AND      he is behind in the hokey electoral vote.

>
> 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.
>