Stolen election deja vu: This time we're watching

[Clinton Crusader]

http://smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=18469

Steve B. Cobble: 'Stolen election deja vu: This time we're watching'
Date: Friday, October 29


We all remember what happened in Florida in 2000. The candidate that had the most support lost both the state, and the electoral college. There were police barricades in minority precincts. There were modern, high-tech computer linkups in the wealthier White precincts, but not in African American precincts. There were optical scan machines with "second-chance" voting in largely White precincts, but not in African American precincts, where they were stuck with old, one-chance-only punch card machinery. There were butterfly ballots in Palm Beach, that led to more than 3,000 Jewish votes for Pat Buchanan.

27,000 ballots were tossed out in Duval County, more than half of them from the African-American precincts in Jacksonville - but because no one was paying close enough attention, no official challenges were filed within the 72-hour time period, and thousands of potential votes were lost. Ballot boxes were reported leaving the clerk's offices. Thousands of Gore votes were "mistakenly" subtracted in Volusia County late that night, and only reinstated when an alert local Democrat noticed the large drop in Gore's votes. GOP operatives with strong ties to Tom DeLay and the National Republican leadership shut down the Miami vote count with a "bourgeois riot" that intimidated the local vote-counters.

Republican county clerks in various counties allowed party operatives to "fix" absentee ballot applications; "fix" overvotes in heavily GOP counties; and "fix" military ballots that lacked signatures. Most incredibly, the early-morning "victory" projection that declared Bush the "winner" was made by his first cousin! This incorrect call (the Associated Press did not declare a winner, pointing out that it was "too close to call") set the ongoing media frame that Bush was ahead, and Gore was a sore loser who was trying to change the results.

Thanks to the fine investigative work of Greg Palast and John Harris, we found out that Secretary of State Katherine Harris, now a Congresswoman, but at the time the state co-chair of the Bush campaign, had carried out a private purging program, using Republican-leaning consultants, to falsely purge supposed "felons" from the voting lists. Thousands of false felons were purged from the voting rolls, far more than enough to have changed the outcome, butterfly ballots or not.
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[deutsey]

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