The Observer of London December
10, 2000
Inside Republican America: A Blacklist Burning for Bush
The more you look the more disbarred and 'disappeared' Gore
voters
you find. You'd almost think it was deliberate
by Gregory Palast
Hey, Al, take a look at this. Every time I cut open another
alligator, I
find the bones of more Gore voters. This week, I was hacking my way
through the Florida swampland known as the Office of Secretary of State
Katherine Harris and found a couple thousand more names of voters
electronically 'disappeared' from the vote rolls. About half of those
named
are African-Americans. They had the right to vote, but they never made
it
to the balloting booths.
When we left off our Florida story two weeks ago, The Observer
discovered that Harris's office had ordered the elimination of 8,000
Florida
voters on the grounds that they had committed felonies in other states.
None had. Harris bought the bum list from a company called ChoicePoint,
a firm whose Atlanta executive suite and boardroom are filled with
Republican funders. ChoicePoint, we have learned, picked up the list of
faux felons from state officials in - ahem - Texas. In fact, it was a
roster of
people who, like their Governor, George W, had committed nothing more
than misdemeanours.
For Harris, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his brother, the Texas
blacklist was a mistake made in Heaven. Most of those targeted to have
their names 'scrubbed' from the voter roles were African-Americans,
Hispanics and poor white folk, likely voters for Vice-President Gore. We
don't know how many voters lost their citizenship rights before the
error
was discovered by a few sceptical county officials, before ChoicePoint,
which has gamely 'fessed-up to the Texas-sized error, produced a new
list of 58,000 felons. In May, Harris sent on the new, improved scrub
sheets to the county election boards. Maybe it's my bad attitude, but I
thought it worthwhile to check out the new list. Sleuthing around county
offices with a team of researchers from internet newspaper Salon.com,
we discovered that the 'correct' list wasn't so correct.
One elections supervisor, Linda Howell of Madison County, was so
upset by the errors that she refused to use the Harris/ChoicePoint list.
How could she be so sure the new list identified innocent people as
felons? Because her own name was on it, 'and I assure you, I am not a
felon'.
Our 10-county review suggests a minimum 15 per cent
misidentification rate. That makes another 7,000 innocent people accused
of crimes and stripped of their citizenship rights in the run-up to the
presidential race. And not just any 7,000 people. Hillsborough (Tampa)
county statisticians found that 54 per cent of the names on the scrub
list
belonged to African-Americans, who voted 93 per cent for Gore.
Now our team, diving deeper into the swamps, has discovered yet
a
third group whose voting rights were stripped. The ChoicePoint-generated
list includes 1,704 names of people who, earlier in their lives, were
convicted of felonies in Illinois and Ohio. Like most American states,
these two restore citizenship rights to people who have served their
time
in prison and then remained on the good side of the law.
Florida strips those convicted in its own courts of voting
rights for life.
But Harris's office concedes, and county officials concur, that the
state of
Florida has no right to impose this penalty on people who have moved in
from these other states. (Only 13 states, most in the Old Confederacy,
bar reformed criminals from voting.)
Going deeper into the Harris lists, we find hundreds more
convicts
from the 35 other states which restored their rights at the end of
sentences served. If they have the right to vote, why were these
citizens
barred from the polls? Harris didn't return my calls. But Alan
Dershowitz
did. The Harvard law professor, a renowned authority on legal process,
said: 'What's emerging is a pattern of reducing the total number of
voters
in Florida, which they know will reduce the Democratic vote.'
How could Florida's Republican rulers know how these people
would
vote? I put the question to David Bositis, America's top expert on
voting
demographics. Once he stopped laughing, he said the way Florida used
the lists from a private firm was, 'an obvious technique to discriminate
against black voters'. In a darker mood, Bositis, of Washington's Center
for Political and Economic Studies, said the sad truth of American
justice
is that 46 per cent of those convicted of felony are African-American.
In
Florida, a record number of black folk, over 80 per cent of those
registered to vote, packed the polling booths on November 7. Behind the
curtains, nine out of 10 black people voted Gore.
Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project, Washington, pointed out
that
the 'white' half of the purge list would be peopled overwhelmingly by
the
poor, also solid Democratic voters.
Add it up. The dead-wrong Texas list, the uncorrected
'corrected' list,
plus the out-of-state ex-con list. By golly, it's enough to swing a
presidential election. I bet the busy Harris, simultaneously in charge
of
both Florida's voter rolls and George Bush's presidential campaign,
never
thought of that.
But enough is never enough, it seems. We have discovered a
fourth
group of Gore voters also barred from the polls.
It was Thursday, 2am. On the other end of the line, heavy
breathing,
then a torrent too fast for me to catch it all. 'Vile... lying...
inaccurate...
pack of nonsense... riddled with errors'... click! This was not a
ChoicePoint whistleblower telling me about the company's notorious list.
It
was ChoicePoint's own media communications representative, Marty
Fagan, communicating with me about my, 'sleazy disgusting journalism' in
reporting on it.
I was curious about this company that appears - although never
say
never in this game - to have chosen the next President for America's
voters. Its board dazzles with Republican stars, including billionaire
Ken
Langone and Home Depot tycoon Bernard Marcus, big Republican
funders.
Florida is the only state to hire an outside firm to suggest who
should
lose citizenship rights. That may change. 'Given a new President, and
what we accomplished in Florida, we expect to roll across the nation,'
ChoicePoint told me ominously.
They have quite a pedigree for this solemn task. The company's
Florida subsidiary, Database Technologies (now DBT Online), was
founded by one Hank Asher. When US law enforcement agencies alleged
that he may have been associated with Bahamian drug dealers - although
no charges were brought - the company lost its data management
contract with the FBI. Hank and his friends left last year and so, in
Florida's eyes, the past is forgiven.
Thursday, 3am. (I should say both calls were at my request). A
new,
gentler voice giving me ChoicePoint's upbeat spin. 'You say we got over
15 per cent wrong - we like to look at that as up to 85 per cent right!'
That's 7,000 votes-plus - the bulk Democrats, not to mention the
thousands on the Texas list. Gore may lose by 500 votes.
I contacted San Francisco-based expert Mark Swedlund. 'It's just
fundamental industry practice that you don't roll out the list statewide
until
you have tested it and tested it again,' he said. 'Dershowitz is right:
they
had to know that this jeopardised thousands of people's registrations.
And
they would also know the [racial] profile of those voters.'
'They' is Florida state, not ChoicePoint. Let's not get confused
where
the blame lies. Harris's crew lit this database fuse, then acted
surprised
when it blew up. Swedlund says ChoicePoint had a professional
responsibility to tell the state to test the list; ChoicePoint says the
state
should not have used its 'raw' data.
Until Florida privatised its Big Brother powers, laws kept the
process
out in the open. This year, when one county asked to see ChoicePoint's
formulas and back-up for blacklisting voters, they refused - these were
commercial secrets. So we'll never know how America's president was
chosen.
ChoicePoint complains that I said Harris signed their contract.
It was a
Beth Emory. I'm still more than 85 per cent accurate.
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