Better still you should get a lawyer and sue your Supervisor of Elections for the injunctive relief of having your voting rights restored or confirmed. Which takes time, so you had better check, several months before the election, to make sure your registration is still valid. And anybody who has the least bit of doubt about their voting eligibility should do the same.
The racial makeup of the general population of Florida is not material to this discussion.
The “population” that matters is convicted felons, since all of those banned were alleged to be convicted felons.
If the population of convicted felons was 80% white and those banned from voting were 50% black, you could make a case for racial discrimination. If the racial breakdown of the population of convicted felons is close to 50/50, it would indicate no racial discrimination in the banning process.
Should convicted felons be banned from voting? is another question entirely.
If the claimed 90% error rate is correct, then that’s dismal and needs to be improved, but it’s still a different question.
You guys ought to read up on what Pallast wrote. There is a lot more to this story than massive incompetence. There is also extremely excessive payments given to the private company for what they did, and ignoring the company’s own advice that the records needed to be checked not simply used as is. It is almost as if some people did their best to insure the records were inaccurate…erring on the side of disqualifying many more voters than were actually felons.
But, the point is that most of those banned were not actually convicted felons. So, the net effect was that many more blacks were banned, relative to their percentage of the population, than whites.
Here is an earlier article by Palast with more details about the Florida case. The full story is quite long and involved and is documented in a chapter in his book, “The Best Democracy that Money can Buy”. You can read that whole chapter here (it’s chapter 1).
What are the proportions of B/H felons to white felons? Does that exact same proportion carry over??? Are there proportionally MORE or LESS B/H felons to white felons???
And perhaps if a friend or loved one appears on a felony list, they did actually commit a crime…I happen to have a cousin that robbed a convenience store when he was young. I have a very good friend whos brother was in the slammer for bigamy…I directly know a couple of felons from when I was dating a lawyer.
Personally, I tend to be pretty colorblind. I am more concerned with the false positives on the list than I will ever be about color.
And again - NOT EVERY WHITE IN THIS COUNTRY GOVES A DAMN ABOUT WHAT COLOR ANYBODY IS AND DONT GIVE A CRAP ABOUT WANTING TO OPRESS ANYBODY. SOME OF UD do GIVE A DAMN ABOUT SLOPPY WORK SCREWING WITH YOUR FRANCHISE.
THANK YOU. As I have been trying to get across, it isnt the color of the people, it is the sloppiness of the work.
My take on felonage, do the crime, do the time. Theoretically once you have done your time, your rights should be returned to you since you have ‘cleaned the slate’
I do think they should be allowed to vote as theoretically they are restored to their rights…
Check out Greg Palast for the whole story. He mentions that the reason behind the purge was that all convicted felons vote 90% Democrat, not just blacks.
Ok, I’ve read the articles at the different Palast sites, except for the book’s chapter. If he’s correct about the inaccuracy in the system in past years, this surely needs to be corrected.
My entire life I’ve heard that if a person gets a dishonorable discharge from military service or is convicted of a felony, voting privileges are forfeited. I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, I don’t think those in the above categories deserve the right to vote. But that’s my opinion. If it’s now the law, then let’s hope they get the system straightened out so that there is an accurate purging of voter lists, not an erroneous one.
I don’t know about Florida. Here we have poll watchers whose job is to examine ballots and determine which, if any, are spoiled. These watchers work in pairs, one from each major party. I don’t think a scam could be conducted under these circumstances.
Question: How does Palast know whose ballot, specifically, was discounted? If ballots could be tied back to individual voters, there would be no “secret ballot”. If ballots can’t be traced to a specific individual, how can the race of the person whose ballot was dis-allowed be determined?
It’s not a matter of their ballots not being counted…They are not allowed to vote in the first place. You know, when you go in and they check your name against the names of legally registered voters. Some people were purged from the legally registered voters list.
JCM: *My entire life I’ve heard that if a person gets a dishonorable discharge from military service or is convicted of a felony, voting privileges are forfeited. *
JCM: *I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, I don’t think those in the above categories deserve the right to vote. *
I’m neutral about denying the franchise to current felons, but I definitely think that ex-felons should be reinstated as voters (as is indeed the policy in most states). Once convicts have “paid their debt to society” by doing their time, it seems to me useless, if not counterproductive, to continue to punish them by denying them full participation as citizens.
No, it was not mere incompetence. Palast has described what happened.* Shortly before the 2000 election, Katherine Harris fired the company that was charging $5,700 to come up with a list of people to scrub from the voter rolls as ineligible to vote due to felonly convictions. She then hired the Database Technologies division of Choicepoint to do the scrub – for $2.3 million! Why were Florida officials willing to pay Choicepoint so much more than the other company would charge for the same job? I don’t see any explanation other than that the inflated fee was for doing exactly what they did: illegitimately disenfranchize thousands of people deemed likely to vote Democratic.
I understand that, as concerns the purging of alleged felons. I should have been more clear: In one of Palast’s articles he goes into detail and quotes numbers, about the disproportionate number of black persons whose ballots were deemed to be spoiled.
Gotta’ get to work and it seems the hamsters are fatigued, so I don’t have time to check back and link to the specific story.
Are the tinfoil hats a safety hazard during thunderstorms?
This strikes me as liberal conspiracy theory wishful thinking. Does anyone really believe that something of this magnitude could be pulled off without the cooperation and silence of a great many people?
I can see them all now…rubbing their hands together and saying “BWA HA HA HA! Let’s disenfranchise minorities to further our evil agenda!”
So when you say “sloppiness” I’m assuming you blame a 90% failure rate on incompetency and not on malicious ulterior motives. Perhaps if the percentage in error was 10-15%, I’d be more inclined to agree. But 90%? Believing this was the product of sloppiness is the product of sloppy thinking.
Sorry, this is irrelevant. If it has been shown that 90% of the people whose votes were tossed were NOT felons, how do crime statistics figure into the equation? If anything, the unfortunate fact that there is a disproportionate number of blacks/Hispanics in prison is one that can be taken advantage of by those who seek to eliminate Democratic votes without raising a lot of questions. All you have to do is screen out of a big chunk of the black/Hispanic voters, put their ballots in the reject pile, and when someone dares to question you on it, simply say that all the ballots belong to felons. Few people will think twice about that explanation because, afterall, most blacks have done hard prison time, right? I mean, look at those statistics!!!
If it’s 9 out of 10 chances that a person on the list is NOT a felon, perhaps you should strive to put less weight on that “perhaps”. “Occasionally” may be a better fit.
I know it is en vogue and all to be colorblind, but when there is evidence that race is being used in a devious manner, being colorblind is willfully refusing to see truth. Perhaps you don’t have to think about color because you don’t feel affected by race. Kudos, you are one lucky human being. But you are not thinking critically or objectively if you think race is irrelevant in this.
Calm down. Does the subject of race touch a raw nerve? Who said anything about every white trying to oppress anyone? Get a grip on reality.
Wishful thinking? No liberal I know actually wants this stuff to happen. As for “silence and cooperation” In 2000, the Secretary of State’s office simply hired the desired company to compile the lists of “felons” and then proceeded to carry out the purge, on its own authority, without publicizing what they were doing. And in 2002 the Republican-controlled Congress simply enacted HAVA, all a matter of public record, providing in part (from http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm):
The referenced section of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (the “Motor-Voter Bill”) provides simply:
So the question is, when you put all this legal verbiage together, does it or does it not do what Palast says it does?
I suggest the language quoted above could be applied to do what Palast is describing. But until HAVA is actually implemented, its effects on the voting rolls are hidden in plain sight, as it were.
Now, regarding the other half of Palast’s story, I must admit I wonder how it could be kept a secret if local election authorities were in some kind of conspiracy to disfranchise blacks by rejecting their ballots as “spoiled.” (If there is a real problem with spoiled ballots, we might hope the new touchscreen system will eliminate it.) On the other hand, we had a recent GD thread – “Local election boards discourage students from voting” (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=257342) – and nobody suggested that was tinfoil hat territory.
Have you actually read the book, or the links supplied above? This is not rumour or conjecture that this happened, Palast has the scrub list and has testimony from elections officials and employees of the database company as to the checks that were (or more to the point weren’t done).
Palast’s entire point is not that this was planned from the start as some great conspiracy, but rather that nothing was done by Kathryn Harris when it became obvious that a large number of people would be disenfranchised by what was being done and that, statistically speaking, that group would contain a hugely dispropotionate number of democrat voters. From the book:
Including yourself, by the sounds of it, and the US media, who were more concerned with the mechanics of hanging chads at the time.