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n Your Dreams wrote:
[Excellent article describing in copious detail how Florida
Republicans keep Blacks from voting. Of course, the
Democrats have been deeply and actively complicit in this
for years, above all with the exclusion of former convicts
from the right to vote.
Now former President Carter has added his voice to the
protest. It all dovetails well with President Alarcon's
call for there to be international observers in Florida:
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2004/julio/vier30/32elec.html
-WL]
Los Angeles Times - Sept 26, 2004
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-op-bardach26sep26,1,4475008.story
How Florida Republicans Keep Blacks From Voting
By Ann Louise Bardach
SANTA BARBARA - The worst-kept secret among Florida's
Republican elites is their dread of the African American
vote. It is not an unfounded fear. In 2000, blacks in this
crucial swing state voted for Al Gore in unprecedented
numbers, a whopping 92%. Current polls indicate they are
even less enamored with George W. Bush this time around.
State Democrats are abuzz with suspicions about how Gov.
Jeb Bush and his handpicked secretary of state, Glenda
Hood, will limit the effect of black voters Nov. 2. Though
the state has cultivated several voting techniques that
favor Republicans - an emphasis on military and absentee
ballots is one - no issue has been leveraged as
successfully as its restrictive policy on ex-felons. One
reason is that the Sunshine State holds the dubious honor
of having one of the nation's largest felon populations,
about 5% of its total.
Florida is one of seven states that imposes a lifetime ban
on voting for ex-felons, barring an act of executive
clemency. Currently, more than 600,000 ex-inmates, not
including 82,000 in prison, are unable to vote in Florida.
It is impossible to discuss this issue separate from race.
In 2000, more than 58% of Florida's ex-felons were African
Americans.
A task force set up by Gov. Bush to recommend changes after
the vote-count fiasco of 2000 urged that the voting rights
of prisoners be automatically restored once inmates
completed their sentences. But the governor refused to
review the issue. No matter whether one's crime was
marijuana possession, check bouncing or drunk driving, a
felon must negotiate a daunting obstacle course to win back
the right to vote.
It is a policy that disproportionately affects African
Americans in the state's prisons, the vast majority are
serving time for drug offenses. Critics of the policy point
out that had Gov. Bush's troubled daughter, Noelle, been
prosecuted for having falsified drug prescriptions or
possession of crack cocaine instead of being placed in
treatment-she would probably be an ex-felon today and
unable to vote.
How critical is the felon issue in Florida? Last year, more
than 54,000 felons were released or completed their parole
in the state. In 2001, the ACLU and the Florida Justice
Institute sued the state for failing to comply with a state
law mandating that felons be provided voting-rights
assistance upon completion of their sentences. In response,
the state admitted that between 1992 and 2001 it had not
provided the required assistance forms to 125,000
ex-felons. When a Florida appellate court ordered Bush to
provide the forms, he responded by abolishing them.
In late August, the state's Clemency Board informed the
plaintiffs that about 15% of the ex-felons have had or will
have their voting rights restored without a hearing.
Randall Berg of the Florida Justice Institute says the
remaining 85% will need a hearing before the board, which
consists of Bush and two state Cabinet members. But that's
where the Kafka whiplash begins. The board meets only four
times a year and then accepts just 50 cases. That means 200
ex-felons - maximum - get processed.
For the lucky ex-felons who get a hearing, any of the board
members, all Republicans, have the right to deny petition
without citing cause. There is no appeal process. In short,
the brother of the president can decide who gets to vote in
Florida. "There is only the court of public opinion," said
Peter Siegel of the Florida Justice Institute, "and Jeb
Bush doesn't seem to care about that."
Florida's felon-voting laws have their antecedents in
pre-Civil War laws that minimized the number of freed
slaves on voting rolls. In 1838, the state criminalized a
host of actions to the detriment of poor, uneducated freed
slaves, along with a penal system to ensure they served
long sentences. For instance, vagrancy and larceny were
made felonies. The state's felons would then permanently
lose their right to vote unless they went hat in hand to
the state's Clemency Board.
Particularly troubling to Southern whites was passage of
the 14th Amendment in 1868, which guaranteed blacks the
right to vote. To ensure that blacks would not reward the
Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln with their votes, the
Democratic-controlled Florida Legislature crafted a raft of
statutes to keep blacks out of the polling booths.
After 1880, Florida adopted literacy tests to ensure that
many blacks would be ineligible to cast ballots. There was
the "grandfather clause" that rewarded voting rights only
to people whose "grandfathers" had voted, which knocked
more blacks off the rolls.
Another statute required voters to place eight individual
ballots in eight separate ballot boxes, a rule intended to
confuse black voters who had a 40% illiteracy rate in 1900.
In 1889, Florida passed the first poll tax - pay-to-play
voting - in the South, which remained in effect until 1938.
In 1902, the state's Democratic Party pushed through a
"whites only" primary system.
African Americans who fought for suffrage often faced
violence. Florida set records for lynchings in the South
through 1946. On election day in 1920, a white mob laid
siege to the black town of Ocoee, not far from Orlando,
after a black man, allegedly carrying a weapon, demanded
his right to vote. The town was torched and a half-dozen
residents killed.
In the late 1960s, as Florida Democrats embraced the civil
rights movement, Republicans exploited the state's felon
laws to depress the African American vote. Seeking to
redress past inequities, Democratic Gov. Reubin Askew
changed Florida's policy in 1975 to restore the voting
right to felons once they completed their sentences. Gov.
Bob Graham continued Askew's policy. GOP Gov. Bob Martinez
reinstated the lifetime voting ban on ex-felons in 1988.
But Democrats hardly have clean hands. In the 1990s, Gov.
Lawton Chiles tightened the rules for ex-felons by
eliminating certain crimes from clemency consideration.
Gov. Bush has tinkered with the process to further restrict
clemency and increase secrecy.
On May 5, Secretary of State Hood ordered the state's 67
local election supervisors to begin purging "ineligible"
voters from a list of 48,000 felons she had sent them. Hood
insisted that the purge list be kept secret. Not until a
state court ordered her to release the list in June did the
media learn that Hood's list contained names of mostly
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BS & Lies Snipped
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/00electionmyth.html
Published Wednesday, July 28, 2004, in Investors Business Daily, p. A14
Dems Won't Permit Facts to Get In Way of '00 Election Myth
By John R. Lott, Jr. and Brian Blase.
You know that the political debate has been poisoned when 85 percent of
African-Americans feel President Bush stole the 2000 election. At least
that is what a CBS poll released last Friday finds.
Possibly this just reflects the same 85 percent of African-Americans who
disapprove of the job that Bush is doing. But if no body really believes
the election was stolen and it is all window dressing, it is hard to
explain why the Democrats keep raising the issue at almost every possible
opportunity.
Michael Moore is not alone in asserting the election was stolen. On
Monday night at the Democratic Convention, both former Vice President Al
Gore and former President Bill Clinton raised the election issue that
"this time every vote is counted" and "this year, we're going to make sure
they're all counted."
Before both the NAACP and the Urban League during July, Senator John Kerry
said that in 2000 there were "a million disenfranchised African Americans"
and that it was the "most tainted election in history."
Jesse Jackson recently claimed that "in the year 2000, the loser won and
the winner lost" and that "our birthright was stolen."
The continued charges of Bush stealing the election from Gore are
remarkable considering that exhaustive studies by the U.S. Commission on
Civil Rights and newspaper organizations have found little, if any
evidence voter harassment, intimidation and disenfranchisement occurred
in Florida.
Probes Come Up Empty
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights began an investigation in January
2001 following the public outcry after the election. Although Democrats
appointed 6 of the 8 commissioners and the hearings were often hostile
toward Republicans, the Commission could not find evidence that a single
person was intimidated, harassed, or prevented from voting by Florida law
enforcement.
The Commission could not find evidence of systematic disenfranchisement of
African-American voters, and concluded that state officials were not at
fault for widespread voter disenfranchisement.
A favorite charge is that Republicans threw African-Americans off the
voter rolls to take votes away from Democrats.
Florida bans felons from voting, unless they had been granted clemency.
Before the 2000 vote, the state hired Database Technologies to purge rolls
of felons and dead people.
Unfortunately, some non-felons were erroneously removed from the rolls *
but the errors didn't target minorities.
The liberal-leaning Palm Beach Post found that "a review of state
records, internal e-mails of [Database Technologies] employees and
testimony before the Civil Rights Commission and an elections task force
showed no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted."
In fact, while more African-Americans were removed from the voter roles
simply because most felons in Florida are black, whites were twice as
likely to be erroneously placed on the list as African-Americans were.
The evidence does not support the charges that there was a nefarious plot
to deny African-American voters their right to vote.
In fact, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reports that in 24 of the 25
counties with the highest percentage of non-voted ballots for president,
the county supervisor was a Democrat. In the remaining county, the
supervisor was an independent.
Spoiled Ballots
Additionally, the overall rate of spoiled ballots was 14% higher when the
county election supervisor was a Democrat, and 31% higher when the
supervisor was an African American Democrat. The famed butterfly ballots of
Palm Beach County were creations of Democrats.
Thus, if these nonvoted ballots are viewed as disenfranchisement, not
simply that some voters didn't intend to vote in a particular race, then
the ire of Democrats should be directed toward Democrats in Florida.
Recent research published by one of the current authors in the Journal of
Legal Studies shows that if any African-Americans in Florida had an
unusually high rate of spoiled ballots it was African-American
Republicans, not African-American Democrats.
By income, it was voters with family income over $500,000, hardly a group
that one could attribute their nonvoted ballots to mistakes on their part.
To start the Democratic convention, newspaper headlines blared:
"Democratic Convention aims to stay positive."
Of course, there were the obligatory charges from speakers such as Jimmy
Carter that President Bush had lied about the Iraq war.
But Bill Clinton is the master at simultaneously claiming that Democrats
have sought to unite Americans, while Republicans "need a divided America,"
and lacing his speech with issues that divide Americans: the supposedly
stolen election or rich versus poor being just two. Senator Kerry and the
Democratic Party elites will undoubtedly continue to trumpet their message
of the 2000 election as "stolen" and *tainted" because it resonates with
their base. But at what costs are these short-term electoral gains
achieved? How harmful is it to race relations that African-Americans
believe that others are conspiring to keep their votes from being counted?
*John Lott is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and
was the statistical expert for the Republican minority on the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights report on Florida.
*Brian Blase is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.
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n Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:05:10 -0600, "S. O. Damocles" <so@damocl.es>
wrote:
In Your Dreams wrote:
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n Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:05:10 -0600, "S. O. Damocles" <so@damocl.es>
wrote:
In Your Dreams wrote:
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n Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:05:10 -0600, "S. O. Damocles" <so@damocl.es>
wrote:
In Your Dreams wrote:
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ill Thomas wrote:
On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:05:10 -0600, "S. O. Damocles"
<so@damocl.es>
wrote:
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n Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:47:57 -0600, "S. O. Damocles" <so@damocl.es>
wrote:
Bill Thomas wrote:
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n Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:47:57 -0600, "S. O. Damocles" <so@damocl.es>
wrote:
Bill Thomas wrote:
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n Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:47:57 -0600, "S. O. Damocles" <so@damocl.es>
wrote:
Bill Thomas wrote:
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n Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:47:57 -0600, "S. O. Damocles" <so@damocl.es>
wrote:
Bill Thomas wrote:
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