The more you look the more disbarred and 'disappeared' Gore voters you find. You'd almost think it was deliberate
Gregory
Palast
Sunday
December 10, 2000
The
Observer
Hey, Al, take a look at this. Every
time I cut open another alligator, I find the bones of more Gore voters. This
week, I was hacking my way through the Florida swampland known as the Office of
Secretary of State Katherine Harris and found a couple thousand more names of
voters electronically 'disappeared' from the vote rolls. About half of those
named are African-Americans. They had the right to vote, but they never made it
to the balloting booths.
When we left off our Florida story two weeks ago, The Observer discovered
that Harris's office had ordered the elimination of 8,000 Florida voters on the
grounds that they had committed felonies in other states. None had. Harris
bought the bum list from a company called ChoicePoint, a firm whose Atlanta
executive suite and boardroom are filled with Republican funders. ChoicePoint,
we have learned, picked up the list of faux felons from state officials in -
ahem - Texas. In fact, it was a roster of people who, like their Governor,
George W, had committed nothing more than misdemeanours.
For Harris, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his brother, the Texas blacklist
was a mistake made in Heaven. Most of those targeted to have their names
'scrubbed' from the voter roles were African-Americans, Hispanics and poor white
folk, likely voters for Vice-President Gore. We don't know how many voters lost
their citizenship rights before the error was discovered by a few sceptical
county officials, before ChoicePoint, which has gamely 'fessed-up to the
Texas-sized error, produced a new list of 58,000 felons. In May, Harris sent on
the new, improved scrub sheets to the county election boards. Maybe it's my bad
attitude, but I thought it worthwhile to check out the new list. Sleuthing
around county offices with a team of researchers from internet newspaper
Salon.com, we discovered that the 'correct' list wasn't so correct.
One elections supervisor, Linda Howell of Madison County, was so upset by the
errors that she refused to use the Harris/ChoicePoint list. How could she be so
sure the new list identified innocent people as felons? Because her own name was
on it, 'and I assure you, I am not a felon'.
Our 10-county review suggests a minimum 15 per cent misidentification rate.
That makes another 7,000 innocent people accused of crimes and stripped of their
citizenship rights in the run-up to the presidential race. And not just any
7,000 people. Hillsborough (Tampa) county statisticians found that 54 per cent
of the names on the scrub list belonged to African-Americans, who voted 93 per
cent for Gore.
Now our team, diving deeper into the swamps, has discovered yet a third group
whose voting rights were stripped. The ChoicePoint-generated list includes 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 hundreds more convicts from the
35 other states which 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.'
How could Florida's Republican rulers know how these people would vote? I put
the question to David Bositis, America's top expert on voting demographics. Once
he stopped laughing, he said the way Florida used the lists from a private firm
was, 'an obvious technique to discriminate against black voters'. In a darker
mood, Bositis, of Washington's Center for Political and Economic Studies, said
the sad truth of American justice is that 46 per cent of those convicted of
felony are African-American. In Florida, a record number of black folk, over 80
per cent of those registered to vote, packed the polling booths on November 7.
Behind the curtains, nine out of 10 black people voted Gore.
Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project, Washington, pointed out that the
'white' half of the purge list would be peopled overwhelmingly by the poor, also
solid Democratic voters.
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.
But enough is never enough, it seems. We have discovered a fourth group of
Gore voters also barred from the polls.
It was Thursday, 2am. On the other end of the line, heavy breathing, then a
torrent too fast for me to catch it all. 'Vile... lying... inaccurate... pack of
nonsense... riddled with errors'... click! This was not a ChoicePoint
whistleblower telling me about the company's notorious list. It was
ChoicePoint's own media communications representative, Marty Fagan,
communicating with me about my, 'sleazy disgusting journalism' in reporting on
it.
I was curious about this company that appears - although never say never in
this game - to have chosen the next President for America's voters. Its board
dazzles with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken Langone and Home Depot
tycoon Bernard Marcus, big Republican funders.
Florida is the only state to hire an outside firm to suggest who should lose
citizenship rights. That may change. 'Given a new President, and what we
accomplished in Florida, we expect to roll across the nation,' ChoicePoint told
me ominously.
They have quite a pedigree for this solemn task. The company's Florida
subsidiary, Database Technologies (now DBT Online), was founded by one Hank
Asher. When US law enforcement agencies alleged that he may have been associated
with Bahamian drug dealers - although no charges were brought - the company lost
its data management contract with the FBI. Hank and his friends left last year
and so, in Florida's eyes, the past is forgiven.
Thursday, 3am. (I should say both calls were at my request). A new, gentler
voice giving me ChoicePoint's upbeat spin. 'You say we got over 15 per cent
wrong - we like to look at that as up to 85 per cent right!' That's 7,000
votes-plus - the bulk Democrats, not to mention the thousands on the Texas list.
Gore may lose by 500 votes.
I contacted San Francisco-based expert Mark Swedlund. 'It's just fundamental
industry practice that you don't roll out the list statewide until you have
tested it and tested it again,' he said. 'Dershowitz is right: they had to know
that this jeopardised thousands of people's registrations. And they would also
know the [racial] profile of those voters.'
'They' is Florida state, not ChoicePoint. Let's not get confused where the
blame lies. Harris's crew lit this database fuse, then acted surprised when it
blew up. Swedlund says ChoicePoint had a professional responsibility to tell the
state to test the list; ChoicePoint says the state should not have used its
'raw' data.
Until Florida privatised its Big Brother powers, laws kept the process out in
the open. This year, when one county asked to see ChoicePoint's formulas and
back-up for blacklisting voters, they refused - these were commercial secrets.
So we'll never know how America's president was chosen.
ChoicePoint complains that I said Harris signed their contract. It was a Beth
Emory. I'm still more than 85 per cent accurate.