Robert Sterling / Greg Palast
Florida Computers Snatch 1,000s Of Votes From Kerry
Tue Nov 2, 2004 15:26
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New Florida vote scandal: Republican 'caging list'
By Greg Palast
BBC Television News Online

October 26, 2004 - A secret document obtained from inside Bush
campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in
violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-
American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Two emails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign
in Florida and the campaign's national research director in
Washington, DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black
and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told
Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing
is to challenge voters on election day."

Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party
operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a
ballot.

Mass Challenges

They may then only vote "provisionally" after signing an affidavit
attesting to their legal voting status.

Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr
Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter "in the 16 years
I've been supervisor of elections."

"Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting
process and cause chaos on election day; and discourage voters from
voting."

Sancho calls it "intimidation." And it may be illegal.

In Washington, well-known civil rights attorney Ralph Neas noted that
US federal law prohibits targeting challenges to voters, even if
there is a basis for the challenge, if race is a factor in targeting
the voters.

The list of Jacksonville voters covers an area with a majority of
black residents.

When asked by Newsnight for an explanation of the list, Republican
spokespersons claim the list merely records returned mail from either
fundraising solicitations or returned letters sent to newly
registered voters to verify their addresses for purposes of mailing
campaign literature.

Republican state campaign spokeswoman Mindy Tucker Fletcher stated
the list was not put together "in order to create" a challenge list,
but refused to say it would not be used in that manner.

Rather, she did acknowledge that the party's poll workers will be
instructed to challenge voters, "Where it's stated in the law."

There was no explanation as to why such clerical matters would be
sent to top officials of the Bush campaign in Florida and Washington.

Purging Soldiers

At least 50 persons on the list are in the military, most stationed
at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville. They now face challenge
because some, like Randall Prausa of Atlantic Beach, have been
shipped overseas.

Private Detective

In Jacksonville, to determine if Republicans were using the lists or
other means of intimidating voters, we filmed a private detective
filming every "early voter" - the majority of whom are black - from
behind a vehicle with blacked-out windows.

The private detective claimed not to know who was paying for his all-
day services.

On the scene, Democratic Congresswoman Corinne Brown said the
surveillance operation was part of a campaign of intimidation tactics
used by the Republican Party to intimate and scare off African
American voters, almost all of whom are registered Democrats.

*****

Florida Computers Snatch 1,000s Of Votes From Kerry
By Greg Palast
10-28-4

CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT! FLORIDA'S COMPUTERS HAVE ALREADY
COUNTED THOUSANDS OF VOTES FOR GEORGE W. BUSH

Before one vote was cast in early voting this week in Florida, the
new touch-screen computer voting machines of Florida started out with
a several-thousand vote lead for George W. Bush. That is, the
mechanics of the new digital democracy boxes "spoil" votes at a
predictably high rate in African-American precincts, effectively
voiding enough votes cast for John Kerry to in a tight race, keep the
White House safe from the will of the voters.

- Excerpted from the current (November) issue of Harper's Magazine

To understand the fiasco in progress in Florida, we need to revisit
the 2000 model, starting with a lesson from Dick Carlberg, acting
elections supervisor in Duval County until this week. "Some voters
are strange," Carlberg told me recently. He was attempting to explain
why, in the last presidential election, five thousand Duvalians
trudged to the polls and, having arrived there, voted for no one for
president. Carlberg did concede that, after he ran these punch cards
through the counting machines a second time, some partly punched
holes shook loose, gaining Al Gore160 votes or so, Bush roughly 80.

"So, if you ran the 'blank' ballots through a few more times, we'd
have a different president," I noted. Carlberg, a Republican,
answered with a grin.

So it was throughout the state - in certain precincts, at least. In
Jacksonville, for example, in Duval precincts 7 through 10, nearly
one in five ballots, or 11,200 votes in all, went uncounted, rejected
as either an 'under-vote' (a blank ballot) or 'over-vote' (a ballot
with extra markings). In those precincts, 72 percent of the residents
are African-American; ballots that did make the count went four to
one for Al Gore. All in all, a staggering 179,855 votes
were "spoiled" (i.e., cast but not counted) in the 2000 election in
Florida. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission matched
the ballots with census stats and estimated that 54 percent of all
the under- and over-voted ballots had been cast by blacks, for whom
the likelihood of having a vote discarded exceeded that of a white
voter by 900 percent.

Votes don't "spoil" because they are left out of the fridge. Vote
spoilage, at root, is a class problem. Just as poor and minority
districts wind up with shoddy schools and shoddy hospitals, they are
stuck with shoddy ballot machines. In Gadsden, the only black-
majority county in Florida, one in eight votes spoiled in 2000, the
worst countywide record in the state. Next door in Leon County
(Tallahassee), which used the same paper ballot, the mostly white,
wealthier county lost almost no votes. The difference was that in
mostly-white Leon, each voting booth was equipped with its own
optical scanner, with which voters could check their own ballots. In
the black county, absent such "second-chance" equipment, any error
would void a vote.

The best solution for vote spoilage, whether from blank ballots or
from hanging chads, is Leon County's: paper ballots, together with
scanners in the voting booths. In fact, this is precisely what
Governor Bush's own experts recommended in 2001 for the entire state.
His Select Task Force on Elections Procedures, appointed by the
Governor to soothe public distrust after the 2000 race, chose paper
ballots with scanners over the trendier option -- the touch-screen
computer.

Although the computer rigs cost eight times as much as paper with
scanners, they result in many more spoiled votes. In this year's
presidential primary in Florida, the computers had a spoilage rate of
more than 1 percent, as compared to one-tenth of a percent for the
double-checked paper ballots.

Apparently some Bush boosters were not keen on a fix so inexpensive
and effective. In particular, Sandra Mortham - a founder of Women for
Jeb Bush, the Governor's re-election operation - successfully lobbied
on behalf of the Florida Association of Counties to stop the state
the legislature from blocking the purchase of touch-screen voting
systems. Mortham, coincidentally, was also a paid lobbyist for
Election Systems & Strategies, a computer voting-machine
manufacturer. Fifteen of Florida's sixty-seven counties chose the
pricey computers, twelve of them ordered from ES&S which, in turn,
paid Mortham's County Association a percentage on sales.

Florida's computerization had its first mass test in 2002, in Broward
County. The ES&S machines appeared to work well in white Ft.
Lauderdale precincts, but in black communities, such as Lauderhill
and Pompano Beach, there was wholesale disaster. Poll workers were
untrained, and many places opened late. Black voters were held up in
lines for hours. No one doubts that hundreds of Black votes were lost
before they were cast.

Broward county commissioners had purchased the touch-screen machines
from ES&S over the objection of Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant;
notably, one commissioner's campaign treasurer was an ES&S lobbyist.
Governor Bush responded to the Broward fiasco by firing Oliphant, an
African-American, for "misfeasance."

Even when computers work, they don't work well for African-Americans.
A July 2001 Congressional study found that computers spoiled votes in
minority districts at three times the rate of votes lost in white
districts.

Based on the measured differential in vote loss between paper and
computer systems, the fifteen counties in Florida, can expect to lose
at least 29,000 votes to spoilage-some 27,000 more than if the
counties had used paper ballots with scanners.
Given the demographics of spoilage, this translates into a net lead
of thousands for Bush before a single ballot is cast.

_____

For the full story, read "Another Florida" in the November issue of
Harper's, out now. Mr. Palast, a contributing editor to the magazine,
is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money
Can Buy. See the film of his investigative reports for BBC
Television, "Bush Family Fortunes," out now on DVD. Watch a segment
at www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

*****

Voters Claim Abuse Of Electoral Rolls
By Greg Palast in New York
The Observer - UK
10-31-4

An Observer investigation in the United States has uncovered
widespread allegations of electoral abuse, many of them going
uninvestigated despite complaints of what would appear to be criminal
attempts to manipulate voter lists.

The allegations, which come just two days before Americans go to the
polls in one of the most tightly contested elections in a generation,
threaten to plunge Tuesday's count into a legal minefield and
overshadow even the elections of 2000.

The claims come as both Republicans and Democrats put in place up to
2,000 lawyers across the country to challenge attempts to manipulate
the vote in swing states.

Although allegations of misconduct have been levelled at both parties
recently, the majority of complaints that have been identified in The
Observer' s investigation involved claims against local Republicans.

The claims, made by the BBC's Newsnight, follow alleged attempts by
Republicans to illegally suppress the votes in key states. Republican
spokesmen deny these allegations.

One of the more serious claims is that no action has been taken in a
complex fraud, where more than 4,000 Florida students were allegedly
conned into signing a form which could lead them to be doubly
registered and void their votes. The Florida Law Enforcement
Department has told the complainants that it is too busy to
investigate.

In Colorado too, Democrats are complaining about an attempt to remove
up to 6,000 convicted felons from the electoral roll, at the behest
of the state's Republican secretary of state, Donetta Davidson,
despite a US federal law that prohibits eliminating a voter's rights
within 90 days of an election to give time for the voter to protest.

The attempt to purge the list of alleged felons would appear to be a
re-run of the attempt by Florida Governor Jeb Bush's secretary of
state to remove 93,000 citizens from voter rolls as felon convicts
are not allowed to vote.

Investigations appear to have established that only 3 per cent of the
largely African-American list were illegal voters.

That action led to a vote in July by the US Civil Rights Commission
to open a criminal and civil investigation of the Jeb Bush
administration's purge of voters, including indications of concealing
evidence subpoenaed by the commission's investigators. The new claims
follow the Newsnight revelation last week of confidential documents
from inside Republican headquarters in Florida and Washington which
the programme claimed suggested a plan - possibly in violation of US
law - to stop thousands of African-Americans from voting on election
day.

The programme produced two leaked emails, prepared for the executive
director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national
research director in Washington DC, containing a 15-page list. The
list contains 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly
black and traditionally Democratic areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told
Newsnight: 'The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing
is to challenge voters on election day.'

Ion Sancho, not affiliated with any party, noted that Florida law
allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop
voters from obtaining a ballot. They may then only
vote 'provisionally' after signing an affidavit attesting to their
legal voting status.

Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr
Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter 'in the 16 years
I've been supervisor of elections. Quite frankly, this process can be
used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day
and discourage voters from voting.'

Sancho calls it intimidation. And it may be illegal. In Washington,
well-known civil rights attorney Ralph Neas noted that US federal law
prohibits the targeting voters, even if there is a basis for the
challenge, if race is a factor in targeting the voters.

The list of Jacksonville voters covers an area with a majority of
black residents.

When asked by Newsnight for an explanation of the list, Republican
spokespeople claimed that the list merely records returned mail from
either fundraising solicitations or newly registered voters to verify
addresses for purposes of campaign literature.

Republican state campaign spokeswoman, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, stated
the list was not put together 'in order to create' a challenge list,
but refused to say it would not be used in that manner.

The Observer has found that many people are soldiers sent overseas.
Republicans acknowledge the list was created by compiling lists of
voters whose addresses have changed whose only use, say critics,
would be to challenge voters on election day on the basis that their
voting address is not valid. But this 'caging' method captures those
whose addresses have changed because they have been sent to Iraq or
other places. The list includes homeless shelter residents, casting
doubt on suggestions the list was created from fundraising
solicitations for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

*****

An Election Spoiled Rotten
TomPaine.com
Monday, November 1, 2004
by Greg Palast

It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is
already down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in
important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have
been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have
been overlooked - overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba
County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater
chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg
Palast reports on the trashing of the election.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated
the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The
documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times
bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this