Depends on the state (PDF)
In the period following Reconstruction, some Southern states, including Florida, passed legislation to bar ex-felons from voting, as a way of barring blacks from voting. In Florida this applies to all ex-felons as such; in some other states the law was crafted to apply only to persons convicted of what were thought of as “black” crimes, crimes blacks tended to commit. We discussed this at length in a recent GD thread:
“Should inmates and ex-cons be allowed/denied to vote in elections?” –
In Florida, ex-felons who have completed their prison sentences do not automatically get their “rights restored,” including voting rights. For this they have to apply to the state Office of Executive Clemency, and the application must be approved by the Executive Clemency Board, which is composed of the governor (Jeb Bush), the state attorney general (Charlie Crist), the chief financial officer (Tom Gallager) and the commissioner of agriculture (Charles Bronson). All four of these are elected constitutional officers, and at present, all four are Republicans. Here’s a link to the Office of Executive Clemency: http://www.state.fl.us/fpc/exclem.html
He’s full of crap. Data is data, it isn’t like blood types, or morning people marrying night owls. The operating systems may be incompatible, you may not be able to open a Linux based database application in Windows Access, for instance. But if you want to, you can manipulate the database format in such a way as to transfer the data easily from one platform to another. It’s not altogether simple, but it is not by any stretch of the imagination a challenge.
I do this kind of stuff, sort of a bottom feeding comp geek, developing applications, that sort of thing. I might hesitate to take on the task, given my skill level, but I know at least ten people who could knock it off in a weekend. Well, they’d bill for the weekend, maybe spend about 10 hours on it.
“Incompatible databases” is the kind of semi-technical jargon one uses to bamboozle someone more clueless than oneself. He may even actually believe it, but its still crap.
What you’re saying implies that somebody deliberately rigged the list to exclude Hispanics. Which raises the question: Who? Did Bush actually give orders to this effect, or did the contractor who produced the list (Accenture, I think) simply give the customer what it knew the customer wanted? 
Considering the amount of state funds that were spent on this project, I think there really needs to be an investigation. And of course there won’t be, so long as the governor is a Republican, the attorney general is a Republican, and both houses of the state legislature are controlled by Republicans. :mad:
It’s because of this kind of situation that I conceived the idea of a separately elected fourth branch of government, the Tribunate, to police the other three. See my recent thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462
Sorry, here’s the link: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462
Not necessarily. Only that his explanation is transparently bogus. Its like a techno-buzzword, something designed to convince the unsophisticated listener that Jeb is the innocent victim of a “glitch”.
On the other hand, if one were conspiring to exclude black voters without excluding Hispanic/Cuban voters, I haven’t the foggiest notion how one would go about it, unless race/ethnicity were clarified in some manner. I believe the Bushiviks are somewhat corrupt, but don’t believe them to be brilliant. Or perhaps I simply don’t think they’re smarter than me, and I have no clue as to how such might be done.
On the gripping hand, the sheer fact that so many blacks were excluded, who are dependably Dem, and so many Hispanics were not, who are dependably Pub, is a coincidence difficult to swallow, to say the least.
Not proven.
Well, I didn’t say Jeb Bush is necessarily guilty (as noted, the contractor might be to blame and the governor might have plausible deniability). Only that there needs to be an investigation, at the federal or the state level. And since the state attorney general is a Republican . . .
What’s that? You say the U.S. attorney general is a Republican too?
I think this may be because you (or I) misunderstand the term. If one list (the list of convicted felons) contains information about race (including hispanic as a category) filled in by court personel, and the other contains information about race filled in by questioning the individual, then you might have a situation where a particular individual was listed as hispanic in one data set and as white in another. If you simply do not include any people on the list (remember the list will deny someone the vote) who are not listed identically in the two data sets, you could effectively remove lots of hispanics from the list without having commited any sort of bamboozle.
What I’m saying is that “Incompatible databases” does not necesarily mean that one is in Access while the other is in DBASE.
I’m unsure of the implications here. Hispanics, at least the variety I’m personally familiar with, are pretty overwhelmingly Democrat and vote the straight party line…when they vote (when the CAN vote). My dad is one of the very few Hispanic Republicans I know. Now, this is just anacedotal, and means nothing of course, but I’d like to see that Florida Hispanics are overwhelmingly Republican. I suppose its possible, at least Cuban Hispanics living in Florida, but sounds fishy to me. More reasonably is that this was simply a fuckup by the government.
As to the database thing, I’m more an infrastructure engineer, but I’ve done my share of database stuff as well and I think the use of ‘incompatable’ is plausable, but not as was meant. My guess is that the govenor, making that statement, didn’t have a clue what the hell he was talking about and just parroting things he knew nothing about. I COULD see two databases being ‘incompatable’ in the sense that there was no way to use a metakey between them, so no way to cross reference the data…and sorting them out was more trouble than it was worth on a field by field parse, especially if they used different formats or standards. This of course begs the question as to why their data isn’t standardized and cross keyed, but thats a different issue, and I can certainly believe the government is inefficient enough to have done this. Hell, I’d be willing to wager large sums they could be that stupid.
-XT
If you read the newspaper articles linked in this thread and discussing this issue, you will see that most Hispanics in Florida are Cuban – refugees or exiles, or the children of exiles, who fled the country after Castro’s revolution, or the later wave of malcontents who were thrown out in the Marielito boatlift, or others who have crossed the Straits of Florida by boat in small dribbles over the past 45 years. In practically all cases, people who left Cuba because, for one reason or another, they hated living under Castro’s government. And they vote Republican because they see the Republican Party as more zealously anti-Communist than the Democrats. This is especially true in the Miami area. (It’s not so much the case here in Tampa, because our Cuban community is much older – many Cubans migrated here in the early 20th Century to work in cigar factories of Ybor City.)
And here’s another relevant story from today’s St. Petersburg Times:
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/18/State/Vote_illegally__get_c.shtml
The other big clunker in Florida 2000 remains a bleeding wound today:
Military vote in jeopardy
I bet that we’ll see a lot of those post-dated ballots counted again this year.
In 2000, it was the Bush team that insisted such ballots be counted, because they were sure active-duty military personnel would overwhelmingly vote Republican. And they probably did. But I wonder if that’s still true. Our troops in Iraq, who were sent to war on a lie and who keep getting their tours of duty extended, might be feeling a grudge against Bush.
Military polls are a lot like hen’s teeth. However, the Military Times poll of last december showed 56% of those in uniform approved of Bush’s Iraq Attack.
Is Katherine Harris up for re-election as Sec of State this year, and is she even running? Has any of the wrath of the electorate focused on her?
If she’s not running for SOS, have the people who are said anything about what they’ll do?
I used to work for the SOS of MA and was amazed and what had happened in FL in 2000; however, it is a tricky job running elections even without rampant underfunding and shifting and often transient population.
Katherine Harris was the last elected Secretary of State of Florida; the office is now an appointed one. In 2002, Harris was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, from a district in Sarasota.
BTW, other than the governor, there are now only three elected constitutional executive state offices in Florida: The attorney general, the chief financial officer, and the commissioner of agriculture. As I noted above, at present all these officers are Republicans; and, together with the governor, they make up the Executive Clemency Board that acts on applications to restore voting rights, and other rights, to ex-felons.
The current secretary of state is Glenda E. Hood, appointed by Governor Bush in 2003. From the Department of State website (http://oss.dos.state.fl.us/background.html):
Thanks for the info!
Wow. States are different. The SOS is the oldest elected office in Massachusetts besides the Governor, and it’s in our state constitution and all and I guess it would take an amendment to change that. And they’ve usually been Dems even though the last couple of Governors have been Repubs. I’m amazed that the Governor of FL gets to appoint the person who will administer the elections, including his, although I have no reason to doubt Hood’s integrity.
That’s why I think we need a fourth branch of government, to police the other three, but also to run “metagovernmental” functions such as elections and post-Census redistricting. Again, see my thread on the Tribunate: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462