[Nettime-bold] THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>]

I just thought I'd pass this along...
Paul



anansi1@earthlink.net just sent you an article from
Journalist Greg Palast's web-site, http://www.GregPalast.com



THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME

HOW THE FELON VOTER-PURGE WAS ITSELF FELONIOUS
HARPER'S MAGAZINE

by Greg Palast

In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the 
Florida recount as a victory for President Bush.  But however one 
reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized 
had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. 
Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of 
state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protÈgÈes of 
Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited 
from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls.  (In the 
thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent 
vote Democratic.)  A portion of the list, which was compiled for 
Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a 
company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million 
for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the 
same service.  If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to 
exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent i!
ts money wisely.


Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were 
distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders 
to remove the voters named.  Together the lists comprised nearly 1 
percent of Floridaís electorate and nearly 3 percent of its 
African-American voters.  Most of the voters (such as <b>"David 
Butler," (1)</b>; a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone 
books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race 
matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of 
ex-felons in the United States.  Neither DBT nor the state conducted 
any further research to verify the matches.  DBT, which frequently is 
hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using 
address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the 
state declined the cross-checks.  In Harrisís elections office files, 
next to DBTís sophisticated verification plan, there is a 
hand-written note: ìDONíT NEED.î



<b>Thomas Alvin Cooper (2)</b>, twenty-eight, was flagged because of 
a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to 
Floridaís elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover 
his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his 
race.  Harper's found 325 names on the list with conviction dates in 
the future, a fact that did not escape Department of Elections 
workers, who, in June 2000 emails headed, ìFuture Conviction Dates," 
termed the discovery, "bad news.î Rather than release this whacky 
data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, 
suggested that ìblanks would be preferable in these cases." (Harper's 
counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.)   The one county that checked 
each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as 
actual felony convicts.  Some counties defied Harris' directives; 
Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge 
list after she found her own name on it.



<b>Rev. Willie Dixon (3)</b>, seventy, was guilty of a crime in his 
youth; but one phone call would have told the state that it had 
already pardoned Dixon and restored his right to vote.  On behalf of 
Dixon and other excluded voters, the NAACP in January 2001 sued 
Florida and Harris, after finding that African-Americansówho account 
for 13 percent of Florida's electorate and 46 percent of U.S. felony 
convictions ówere four times as likely as whites to be incorrectly 
singled out under the state's methodology.  After the election, 
Harris and her elections chief Clay Roberts, testified under oath 
that verifying the lists was solely the work of county supervisors. 
But the Florida-DBT contract (marked "Secret" and ìConfidentialî) 
holds DBT responsible for ìmanual verification using telephone 
calls.î in fact, with the stateís blessing, DBT did not call a single 
felon.   When I asked Roberts about the contract during an interview 
for BBC television, Roberts ripped off his microphone, !
ran into his office, locked the door, and called in state troopers to 
remove us.



<b>Johnny Jackson Jr. (4)</b>, thirty-two,  has never been to Texas, 
and his mother swears he never had the middle name ìFitzgerald.î 
Neither is there evidence that John Fitzgerald Jackson, felon of 
Texas, has ever left the Lone Star State. But even if they were the 
same man, removing him from Floridaís voter rolls is an 
unconstitutional act. Texas is among the thirty five states where 
ex-felons are permitted to vote, and the "full faith and credit" 
clause of the U.S. Constitution forbids states to revoke any civil 
rights that a citizen has been granted by another state; in fact, the 
Florida Supreme Court had twice ordered the state not to do so, just 
nine months before the voter purge.  Nevertheless, at least 2,873 
voters were wrongly removed, a purge authorized by a September 18, 
2000 letter to counties from Governor Bush's clemency office.  On 
February 23, 2001, days after the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights 
began investigating the matters, Bush's office issued a new letter!
  allowing these persons to vote; no copies of the earlier letter 
could be found in the clemency office or on its computers.



<b>Wallace McDonald (5)</b>, sixty-four, lost his right to vote in 
2000, though his sole run-in with the law was a misdemeanor in 1959. 
(He fell asleep on a bus-stop bench.)  Of the "matches' on these 
lists, the civil-rights commission estimated that at least 14 percent 
- or 8,000 voters, nearly 15 times Bush's official margin of victory 
- were false.  DBT claims it warned officials "a significant number 
of people who were not a felon would be included on the list"; but 
the state, the company now says, "wanted there to be more names than 
were actually verified."  Last May, Florida's legislature barred 
Harris from using outside firms to build the purge list and ordered 
her to seek guidance from county elections officials.  In defiance, 
Harris has rebuffed the counties and hired another firm, just in time 
for Jeb Bush's reelection fight this fall.

<center>###</center>

Special thanks to Fredda Weinberg for cracking the Florida computer 
files and crunching the numbers as well as to all the volunteer 
researchers who contributed to this investigative effort.


Read the complete and latest material on the ethnic purge that fixed 
the election in Palast's new book, <u>The Best Democracy Money Can 
Buy</u>, out this week from Pluto Press.

At <a href="http://www.GregPalast.com";>www.GregPalast.com</a> you can 
read and subscribe to Greg Palast's London Observer columns and view 
his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight.


You can also see this article online:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&frm=eml

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Complete contents of this e-mail are (c)Greg Palast. All Rights Reserved
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