Katherine Harris, who was both George W. Bush's presidential campaign chairwoman, and the Florida secretary of state in charge of elections, paid $4 million to Database Technologies to go through Florida's voter rolls and remove anyone “suspected” of being a former felon. She did it with the blessing of the governor of Florida, George W.'s brother Jeb Bush, (who's own wife was caught by immigration officials trying to sneak $19,000 worth of jewelery into the country without declaring and paying tax on it...a felony in it's own right.)
The law states that ex-felons cannot vote in Florida. That means 31 percent of all black men in Florida are prohibited from voting because they have a felony on their record. Harris and Bush knew that removing the names of ex-felons from the voter rolls would keep thousands of black citizens out of the voting booth. Black Floridians, overwhelmingly are Democrats, and sure enough Al Gore received more than 90 percent of them on November 7, 2000.
In what happens to be a mass fraud committed by the state of Florida, Bush, Harris, and company not only removed thousands of black felons from the rolls, they also removed thousands of black citizens who had never committed a crime in their lives, along with thousands of eligible voters who had committed only misdemeanors.
Katherine Harris's office told Database technologies, a firm with strong Republican ties, to cast as wide a net as possible to get rid of these voters. Her minions instructed the company to include even people with “similar” names to those of the actual felons. They insisted Database check people with the same birth dates as known felons, or similar Social security numbers; an 80 percent match of relevant information, the election office instructed, was sufficient for Database to add a voter to the ineligible list.
This means that thousands of legitimate voters might be barred from voting on Election day just because they had name that sounded like someone else's, or shared a birthday with some unknown bank robber.
Marlene Thorogood, the Database project manager, sent an E-mail to Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, a lawyer for Katherine Harris's election division, warning him that “Unfortunately, programming in this fashion may supply you with false positives,” or misidentification s.
Never mind that, said Bucky. His response. “Obviously we want to capture more names that possibly aren't matches and let (county election) supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.”
Database did as they were told. And before long 173,000 registered voters in Florida were permanently wiped off the voter rolls. In Miami-Dade, Florida's largest county, 66 percent of the voters who were removed were black. In Tampa's county, 54 percent of those who would be denied the right to vote on November 7, 2000 were black.
But culling names from Florida's records alone was not enough for Harris and her department. Eight thousand additional Floridians were thrown off the voting rolls because Database used a false list supplied by another state, a state which claimed that all the names on the list were former convicted felons who had since moved to Florida.
It turns out that the felons on the list had served their time and had all their voting privileges reinstated. And there were others on the list who had committed only misdemeanors, such as parking violations or littering. What state was it that offered Jeb and George W. Bush a helping hand by sending this bogus list to Florida? Texas.
The investigation into the purged voter lists was reported in
The Nation, Florida's Disappeared Voters': Disfranchised by the GOP,” Gregory Palast, February 5, 2001;
The Nation, How the GOP Gamed the System in Florida,” John Lantigua April 30, 2001;
Los Angeles Times “Florida Net Too Wide in Purge of Voter Rolls,” Lisa Getter, May 21, 2001
Salon.com, “Eliminating Fraud-Or Democrats?,” Anthony York, December 8, 2000
