Jimmy Carter: Basic requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida

Great Debates
21

1993 treaty with North Korea. The Iran hostage crisis. Stagflation. His response to the energy crisis, which was to put on a sweater.

Although the Camp David accords were an achievement, as was the boycott of the Olympics.

Pardon me while I wet myself laughing. Do I, a Republican, need to remind you that Osama bin Laden is Saudi, not Afghani?

And I rather doubt that, if the Soviets had no fear of invading Afghanistan while Carter was dithering about in the White House, that Saddam would pay all that much attention to him either. Especially not a decade later.

Regards,
Shodan

22

The problem in '00 in Florida was simply a matter of an election being too close to call. I’m not sure the same situation wouldn’t have happened in other states, had they been that close. Florida has had plenty of fair elections in the past with exactly the “problems” that Carter is pointing out.

Just MHO, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Florida will not be an issue in the election this year. If there are issues, they’ll be something we hadn’t thouight about yet.

23

I’m not going to say I think that Al Qaeda wouldn’t have happened, but even you, a Republican, know that bin Laden developed his philosophy and built his movement in Afghanistan based on the financial and military support given to the Mujihideen, who came from a variety of countries.

24

You are ignoring the Republican dirty tricks of Florida in 2000, such as the purge of “felons” from the rolls. If the election had been run honestly, Gore would have won by a solid margin.

25

Exactly how many convictions were there for these alleged dirty tricks? IIRC, none.

26

I suspect that if the voter rolls had been purged of felons, aliens and other ineligible voters, Bush would have won by a solid margin. Why does the Democratic Party oppose any attempts to clean up the voter rolls? Why were they such enthusiastic supporters of the “Motor Voter” law, that helped get us in this mess? Why do they oppose any efforts to verify the identity of voters? Simple self-interest.

27

Shodan: *For heaven’s sake, this is the guy who came within a whisker of being beat by Jerry Ford after Ford pardoned Nixon. *

Er, speaking of Ford, you did notice this part of the OP’s link, didn’t you?

In other words, the original diagnosis of the electoral problems was made by a bipartisan commission led by Carter and Ford. I don’t see how you can shrug off those findings by dismissing Carter as an “incompetent dolt”.

All Carter is doing now is pointing out that many of the recommendations that he and Ford and the other commission members made, and that the government mandated in 2002, have not been implemented in Florida.

What grounds do you have for rejecting that claim, besides what appears to be your knee-jerk contempt for Carter? After all, it seems like a pretty simple assertion of fact—either the mandated changes have been properly implemented in Florida or they have not.

Since you apparently disagree with Carter’s assessment, could you tell us what your reasons are for believing that Florida has adequately met the provisions of the “Help America Vote” Act? Just saying that you’ll say the opposite of whatever Carter’s saying because you think he’s an incompetent dolt doesn’t cut it.

28

“As fair as any other state in the union” isn’t a great standard for me. Things are bad, but they’re bad everywhere just sucks. Although I’m sure neither sides’ hands are clean, the Republicans’ are a lot dirtier.

29

You know why BrainGlutton put “felons” in quotes, don’t you?

30

Yes, and I don’t care if they are white, brown, black, or green with orange polka-dots. If they are ineligible to vote, they shouldn’t be on the state’s voter rolls.

31

:rolleyes: Did you pay any attention at all to the coverage of that story? Or the several GD threads in which we’ve discussed it? (See http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=265501 and http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=268623.) The rolls were purged in 2000, but thousands of those purged were not convicted felons but legally eligible voters who were included on the “felons list” by mistake – e.g., because they happened to have a similar name to a felon. Some were persons who had been convicted of a felony in another state but who had had their rights restored in that state. And none of them were informed about their “ineligible status” until election day, when it was too late to do anything about it. And apparently, most of them are still off the rolls and still can’t vote. That’s what Palast said today; I haven’t checked up on it.

If those mostly African-American voters had not been improperly and unlawfully denied their right to vote, Gore, not Bush, would have won Florida by a comfortable margin.

This ain’t all in the past, either. It’s only a month since the Florida Department of Law Enforcement sent state police into the homes of black get-out-the-vote organizers in Orlando in an alleged “voter fraud” investigation, the nature of which the FDLE refused to disclose. See Opinion: Suppress the Vote? - DER SPIEGEL

32

The Florida Department of Corrections settled a lawsuit about not properly reinstating eligible voters, and admitted its failure to perform its obligations in that regard:

In other words, mks: we’re talking here about people who were eligible to vote but were misidentified on the voter rolls as ineligible (or, in the case above, should have been reinstated as eligible but weren’t).

33

Once upon a time there were two strong political parties in America which, each in its own way, stood for what makes this country strong and free. Once I was proud to be an upstate New York Republican.

It’s simply amazing to me that the G.O.P. has largely turned into a group of self-righteous “protectors of America” who, like the infamous commander in Vietnam said of a village, are out to destroy our freedom in order to protect our freedom.

Shodan and others, I do not much care what your opinion of Jimmy Carter may be – the issue at hand is whether Florida (and other states) have implemented protections against the problems that were unquestionably encountered there. And according to a bipartisan commission for which Carter is speaking, they have not.

As for purging the voter rolls of felons, if Florida is determined to continue disenfranchising felons who have served out their sentence, then they have the right to do so – fairly, not selectively, not ensuring (as was done) that the majority of felons wiped from the rolls are Democrats, and that Democrats who happen to have the same name as felons have their franchise removed.

Corruption is corruption, no matter what the party affiliation. And if party loyalty blinds you to that, then I truly pity you – because you have lost sight of what it means to be an American.

34

Time’s running out, but the good fight is still being fought! Here’s an update from today’s (September 28, 2004) Tampa Tribune – :

And from the same edition – http://tampatrib.com/News/MGB7GWHKNZD.html:

35

The first Presidential ballot I was old enough to cast was for Carter in 1980. Too bad he inherited an economic disaster in the aftermath of Vietnam, but he was making progress with the kind of austere budgetary measures that Republicans supposedly favor but never actually enact.

What a surprise that Florida is still a mess. One thing I never understood was how it was possible for the Secretary of State, Florida’s chief election officer, to at the same time be an active participant in the campaign of one of the two main candidates. How in the world can that be legal?

36

Poly: * the issue at hand is whether Florida (and other states) have implemented protections against the problems that were unquestionably encountered there. And according to a bipartisan commission for which Carter is speaking, they have not.*

Nitpick—AFAICT, the bipartisan commission recommended the protections, the “Help America Vote” Act made them legally required, and it’s Carter (along with other commentators) who’s saying that the protections haven’t been properly implemented.

37

I find it interesting that the folks taking potshots at Mr. Carter (a) don’t bother to refute the allegations he raise, and (b) tend to be big supporters of Ronald Reagan, who sanctioned nun-raping priest-murdering thugs in Central America during his tenure in office.

38

Note that Ford is also involved in this. The idea of fair elections is non-partisan. Heck, one thing that has hurt Bush is that there has been a cloud over whether he really won Florida.

39

No convictions as far as I know…But, there was a lawsuit settled out of court:

It is worth noting other interesting facts that Palast alleges and, to my knowledge, have not been refuted:

(1) Not only were thousand purged but the percentage who were on the lists erroneously was phenomenally high…I seem to recall Palast finding the error rate on the order of 80-90%.

(2) The company who produced this list was hired to replace another company, was paid a phenomenal amount by industry standards for the amount of work that they did and warned the state that the list had to be verified. The state decided to skip the verification step. It is hard to read all these facts taken together as being merely incompetence.

There are lots of other fun things you can read about the whole debacle at Palast’s website. (Click on the Chapter 1 link.)

40

According to an Associated Press article by Erica Werner, a group of international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 55 state nation group that was invited by the Bush Administration, election problems may again delay the outcome past November 2. Problems include voter registration lists, provisional and absentee ballots, allegations of voter intimidation, equipment changes and slow implementation of the Help America Vote Act. This report was released today.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040928/ap_on_el_pr/election_observers

“In general, the nationwide replacement of voting equipment, inspired by the disputes witnessed during the 2000 elections, primarily in Florida, may potentially become a source of even greater controversy during the forthcoming elections,” said the 11-page report.

Many of the new touch-screen machines that will be used by up to 50 million voters on Nov. 2 do not produce the paper ballots needed for a manual recount of votes, the report said.

This “may cause postelection disputes and litigation, potentially delaying the announcement of final results,” it said.

The OSCE (news - web sites) observers were in the United States from Sept. 7-10. A larger group will return for the election and focus on the potential problems noted in Tuesday’s report. Among them:

Slow implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.86 billion to replace outdated machines and reform election procedures.

_Poorly maintained voter registration lists and a hodgepodge of procedures for handling absentee and provisional ballots could result in voter disenfranchisement and postelection litigation. Provisional ballots are a new feature, meant to allow anyone who shows up at the polls to vote even if their name isn’t on precinct lists.

_The report criticized steps by states to allow military and overseas voters to fax rather than mail their completed ballots, calling them inconsistent “with the principle of the secrecy of the vote.”

_The observers said the scale of complaints about intimidation of minority voters was difficult to assess but that “such allegations were repeated by Democratic Party representatives, while the Republican Party officials did not seem to share these concerns.”
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