I read this article in the Nation.
This is a fascinating topic that deserves the attention of fair-minded
citizens. However, the Nation is not a news source known for its
objectivity, so I think the article needs to be examined in detail.
The author, Gregory Palast, begins
with the following assertion:
In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent.Damaging accusations, but Mr. Palast does not provide any references to source materials, so it is impossible to know where he came by those numbers. The '90.2 percent' claim appears particularly dubious: accuracy to the third digit on the percentage, when the 57,700 number has already been rounded to hundreds? Just how did he come by this high degree of accuracy?
Without references to check, I tried to verify his claims myself using
google. Here is what I found.
Under Florida law, (BTW: same as Ohio law), convicted felons
permanently lose the right to vote. Presuming that the names of felons are stricken from the voting record at least once every election cycle,
(ie. two years), I attempted to correlate the number of released
prisoners during 1998-2000 to the 57,700 number supplied by Mr.
Palast. According to the Florida Department of Corrections, 23,025 prisoners were released in 1998-99, and 24,317 prisoners were released in 1999-2000. This totals to 47,342, which is over 10,000 shy of the number used by Mr. Palast.
So how do we account for this large discrepancy? I see two
explanations neither of which look good for Mr. Palast. First, it is
possible that the removal of felons from the list of registered voters
is not done every two years. Thus, my attempts at correlation fail.
Second, it is possible that the removal of felons from the list of
registered voters IS done every election cycle, and that Jeb Bush and
Katherine Harris colluded to remove an additional 10,358 names from the
voting rolls, placing special emphasis on removing Democrat voters.
The problem with both these scenarios is obvious. Even if 10,358 names
were added, and even if the 57,700 number is for only one years-worth
of felons, there were still over 24,317 names for 1999 alone that
justifiably should have been removed. This completely debunks Mr.
Palast's claim that 90.2 percent were innocent. Now I suppose you could still claim that the 57,700 people 'wrongly' removed were in addition to the 24,317 that were correctlyremoved, but Mr. Palast makes no attempt to make this claim in his article.
Next, Mr. Palast claims that "notably, more than half -- about 54
percent [of the 57,700] are black or Hispanic." Well, if we are indeed
talking about released convicts, this fact is not notable at all, since
the statistics that I found indicate that blacks compose about 54%
of the Florida inmate population!
Mr. Palast now continues an attack he started earlier on the HAVA, aka
the Help America Vote Act.
HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.Not knowing much about the HAVA, and not certain what Mr. Palast meant about 'vulnerable voters', I decided to learn more about this law. I found the full text of the law and browsed through it until I found the section dealing with computerized voter lists. Surprisingly, I did not find a subsection detailing how vulnerable voters were to be disenfranchised. However, I did find this:
(i) If an individual is to be removed from the computerized list, such individual shall be removed in accordance with the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 1973gg et seq.), including subsections (a)(4), (c)(2), (d), and (e) of section 8 of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1973gg-6).Amazingly, this is one of the clearest and most straightforward laws I have ever read. (And, believe it or not, I have spent a fair amount of time reading the O.R.C. and Federal Title 18.) If anything, this law should help put an end to whatever remaining election fraud there is in this country. I encourage everyone to go read it for themselves. (There is a link at the bottom of this post. Skip down to Sec. 301, Voting System Standards for the more interesting parts. The beginning is bogged down with a description of all the studies that are to be funded through HAVA.)
(ii) For purposes of removing names of ineligible voters from the official list of eligible voters--
(I) under section 8(a)(3)(B) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1973gg-6(a)(3)(B)), the State shall coordinate the computerized list with State agency records on felony status; and
(II) by reason of the death of the registrant under section 8(a)(4)(A) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1973gg-6(a)(4)(A)), the State shall coordinate the computerized list with State agency records on death.
Anyway, I can't see what Mr. Palast is worried about, unless he
supports giving felons the right to vote on a general basis. In
addition, Mr. Palast falsely claims that all fifty States must comply
with the requirements of HAVA by the 2004 election, when the law
clearly states that compliance is not required until 2006.
Mr. Palast continues with an in depth discussion of travails of Mr.
Willie Steen, who by all accounts was wrongly blocked from voting,
probably because his name resembled that of William O'Steen, convicted
felon. But the most striking thing about Mr. Steen's account is the
that it appears to be the kind of mix up common to all forms of
bureaucracy, and not part of a grand conspiracy. In addition, the
introduction of a HAVA-style all electronic voting registry across the
country should help eliminate these types of mistakes. A human could
mistake Steen for O'Steen. A computer should not. It also bears
pointing out that a single example of an innocent man being removed
from the voting records does not prove that 90.2% of those removed are
innocent.
Finally, Mr. Palast tackles the spoilage issue, particularly the
disproportionate number of black voters whose ballots were excluded.
The bottom line is that ballots are designed at the local level in
Florida, and ultimately it is the local election officials who are
responsible for designing a ballot that their constituents can
understand. There is no doubt in my mind that had ballots been used in Dade County that the citizens could understand, Al Gore would be
President today. But, we can't decide elections based on who people
claim they intended to vote for: only performance counts in
the voting booth.
-Matt
P.S.
Mr. Palast sure indulges in a lot of loaded phrases for a reporter.
Electoral racial pogrom? Harris's "hit list"? The ever present jab at
Bush's National Guard service? (Which, BTW, does count as part of the
military.)
Sources
Released Felons in Florida:
http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/release/0001/reltype1.html
(Incidentally, 372 felons were released because they died in prison.
However, this should not make any difference for the purposes of our
discussion, since the dead should also have their names removed from
the list of registered voters.)
Racial composition of Florida Prisons:
http://www.gibbsmagazine.com/blacks_in_prisons.htm
HAVA: http://www.fec.gov/hava/law_ext.txt