Here it is, four years later in Florida, long after the 60,000 chads, 120,000 double-punched and triple-punched Gore votes, 16,000 Gore votes mysteriously dropped in Volusia, 3000 Jews for Buchanan butterfly ballots, 90,000 disenfranchised, mostly Black voters, 96,000 Nader votes, thousands of illegal late absentee ballots...and you are still waiting for the other shoe to drop in November.
Where are you, John Kerry?
http://wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/vote-m12.shtmlUS media seize on partial Florida vote recount to bolster Bush
By Fred Mazelis
12 March 2001
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Only a handful of commentators and newspapers explained that the Miami-Dade recount result did not mean what most of the reports suggested. First of all, the 10,664 ballots reviewed in this county represent only about one-sixth of the statewide total of 60,000 “undervotes,” i.e., ballots that did not register a vote for president in the initial machine tabulation. The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a manual recount of these undervotes in all of the state's counties, but it was halted by the US Supreme Court on December 12. The Miami-Dade result is a partial finding announced even though tens of thousands of other ballots are still being reviewed by BDO Seidman.
Furthermore, another media consortium, including CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, is reviewing all 180,000 excluded votes statewide, a total that also includes more than 120,000 “overvotes”—ballots that recorded a preference for more than one candidate. This project, organized by the National Opinion Research Council, a group affiliated with the University of Chicago, has reviewed about one-third of the total and is expected to release its own results some time in April.
There are many indications that a full recount in all 67 Florida counties would show that Gore carried the state, possibly by a comfortable margin. A review of excluded ballots in Palm Beach County indicated a gain for Gore of 682 votes. The Orlando Sentinel found a gain for Gore of 25 votes in Osceola County. There have also been reports of net gains for Gore in other counties, including Hillsborough, Gadsden and Lake. The incomplete reports indicate the Gore would have had more votes than Bush if the manual recount in all counties had been allowed to proceed.
Of particular interest is the recount in Duval County, in the northeast part of the state. Bush carried the county, but it is also where Jacksonville, a city of 720,000 people, including a large number of black voters, is located. Nearly 27,000 ballots were rejected in the machine tabulation in Duval County, and more than 40 percent of these were in predominantly black neighborhoods in Jacksonville. This huge number of discarded votes, amounting to 9 percent of the total countywide, was nearly three times the number discarded in the 1996 presidential vote.
Some 22,000 of the 27,000 ballots discarded in Duval County were “overvotes,” and, as in Palm Beach County, confusing ballot instructions were a major factor. A sample ballot displayed in local newspapers prior to the election was designed differently than the actual ballot used on election day. Presidential candidates were listed on one page on the sample ballot, but across two pages on the actual ballot. The sample ballot carried the instruction “vote every page,” but the actual ballot said, “vote appropriate pages.” These conflicting instructions undoubtedly led many voters to cast ballots for more than one presidential candidate.
There are many other issues that will not be dealt with by the statewide recount of discarded ballots, although they cast doubt on the claim that Bush carried the state and legitimately occupies the presidency. These include the well-known butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, which led to more than 3,700 unintended votes for neo-fascistic candidate Pat Buchanan in precincts largely populated by Jewish retirees. In Seminole County, Republican operatives were allowed to illegally add required information that had been left off of 10,000 absentee ballot applications. Antiquated election machinery is also concentrated in the poorest counties, with far larger numbers of Democratic voters.
There were also scores, if not hundreds, of allegations of intimidation and harassment of black voters throughout Florida. Some of these were connected to the purge of the voter rolls ordered by Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris in the months leading up to the November election. The Republican Administration in Florida, headed by the brother of the Republican presidential candidate, instructed local election officials to remove 64,000 voters from the rolls on the ground that they were felons.
Florida is one of eleven US states that deny felons the right to vote for their entire lives, even after they have served their sentences. Some 525,000 voters in Florida are disenfranchised in this fashion, almost 10 percent of the number who actually cast ballots in the last election. Twenty-four percent of Florida's black men of voting age, including tens of thousands who have completed their sentences and are no longer even under parole supervision, remain disenfranchised.
snip
According to a story broken by Britain's Guardian newspaper last November and barely mentioned in the US media, some 54 percent of those purged from the rolls were African-Americans. Most of the others were also Democratic voters, and only a small number of the 64,000 were actually felons. Thus tens of thousands of legal Democratic voters were prevented from casting a ballot.
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Thus, even in the unlikely event that an accurate statewide review of excluded ballots failed to show that Gore won more votes than Bush among those actually cast on election day, there would remain convincing evidence that the election was hijacked through the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters.
When all the recounts have been completed, however, the most important fact about this election will remain unchanged: it was decided on the basis of an open attack on the right to vote and the principle of popular sovereignty.
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The Democrats, even though they were the losers as the result of this assault, were unwilling and unable to resist it. The Gore campaign refused to expose the widespread disenfranchisement in Florida. The Democratic leadership refused to lay bare the role of the Supreme Court, and have worked since Gore's concession and the inauguration of Bush to paper over the historic issues and prop up the illegitimate occupant of the White House.
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