According to Palast, there were 57,700 names on Florida’s phony felon scrub list. The list included 8,000 people scrubbed as felons who had actually only been convicted of misdemeanors. Most of the other people on the list were there because their name was similar to the name of an actual felon. Palast says, “My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime…”
According to Palast, in 1999, Florida “fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony ‘scrub’ lists and replaced them with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job.” DBT being the Florida division of Choicepoint.
annaplurabelle, good find, and a good refutation of the cmkeller ostrich approach.
No, your unwillingness to discuss them indicate an unwillingness to discuss them. That is well illustrated elsewhere in this same post of yours.
You doth protest too much. It was already known that Florida would be extremely close, and any measure would help. It is “completely illogical”, and self-contradictory of you, to think that 8000 votes were irrelevant if the margin were in the hundreds, as it in fact was.
Etc. Completely, you say? Who was the governor and the sec of state who made the move, then?
That’s what you want the conclusion to be, certainly. Unfortunately all the circumstantial evidence is against your “completely logical” view.
You still haven’t addressed the topic of how one knows how big the fraud is without investigating it. You’re still stuck in that tight little circle.
If we want honest elections, we need to see to it that they are managed by non-parisan officials. In Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, the state official in charge of elections was also the state chairperson or co-chairperson of the Bush campaign in that state.
You shouldn’t imply that this is merely a problem on the Republican side, Hazel.
In Pennsylvania, Governor Rendell appointed Mark Aronchick as a state official responsible for ensuring that state bureaucrats were placed into every election office on November 2nd to oversee the process.
Problem was, Aronchick had raised $100,000 for the Kerry campaign and had advised the Kerry Pennsylvania campaign as an attorney. He left the campaign mere days before the Rendell appointment.
Would you characterize him as a non-partisan election official?
I think it would be pretty difficult to guarantee that all people in charge of elections would be non-partisan. How are you going to find these people? Elect them? Appoint them? Both of these methods open the door for partisan influence.
On election day, my state requires that some procedures (like ballot handling and voter assistance) must be done in the presence of election officials with different party affiliations. Maybe this should be the aim at the other levels of election decision-making. That is, perhaps it is more realistic to do things in a bi-partisan fashion rather than a non-partisan fashion.
Well, you might be able to get them one step removed from the political parties, but who is going to be hiring these people? Probably people who have a political affililation and got their job either by election or by appointment by someone else who was elected. The point is, many positions of power in government have an element of partisanship, and even something as innocuous as letting those powerful folk “hire the best person for the job” can be partisan. I’d expect this would be especially true when it came time for the powerful people to select people to run elections.
I’m the ostrich? It is to laugh. Her link, which I’ll grant, shows that almost half of those surveyed considered the 2000 election results illegitimate, still shows that more people than that did consider it legitimate. Lord, you’re like one of those pollyanna Democrats rejoicing over the fact that Kerry received more popular votes this year than any candidate ever prior to this election. Raw numbers, however large, don’t show strength of position when the contrary position’s numbers are larger still.
I address all your points (disagree with my assertions though you may), you say I show an unwillingness to discuss the subject, and I’m the ostrich.
“Extremely close” is an understatement. For 8000 votes to have decided Florida, it would have had to be the second slimmest margin of victory (as measured by percentage of votes cast) in any state’s Presidential election in the past 40 years. Granted, it did turn out to be that close (and even closer), but to imagine that it could have been predicted that 8000 votes would swing the state one way or another is a heck of a stretch. No doubt it’s a stretch you’re happy to make, but I hardly think that my not making it is an act of willful ignorance.
The Governor was Jeb Bush, and the Sec. of State was Sandra Mortham (Katherine Harris’ predecessor), but the company wasn’t ChoicePoint. ChoicePoint bought DBT later (contrary to the Palast quote cited by Hazel, which describes DBT as “the Florida division of ChoicePoint”)
No less than you want the conclusion to be that it was rigged. Hey, you want to believe that Jeb, Sandra, Katherine, et al had the prophecy-like foresight to know that 8000 voters would be within the margin of victory, and that ChoicePoint would buy up DBT after the state would award DBT the contract, and that if they allowed local election officials to disregard the scrub list that enough of them would still use it to keep their scrubbed voters out, you go right ahead. Nothing I can say or do will ever stop you. But I feel confident that my conclusions are not the result of willful ignorance flying in the face of logic or evidence, and that most other visitors to this thread, whether or not they agree with my conclusions themselves, will agree with that.
So, you think it is perfectly fine to have only a small plurality of the electorate believing that the election results where legitimate? If you broke it down by how the people voted, I assume you would find that while the overwhelming majority of those who voted for Bush thought the election was legitimate, the overwhelming majority of those that voted for Gore did not.
I would hope that you would have higher standards than that…I.e., that you would want the election to be such that many if not most of those who were on the losing side still believe that their candidate lost fair-and-square.
I don’t think it’s fine. I’d much rather have an election that more people than that believe in.
But the 50-45(-5) split about 2000 exists, whether I like it or not. I’m either on one side or on the other (or amongst the 5% undecideds). And if ElvisL1ves is going to tell me that the fact that only 50% of the people agree with me means I’m willfully ignoring contrary information, then by what twisted logic does he consider himself more right when only 45% agree with him?
Assuming that the poll sampling is representative of those who voted in 2000, I’d imagine that the “overwhelming majority” of Gore voters who think it was illegitimate is at least less overwhelming than the majority of Bush voters who said it was legitimate, because in raw popular vote numbers, there were more for Gore (+ Nader, don’t forget, who would be in an anti-Bush demographic, with no real corresponding demographic on the anti-Gore side) than for Bush.
But you probably are right in the broad strokes.
Certainly that’s what I’d want. But there’s nothing I can do to get it. Is that supposed to prevent me from forming my opinion of rejecting what I consider to be a far-fetched allegation?
You might want to reconsider your rather loose use of the word “logical” in this thread, as well as your modifiers “completely” and “twisted”, based on a margin of an astounding 5 points in a poll. At the very least, it would be more responsible by far to consider that nearly half of the population just might have something to say worth considering, no?
If it’s truly what you’d want, you might instead show just a little openness towards getting it. But you don’t, so it can’t be. Don’t kid yourself.
Are you willing to give the same consideration to the side opposite yours…especially considering that, small though that 5 point margin might be, it’s you who’s on the lesser side of it?
And my “openness” (and that of others who think as I do) would bring about what, exactly? Some sort of formal investigation? And what if it comes up with nothing, a latter-day Warren Commission…would you and those who suspect Jeb et al of rigging the election accept that, or will this become another Kennedy Assassination, with cover-up theories added to the already far-fetched conspiracy theories?
Oh my, I can’t believe I missed it. That’s only a recount of the undervotes. It’s not a complete recount of all the votes according to a single statewide standard. I couldn’t find the recount itself but here’s a highly critical article that tells the story I remember. http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/111201a.html
The problem there is that Gore never, in his court filings, asked for a statewide recount. He only asked for them in some South Florida counties that went for him.
I do recall that at one point he suggested a statewide recount in a speech, but in the court filings, where it counts, he never did so.
According to Palast, there were 57,700 names (not 8,000) on Florida’s phony felon scrub list.
I don’t think it’s of any importance when DBT hooked up with Choicepoint. Whatever company it was, the point is that Florida “fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony ‘scrub’ lists and replaced them with another company who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job.” I think we can assume that the much higher fee was actually for doing exactly what the company did do – come up with a list containing however many names the Florida officials wanted.
Well, how do the other industrialized democratic countries do it? There must be some way to avoid the conflict of interest inherent in having elections run by people who are involved in one candidate’s campaign.
Disregarding all overvotes is still a consistent standard.
Hazel:
I saw your link. I also note that Palast’s stories (and Palast, whose leanings are clearly far left, seems to be the only source for ANY of this. Every Google search I do to look for info on the Florida scrub list is written by or quotes him) have:
a) Found, in his investigation, only a 15% falsehood rate for the scrub list. He mentions that in some counties that he didn’t investigate in-depth, he’s rather certain that it was higher, but doesn’t seem to allow for it being lower in other counties that he didn’t investigate in depth. Assuming his 15% numbers are pretty much correct across the board, that still leaves a total wrongfully disenfranchised of 9,000 - still below the margin of victory in any recent state presidential election except one, in my opinion, less than any attempted fixer would disenfranchise if he wanted a reasonable chance to sway the election.
Even if all 57,000 were wrongly scrubbed, that would still have required the Florida election to be the 17th closest in recent history. That definitely sounds a bit more credible to me than expecting the second closest, but still pretty far-fetched.
b) Noted that the law leaves it to local election officials to verify the eligibility, and allows them to not even bother with the list. Why the heck would anyone attempting to fix the election leave it up to them, when they could just as easily have made it mandatory?
c) Noted the efforts made by ChoicePoint to inform the 8000 (on that Texas-based list) prior to the election, and the efforts made by others to do the same. The following is a quote from one of Palast’s articles:
We can infer that this quote tells us the following:
[ul][li]Without the scrub list, AT LEAST 306 ineligible people would have been accepted at the polls if they showed up to vote. That alone - the number of confirmed ineligibles in just one county - is more than half the ultimate victory margin.[/li]
[li]At least some good-faith efforts (remember the original subject of the debate) were in fact made to not purge those who should not be purged. [/li]
[li]I won’t go so far as to say that the 2700 people who were informed of their pending ineligibility and didn’t respond prove that they were in fact ineligible. (That would be akin to the fallacious “if he wasn’t guilty, why did he run from the policeman” argument) I will say, though, that people who are informed of their ineligibility and do not bother to respond were probably not likely voters anyway, if they didn’t care enough to protest. If this county is reasonably representative of Florida as a whole (and I’ll admit I can’t say for certain if it is), then only about 1/6th of the overall scrub list were likely to vote in the first place, and of them, less than half were rightfully denied.[/ul][/li]
Another part of the article, which I won’t bother quoting, indicates that similar measures were taken in Leon County to keep scrub-list voters from being wrongfully disenfranchised, and only 10% responded in a manner that would place them back on the rolls. Palast notes that in Orange and Miami-Dade counties, letters were sent out as well. He mentions that a large number of those letters were sent back as undeliverable due to wrong addresses, and tries to imply that this wrongfully disenfranchised many. But that misses the fact anyone listed on the voter rolls with an incorrect address is very likely listed for the wrong polling place to begin with.
In summation, I think that even if Palast can be utterly and completely trusted (considering he’s the only easily-found source for most of this, and considering that he has a bias against Bush in the first place), the case for intentional electoral fraud is far less damning than he would like to think it is.
That depends on exactly what the accusations are. The usual accusation I’d heard was that ChoicePoint’s CEO was high up in the Republican Party hierarchy and was therefore chosen by Jeb Bush and Florida Republicans for political rather than economic or merit (i.e., that their system was the best out there) reasons, and taht ChoicePoint juiced its lists for Republican political advantage. Obviously, if the contract was not originally awarded to ChoicePoint, that accusation doesn’t hold water. HOWEVER, since you say you’re not making that accusation, that argument is not directed at you.
I don’t think we can assume that at all. I think we can assume that a new company was hired because the company that had previously done it did a rotten job, as proven by the 1997 Miami municipal elections, which were actually overturned by the courts. That 1997 failure was the whole reason the Florida legislature ordered the state to hire someone new.