Illinois felons and 990 from Ohio -- states that permit the vote even to those on probation or parole. According to Florida's own laws, not a single person arriving in the state from Ohio or Illinois should have been removed. Altogether, DBT tagged for the scrub nearly 3,000 felons who came from at least eight states that automatically restore voting rights and who therefore arrived in Florida with full citizenship.
A ChoicePoint DBT spokesman said, and the Florida Department of Elections confirms, that Harris's office approved the selection of states from which to obtain records for the felon scrub. As to why the department included dstates that restore voting rights, Janet Modrow, Florida's liason to ChoicePoint DBT, bounced the question to Harris's legal staff. That office has not returned repeated calls.
As far as your legal question goes, investigate Schlenther v. Florida Department of State, issued in June 1998. "Florida's Cout of Appeal ruled unanimously that Florida could not require a man convicted in Connecticut 25 years earlier 'to ask [Florida] to restore his civil rights. They were never lost here.' Connecticut, like most states, automatically restores felons' civil rights at the end of their sentence, and therefore 'he arrived as any other citizen, with full rights of citizenship.'" Or perhaps you'd like to check out the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 "motor voter" federal law credited with seven million new voters.
These are just some opening paragraphs -- he goes into fairly intense depth, but given that the chapter runs thirty-six pages, I can't possibly reproduce it all. I'd seriously consider taking a look at the book -- The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, by Greg Palast. It's stunning, to say the least. It's been run across such conservative bastions as Ornery without anyone giving any challenge to the facts (that I've noticed; but I haven't frequented the site for ages, it may have come back to life since I was last there).
Whoo. That took some fingerwork.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Lalo, I'll check the book out. Even the account here sounds like raging incompetence to this ex-government-IT-contractor, not a malicious attempt to steal elections. But I'll check it out once I'm back at school.
As for the legality of banning felons from voting, that is constitutional, at least so far. A decent summary of the legal situation can be found here.
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I think my real question is, why are so many people upset about felons not being allowed to vote? They've already shown they're willing to break the law in a significant way. Why should we as a society allow them to immediately turn around and vote for sheriff? Or our lawmakers?
I don't mind making it easier for them to get their rights restored. I'm glad Bush finally got around to it. But I don't understand why it shouldn't take a little effort on the convicted felon's part. Seriously, what's the big deal?
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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I think the bigger deal isn't that felons can't vote...it is that people with the same name as a felon are removed from voting rolls. Or people who kind of sound like the person. Or people who USED to have their votes taken away but now by law should have them. That is the big deal.
In a state where the final tally gave Bush the win by 500 votes, thousands of incorrectly deleted votes made quite a difference. Worth at least one book's worth of time looking into. And preventing from happening again.
quote:Lalo, I'll check the book out. Even the account here sounds like raging incompetence to this ex-government-IT-contractor, not a malicious attempt to steal elections. But I'll check it out once I'm back at school.
Dag, I have to ask -- what could Bush do that would qualify as corruption to you? I mean, short of twisting his mustache diabolically as he cuts the rope sending a schoolbus of screaming schoolchildren falling to their death in an alligator pit, you seem to excuse every little war and convenient mistake made as an "oops" thang. What could Bush do that would convince you there's a possibility he's corrupt?
And hey, CT, no problem. Anything for my hootchie mama.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote: I think my real question is, why are so many people upset about felons not being allowed to vote? They've already shown they're willing to break the law in a significant way. Why should we as a society allow them to immediately turn around and vote for sheriff? Or our lawmakers?
I don't mind making it easier for them to get their rights restored. I'm glad Bush finally got around to it. But I don't understand why it shouldn't take a little effort on the convicted felon's part. Seriously, what's the big deal?
To be honest, I don't care what individual states do with their own government. What I take issue with is preventing people who are still citizens of the United States from voting in a federal election, when no federal law (that I know of) explicitly prevents this right (yes, the 10th says it's okay for states to make whatever laws they want, as long as it's not in violation of the constitution or federal law).
If there were enough *voting* criminals to alter a federal election in any way, then we'd be living in a sad nation indeed.
Posts: 903 | Registered: May 2003
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quote:Dag, I have to ask -- what could Bush do that would qualify as corruption to you? I mean, short of twisting his mustache diabolically as he cuts the rope sending a schoolbus of screaming schoolchildren falling to their death in an alligator pit, you seem to excuse every little war and convenient mistake made as an "oops" thang. What could Bush do that would convince you there's a possibility he's corrupt?
Lalo, you seem to think that a) there's only one way to interpret the actions of others, and b) you've got the exclusive scoop on it. Forgive me if I don't bow to your great wisdom.
There's a possible perfectly innocent reason for every single action described in the excerpt you typed in above. I've explained my reasons for thinking this might be incompetence, based on my experience with exercises EXACTLY like this one in dealing with the names of doctors running clinical trials. There, we only had 6 rosters of names to reconcile, and all of the names on the list were licensed professionals about whom we had lots of information. It still took over a year and it still was never right, until a human being sat down and did it by hand, which took another 18 months. And it must be done about every 6 months to keep the list accurate.
I explained my reasoning above for thinking this is incompetence. You felt no need to address those reasons at all, either with your own analysis or the portion of the book you posted. Instead you simply chose to paint me as an apologist. I can just picture you shaking your had sadly at the Poor Boy Who Just Doesn't Get It.
This happening the day after you took Rakeesh to task for doing much the same to you is really too much, especially when you consider that the very post he was responding to was as nice an example of hypocrisy as I've seen on this board.
quote:I explained my reasoning above for thinking this is incompetence. You felt no need to address those reasons at all, either with your own analysis or the portion of the book you posted. Instead you simply chose to paint me as an apologist. I can just picture you shaking your had sadly at the Poor Boy Who Just Doesn't Get It.
Heh. And I quote your reasoning back to you:
The list debacle has always sounded more like incompetence than malice to me. Matching up people across different lists is one of the most deceptively difficult database jobs around. You can't just use names; too many people share them. Absent a unique ID, such as SSN, you basically have to match as many attributes as possible, such as name, DOB, and, yes, race. I actually cannot conceive of a way that would have achieved a respectable purge short of manual matching by real people. The difficulties are great enough that it probably shouldn't have been tried.
Lalo, I'll check the book out. Even the account here sounds like raging incompetence to this ex-government-IT-contractor, not a malicious attempt to steal elections. But I'll check it out once I'm back at school.
You're saying it's just raging incompetence that 60,000 people were barred from voting -- that it's simply coincidence that Kathleen Harris, in charge of running Florida's election, just happened to be Bush's campaign manager -- that the overwhelming majority (90+%)of the people banned would have voted Democratically -- that Jeb Bush took it upon himself to ban felons from voting despite no support (and, if Palast is to be believed, actively working against orders) from the judiciary and legislature -- that Bush just happened to win Florida thanks to Jeb's move -- but none of this could possibly be incompetence. It's just a series of unfortunate events! Scuse me as I wander into an, oops, bank (I was sent out by my wife, she wanted me to buy her celery at the grocery store) and, oops, fall into the vault. How clumsy of me! Oh my, my tommy gun slipped out of my pocket and I can't seem to turn the trigger off. Butterfingers! Oh my, why is this car speeding away with a masked man at the wheel? I thought I was hailing a cab!
Gosh, I'm sure unlucky and incompetent.
As far as your link goes...
quote:If convicted felons had voted in 2000, Al Gore would be president. Florida has more than enough felons who would have voted Democratic to have swung that state to Gore. This one-sided impact has led to a legal campaign to persuade activist judges to rewrite state laws to allow felons to vote.
[. . .]
The Second Circuit relied on the “clear statement” rule: “if Congress intends to alter the usual constitutional balance between the States and the Federal Government, it must make its intention to do so unmistakably clear in the language of the statute.” Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U.S. 452, 460-61 (1991).
[. . .]
Notably lacking from the Voting Rights Act is any clear statement that Congress intended to prohibit state disenfranchisement laws. Moreover, the Act cannot extend beyond the power of the Fourteenth Amendment on which it is based, and at ratification 29 of 36 states had provisions in their constitutions prohibiting or authorizing prohibition of voting by persons convicted of felonies or infamous crimes. As of 2002, 48 out of 50 states restricted voting by felons.
The Fourteenth Amendment itself explicitly recognizes the power of states to disenfranchise criminals. Section 2 of the Amendment applies "when the right to vote at any election ... [is] abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime ...." States have always been able to deprive felons the right to vote as part of their punishment.
"So while the Second Circuit said no to felons voting, it invited the Supreme Court to address the issue on a future appeal."
If I'm reading this correctly, all that link claims is that Congress must allow states to determine for themselves whether to allow felons to vote, throwing up a fairly frivolous example of a black felon taking suit against his inability to vote because the justice system is so blatantly rigged against the colored. Where, exactly, does it claim that Florida had laws in place to prohibit felons from voting?
I'm no lawyer, but that seems a fairly important step in banning felons (and their colored counterparts among the citizenry) from voting.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Has anyone invesitgated the fact that things like this happen all over the US? Not just Florida - but everywhere else as well. I know that convicted felons can't vote here in Texas, and I have NO problem with that whatsoever. If you've redeemed yourself, then you can reapply. Voting is a PRIVELEGE.
Posts: 262 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote: If I'm reading this correctly, all that link claims is that Congress must allow states to determine for themselves whether to allow felons to vote, throwing up a fairly frivolous example of a black felon taking suit against his inability to vote because the justice system is so blatantly rigged against the colored. Where, exactly, does it claim that Florida had laws in place to prohibit felons from voting?
I'm no lawyer, but that seems a fairly important step in banning felons (and their colored counterparts among the citizenry) from voting.
I’m going to work backwards, but my link was in response to the constitutionality of banning felons from voting, which is pretty clearly a power of the states, at least at this time. You have no refutation to this so far, so I won’t belabor the point.
Since every single article I’ve ever read has taken it as a given that Florida law bans felons from voting, I had to go to the ACLU Florida website to be sure:
quote:In Florida, individuals convicted of a felony are stripped of their civil and voting rights, even after completion of their sentences. Loss of civil rights takes away not only the right to vote, but also the right to hold public office, serve on a jury, and qualify for certain types of state licenses necessary for many jobs, such as those in the construction and medical fields.
In order to restore those rights, a person with a past felony conviction must apply for Restoration of Civil Rights (RCR). Only the Governor and the Executive Clemency Board have the power to restore those rights. The entire process is complicated and takes years. Even then, there is no guarantee an individual's rights will be restored.
Florida is one of only seven states that strip all citizens with past felony convictions of their civil and voting rights for life.
So let’s all just be real clear that Florida law bars felons from voting in general. There may be exceptions for people convicted of felonies in other states, but Bush didn’t make up the basic facts that led to the list being made.
If your source is contending that Bush had no responsibility to ensure felons didn’t vote, them I’m reconsidering whether it’s worth reading him. Because if one thing is clear in this whole mess, it’s that Florida law requires that felons who have not had their rights restored be barred from voting. However, I think that mistake is yours, not the author’s, so I won’t write him off yet.
quote: You're saying it's just raging incompetence that 60,000 people were barred from voting -- that it's simply coincidence that Kathleen Harris, in charge of running Florida's election, just happened to be Bush's campaign manager -- that the overwhelming majority (90+%)of the people banned would have voted Democratically -- that Jeb Bush took it upon himself to ban felons from voting despite no support (and, if Palast is to be believed, actively working against orders) from the judiciary and legislature -- that Bush just happened to win Florida thanks to Jeb's move -- but none of this could possibly be incompetence. It's just a series of unfortunate events!
First, your ranting is getting in the way of your logic. I’m claiming it was incompetence, so I’m not sure why “but none of this could possibly be incompetence” is even in there. I’ll ignore it and proceed, though.
Your nice little conspiracy theory falls apart because “that Jeb Bush took it upon himself to ban felons from voting despite no support (and, if Palast is to be believed, actively working against orders) from the judiciary and legislature” is a flat out lie. Remove this and the whole house of cards of your corruption case comes tumbling down.
It’s easy to make up conspiracy theories, but it’s tiresome. Shall I spin the one about Clinton and the Chinese for you? It’s as much BS as this one likely is.
posted
Hmm. You're right that I let my ranting get in the way of my logic -- hell, I'm pulling this from one source, I should diversify if I'm going to assert it as fact.
I'll fold on this argument, at least for the moment -- thanks for being the courteous guy you are, dude. Once I get off my current science kick and back on a political one (which I'll probably want to do before the November election), I'll get back to you on the 2000 vote-counting.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
"I'll fold on this argument, at least for the moment"
Good choice I don't think it's possible to win an argument against Dagonee, even if you're right. I think he cheats. Posts: 1103 | Registered: Apr 2002
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