Dirty Tricks and the 2000 Election

Just a reminder of the horrible, despicable things that some Republicans are capable of and are more than willing to do to gain and hold on to their power.
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93% of black voters voted for Al Gore in Florida in 2000. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, beginning in 1998, went on a mission to disenfranchise black voters in their own state. They decided to focus on and all-of-a-sudden enforce a law that specifically denies ex-felons the right to vote. The law was written into the state constitution by ex-confederate soldiers in 1868, who did it because they were being forced by the federal government to allow blacks to vote. They did this to disenfranchise as many African-Americans as possible and to deny as many of them the most basic right of a citizen within the United States.

Katherine Harris (who was in charge of the entire program and who was also the co-chair of George W. for President in the State of Florida) hired a private company to sift through national public records in order to match them to convicted felons on a national level. The program looked for three things:

1. First Name
2. Last Name (not middle initial)
3. Year of Birth (not date)

The voter purge program effectively removed thousands of potential democratic votes from voting lists. Innocent voters from all around the state were denied their right to vote.

Voters were assumed guilty, and were told to send in documentation of their OWN to prove to the state that they were innocent. County to county, AT LEAST 15% of all “assumed guilty” felons were INNOCENT OF ANY CRIME. That’s literally thousands of voters, half of them whom are black and 93% of which vote Democratic... you do the math.

4,000 conviction dates on voter purge lists were deliberately blanked out to make it extremely difficult to double-check their authenticity.

In Leon County, the election supervisor double-checked a list of 692 convicted felons that were supposedly in his area. ONLY 33 OF THEM turned out to be matches to actual felons.

After the first recount, Bush’s 1700 vote lead turned into a 350 vote lead. Democrats were robbed that day, and Republican leaders lost their souls.

The state spent 4 MILLION dollars to deny convicted felons the right to vote with a system that was intentionally flawed so that anyone, and specifically black voters, could match a convicted felons name.

On Nov. 10 the state announced that in duval county, 27,000 votes would be thrown out because voting machines were “unable” to register who voters chose on their ballots. In most precincts of duval county, 98% of voters typically voted Democratic. Florida law states that if machines are unable to count votes, ballots have to be counted manually. Republicans in the state publicly decried the idea of manually recounting ballots… surprise? (this in light of a surprisingly liberal voting bill that George W. Bush signed into law as governor of texas years earlier that also required manual counting of ballots)

Republicans strategically fought tooth and nail to keep the state from having a FULL statewide recount and were successful. The rest is history.

Watch Robert Greenwalds documentary called Unprecedented - The 2000 Election for free on google view.