A Blacklist Burning For Bush
The more you look the more disbarred and 'disappeared'
Gore
voters you find. You'd almost think it was deliberate
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 whistle- blower 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 black-listing 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.