While rereading Greg Palast's excellent
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, I came across the following information regarding the illegal scrub of voter rolls by DBT (owned by ChoicePoint) prior to the election:
Carol Griffin, supervisor of elections for Washington, said, "It hasn't been accurate in the past, so we had no reason to suspect it was accurate this year."
But if some counties refused to use the list altogether, others seemed to embrace it all too enthusiastically. Etta Rosado, spokeswoman for the Volusia County Department of Elections, said the county essentially accepted the file at face value, did nothing to confirm the accuracy of it and doesn't inform citizens ahead of time that they have been dropped from the voter rolls.
"When we get the con felon list, we automatically start going through our rolls on the computer. If there's a name that says John Smith was convicted of a felony, then we enter a notation on our computer that says convicted felon -- we mark an "f" for felon -- and the date that we received it," Rosado said. "They're still on our computer, but they're on purge status," meaning they have been marked ineligible to vote.
"I don't think that it's up to us to tell them they're a convicted felon," Rosado said. "If he's on our rolls, we make a notation on there. If they show up at a polling place, we'll say, 'Wait a minute, you're a convicted felon, you can't vote. Nine out of 10 times when we repeat that to the person, they say 'Thank you' and walk away.
Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program, December 4, 2000
In light of
the -16k voting "error" in Volusia county - the very incident that caused FOX, and then the other networks, to call Florida for Bush - it seems this was another attack specifically aimed at Volusia county.
I discovered this unrelated, but, interesting bit of information a moment ago while Googling to find a breakdown of Democratic/Republican voting trends in Volusia county. Dave Byron, "a spokesman for Volusia County, Florida", refers to the November 14, 2000 5 P.M. hand-recount deadline:
There are other things that have to be done, however. Many of you here this morning know that we brought a voting machine over to the county administration center, where the count is taking place. And we ran the ballots through the voting machine from Precinct 305 in DeBary, Florida. And that was the precinct where we had the problem with the 320 votes that were not picked up until the manual recount process. So that's being done. I don't have any results of that, because it's still being done. I believe there are 1,369 votes in that precinct. So that's taking place.
Text: Volusia County Spokesman, December 14, 2000
Another Volusia county "error" - ballot bag insecurity:
Then, during Wednesday's recount, a forgotten ballot bag emerged from a county poll worker's trunk. County election officials had such a bad week that they agreed with Democrats' requests for the first countywide hand count, to try to mask their public relations nightmare.
But in their efforts to clean up their act, Volusia stumbled once again. On Friday, as the county unlocked its vaults to retrieve its 200,000 or so ballots to begin the count, live television cameras rolled as three ballot bags emerged from the vaults without their tamper-proof seals intact.
<SNIP>
The Democratic Party asked for the hand count during Volusia's first recount, which yielded the same result as the election night tally, because officials merely replaced the memory cards back into the tabulating machines and reprinted the results from the original vote. It was only after the public relations disaster in the county this week that Volusia granted the Democrats' request for a total manual recount.
The Volusia triangle, November 11, 2000
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