3
3
1
A more personal account of people who could not vote in Florida in 2000 due to being inappropriately purged by this list is located here --> http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch2.htm
Finally, regarding election 2000, there is a good NY Times article on its results. The NY Times, like several other news agencies, were given the right to examine all of the ballots and studied them for several months and then issued its conclusions here --> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE.html . I say the article is odd because the title is "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote" but the paragraph that matters is:
But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium's independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to "count all the votes."
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Greg Palast and Robert Kennedy Jr. recently published this article http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote in Rolling Stone describing a Republican effort to block Democrats from voting. Here are some excerpts:
In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."
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.To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. "They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away," says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. "We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn't find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico."
There's a reason Iglesias couldn't find any evidence of fraud: Individual voters almost never try to cast illegal ballots. The Bush administration's main point person on "ballot protection" has been Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA to erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may be stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. "The claim of widespread voter fraud," Minnite says, "is itself a fraud."
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Actually, the data cited in the Rolling Stone article seems to be a bit off regarding the amount of voter fraud but the differences are not significant. According to this article http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html in the New York Times:
Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.
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Republican Election Fraud is the Real Issue in 2008
The big Election Fraud issue in 2008 is that Republicans are pushing the envelopes of the HAVA or Help America Vote Act in ways never intended and that includes purging someone's registration if the name or address is in any way different from that on any other public record such as their drivers license or registration. If John Smith has a Drivers license that says John N. Smith and registers to vote as John N Smith (Note the lack of a period after the 'N' middle initial) this is being used by Republican officials to purge John Smith's registration. The GOP is using the accusations against Acorn as a cover for this effort. Read more about it in this http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/17/AR2008101703360.html Washington post article which describes lawsuits in many states including Ohio and Montana designed to purge new voters from the rolls using the comparisons to other public records. Republicans have lost several of these suits already with some embarrassing quotes from the judges involved including this one from the above linked article:
Several of the battles over registration lists have taken on a partisan tinge, including in Montana, where a state GOP official challenged nearly 6,000 voters over apparent discrepancies in their addresses. He dropped his challenge after Democrats went to court, but not before one county sent letters to hundreds of voters informing them that their registrations were in jeopardy. Now the county is trying to let them know they are eligible to cast ballots after all.
The Republicans filed the case "with the express intent to disenfranchise voters," a federal judge said.
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