Is Dubya a dictator?
I’ve always been a bit cheesed off by people who claim George W Bush was not legitimately elected. My attitude has been that the ballot papers may have been poorly designed, but the Democrats signed off on them. The US electoral system is screwed, but Bush won fairly according to those rules.
However, I’m watching Unprecedented: How Bush Won Florida and it’s raised an issue I hadn’t heard about before:
One of the first indications that something was wrong came early on election day. Thousands of African-Americans who had voted in previous elections discovered their names were missing from the voter rolls. Investigators later uncovered an elaborate strategy that purged thousands of Democratic voters from the rolls. These voters were disproportionately African-American. It appeared that Governor Jeb Bush, Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, and other Republican state officials ordered the manipulation of a list of former felons to include thousands of legitimate voters who had no criminal history. In Florida, ex-felony offenders lose their right to vote. The manipulation of this list denied thousands of legitimate voters of their franchise. In an election that was determined by 537 votes, these purged voters would have reversed the outcome.
Stripping felons of their democratic rights is bad enough, but to deny people their vote based on a deliberately loose list of possible felons is another thing altogether.
If the allegations made in this documentary are true, and it seems to have been very well researched, then I’ll have to change my mind. If large numbers of Democratic voters were deliberately disenfranchised by Dubya’s brother and other Republican officials, then Bush is indeed a cheat and an unelected president.
UPDATE [10:19pm]: In the comments, c8to offered a link to an article by Gregory Palast that supports the allegations. It’s very interesting.
Rob,
I agree. I also just watched the SBS doco. I hadn’t been clearly aware of the felon-purging scam before. The admission of clearly ineligible absentee votes is also a serious concern (although I’d been vaguely aware of that before). A lot of the rest of the doco was very slanted and one-sided, however, so we should certainly treat it with caution.
i read about this quite a while ago and am disappointed i missed the documentary. amazing how long it takes for this type of stuff to come out.
i originally saw the story linked off stallmans site at http://www.stallman.org/
to
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1
it does seem however that democrats dropped the ball on that one…
Yeah, the rest of it was just the same old argument again, and as I said I’ve already made up my mind about them: get over it. And the clear anti-Republican bias was what made me qualify my response: “If the allegations made in this documentary are true…”
That link didn’t work for me, do any of you know if this is supposed to air on Public Broadcast in the states?
Moore used the same arguement in his book “Stupid White Men,” and it is true that Florida punished all felons - even those who did their time - by not allowing them to vote ever again. It was state law. It’s also true that Texas gave Florida *its* list of names of suspected felons that left state.
The Democrats, anyway, deserve everything they got for running Al Gore for President.
Yes, but did everyone else?
Give me the hand written ballot system any day with scrutiners scrutinizing the informals…
I think it will be interesting to note the method by which Election Reform will take place. I think that it is only inevitable, and that a ruling will soon come down that should reserve the right of the federal election to that of the control and auspicies of the federal government. The 10th ammendment should not trigger a suspect scrutiny in this case, simply because the federal election is the right of all the people.
However, we can only hope for a Petition to soon be drafted by some willing lawyer.
I watched this doco as well, and was shocked, not so much by it’s content (much of which I had already heard), but by the fact that the people who are to blame have not been held accountable for their actions.
I think the US presidential electoral process does need some basic changes in how it’s carried out. Here are some ideas.
1) Preferential voting - like in our lower house elections. Its main advantage is that it removes the “You voted for Nader, therefore you let Bush win” argument. Vote Nader [1], vote Gore [2] - if the result is close, Nader would drop out and preferences would flow to Gore.
2) WRITE on the goddamn piece of paper, instead of these convoluted punch-card machines.
3) Centralise the polling, rather than have each state (and indeed country) run its own little election.
4) Get rid of these ridiculous laws preventing “convicted felons” from voting. Sure, they’re criminals, but they’re citizens too, right?
Of course, I have little hope that ANY of these suggestions would be implemented for the next presidential election ;)
Sorry, COUNTY, not country. duh.
Apparently the same purge list was also in use for the recent half term elections. Two years later and they still didn’t have it fixed up.
Oh, and I’m a bit fuzzy on the details here, but Katherine Harris was a big wig in George W Bush’s election campaign committee, something like co-chairwoman or something. I forget exactly. On top of that after the election she ran for congress as a republican, not sure if she got elected.
Suss, is the word.
Actually, she did get elected. She’s now Congress Woman Harris.
there’s a great book i reviewed late last year, called into the buzzsaw (http://home.iprimus.com.au/laurapalmer/intothebuzzsaw.htm) that looks at this and other similar issues.
Another good book on this is called, Deadlock: The Inside Story of America’s Closest Election, by Political Staff of Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima