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POST-COUP
FLORIDA
09/12:
Florida 2000 Redux
11/25: Findings on Miami-Dade
Elections Show Improvements Still Needed, Coalition Says
Saying Miami-Dade County's November 5th elections were far from problem-free,
the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition today issued a run down of
Election Day blunders that demonstrate the county's failure to implement
meaningful voting reforms. Written by members of the citizen-run coalition,
the 25-page report on the November 5th General Election establishes
a framework by which to judge the success of the election, outlines
the county's response to the Coalition's pre-election demands, and makes
recommendations based on information collected by the Coalition throughout
the election process...The report creates a framework for analyzing
the success of the election by differentiating between reforms instituted
for "damage control" and those signifying "productive change."...
Formed in the wake of the September 10th voting fiasco, the Miami-Dade
Election Reform Coalition is a non-partisan organization that consists
of numerous groups, including the Miami-Dade NAACP, the ACLU, the League
of Women Voters, ACORN, the Miami Workers Center, the Haitian-American
Grassroots Coalition, The March for Justice, and many others. A full
list of member organizations and a history of the coalition are included
in the first part of the report. Copies of the report are available
online at http://www.reformcoalition.org/
or by calling the ACLU of Florida at (305) 576-2337 ext. 18.
11/01: Fraudulent "felon" purge will aid Jeb on Nov. 5th
from Jeb Bush's secret weapon, Greg Palast, Salon.com
premium
"...even though the list has been widely condemned -- the company
that created it admits probable errors -- the same voter scrub list,
with more than 94,000 names on it, is still in operation in Florida.
Moreover, DBT Online, which generated the disastrously flawed list,
reports that if it followed strict criteria to eliminate those errors,
only 3,000 names would remain -- and a whopping 91,000 people would
have their voting rights restored..."
10/20: Foxes guarding the henhouse...
"U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Friday that the
Justice Department will send attorneys from its Civil Rights division
to monitor the Nov. 5th election in Miami and several other Florida
counties...Florida NAACP President Adora Obi Nweze said Ashcroft's offer
did little to alleviate distrust within the Civil Rights community.
''We don't trust the government at this time, because we haven't had
our vote counted from 2000 till now,'' Nweze said, referring to the
last two major elections, when black voters particularly felt disenfranchised.
"Why should we trust them now?''..."
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/4318694.htm
09/16: Crooks in Control
"Don't blame the poll workers in Florida. The facts, supported
by voting machine experts and numerous newspaper articles, have made
it clear. Computerized voting machines that were certified by the state
of Florida, caused most of the problems in Florida's primary election.
In the absence of paper ballots, the damage is now irreversible. This
was no accident. It's not new. And Florida is not alone..."
Click
here to read more
09/12: Florida
200 Redux
"South Florida's black community, still struggling to heal from
the disputed 2000 presidential election, demanded answers Tuesday for
the "unconscionabl"' screw-ups that caused voters in some
of their precincts to wait hours before casting ballots. The snafus
-- which some leaders predicted last week -- caused an angry state NAACP
President Adora Obi Nweze to call for the removal of some county elections
supervisors, in particular Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor David Leahy.
''Somebody else needs to be put into that job," Nweze said late
Tuesday. "People ought to have had an opportunity to vote, both
black and white. They haven't had that opportunity in South Florida.
When do we stop this shell game"' ..."
Click
here to read more
09/10: FLORIDA
PRIMARY MARKED BY FAILURE OF 'VOTING REFORM'
"In a predominantly black Miami neighborhood, voting at one precinct
didn't begin until 11:45 a.m., nearly five hours after polls were supposed
to open. Officials said 500 people left without voting. At a nearby
precinct, the touchscreen machines stopped working at 11:50 a.m. and
were shut down for nearly five hours, causing more than 100 would-be
voters to be turned away, election worker Kerry Martin said. In populous
Orange County, election workers said 42 percent of ballots would have
to be counted by hand because they were tearing as they were fed through
optical scanning machines, making them unreadable. ..."
Click
here to
read more
09-04-02: Despite the much-touted "election reform"
in Florida (which is actually no reform at all), voters are still at
risk of being turned away from the polls due to untrained poll workers.
On September 3rd, Rep. Carrie Meeks was denied an absentee ballot for
the upcoming primary because a computer glitch confused the poll worker.
Instead of contacting the main elections office, the poll worker simply
turned Rep. Meeks away.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/3996399.htm
05-25-02: While the Justice Department is (finally) taking some action
on the abuse of voters' rights in the 2000 election, they are ignoring
one of the biggest violations of all -- the deliberate disenfranchisement
of thousands of voters due to phony 'felon purge' lists.
"The Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Orange and Osceola released
copies of the Justice Department's letters citing its intention to sue
over language issues. No references were made to voter list purges,
and no references were made to allegations involving black voters...."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1529-2002May23.html
Disenfranchising thousands of people because of phony 'felon' purge
lists worked so well in November 2000 that Florida is set to do it again
in the 2002 elections.
"State lawmakers have slammed the brakes on an effort to get rid
of the backlog of convicted felons seeking to have their civil rights
restored. That could leave thousands of would-be voters unable to register
in time for fall elections...Of the 600,000 felons who have not had
their rights restored, up to 49 percent are blacks who typically register
as Democrats, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based
criminal justice advocacy group. The Legislature's new budget adds only
what Bush asked for Ñ $622,248 to hire 14 people to help state staff
working on the backlog. But, in order to get even that amount, which
is less than half what Chairman Jimmie Henry says he needs, the commission
must give Bush and lawmakers an accounting for exactly how many cases
are pending and what they've been doing for the past five years to remedy
it. "The amount of time that they've allowed certainly doesnÕt
encourage confidence in this being one of the Legislature's priorities,"
Russell said. Henry said Wednesday he plans to submit the report "sometime
between now and Oct. 1," hopefully as early as mid-August. Even
so, he said, he won't be able to hire the extra hands to process the
applications until Oct. 1 Ñ just six days before the registration deadline
for voting in the Nov. 5 general election. The registration deadline
for the September primary is Aug. 12..."
Read more: http://www.news-press.com/news/today/p_020516felons.html
The captive media largely ignored the purging of thousands of eligible
voters in Florida due to the infamous 'voter purge list'. Despite detailed
reporting by journalists such as Greg
Palast, the sad fact is that most people in this country probably
don't even remember that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris conspired (and
I mean that word in the truest sense) to disenfranchise African-Americans
in Florida.
A trusting person would think that it couldn't happen again. And yet
that is exactly what they have planned.
The U.S. Justice Department has approved all but one part of Florida's
new election law. The part that is in question is the proposed "voter
list", a database of eligible voters. Jeb Bush plans to try once
more to purge convicted felons from the rolls, but the Justice Dept.
has said that Florida must provide details of how the state plans to
identify and notify those people who are to be purged.
Katherine Harris was told by the Florida legislature to work with county
clerks to develop the new purge list, and not to use an outside source.
But Harris has decided to use an outside source again.
The company she plans to use? Accenture. They will be paid $1.6 million
for their work.
Accenture Ltd., a consulting firm, split off from Arthur Andersen about
a year ago. Andersen is, of course, the accounting company that has
come under fire for its role in the Enron
scandal. Andersen was also one of George W. Bush's top political
donors.
Links:
http://www.sptimes.com/News/120201/State/New_voter_rolls_arous.shtml
http://www.sptimes.com/News/121901/State/All_but_one_part_of_n.shtml
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_52/b3763036.htm
Thanks to Lisa Vigliarolo for researching this.
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fringe, please click on the 'join the fringe' button for more information.
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