The Florida Disaster:  Before, During and After

As with other famous US controversies, the Florida election scandal
will be debated for years.  A promising quality to this scandal is
the massive amount of evidence documenting injustice that is now
available.  Circulating this evidence can help prevent the rewrite of
our history.  Here is a condensed historical record, as of 1/26/2001.


BEFORE THE ELECTION

-The Florida Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, hired the
services of Choicepoint Inc. to "clean up" the Florida voter rolls in
advance of the election at a taxpayer cost of $4 million.  The initial
list of voters this firm recommended be "cleansed" from the rolls
included 8,000 residents of Florida who had only committed misdemeanors
in other states (i.e. drunk driving in Maine). As the Miami Herald
reported, most counties did not use the flawed list; a new list without
this error was prepared.

-However, a team led by London journalist Gregory Palast reviewed this
"corrected" list for 10 counties in early December and found a 15%
misidentification rate resulting in 7,000 additional legal voters removed
from the voting rolls.  Palast's team also found 1,700 "cleansed" voters
who had regained their right to vote in other states after serving a
sentence, and could not be barred from voting by Florida law for offenses
they did not commit in Florida.  In the largest pro-Bush county, Hillsborough,
54% of the names on the "scrub" list belonged to African-Americans.

The company that did the cleansing received an award from a conservative
"voting rights" organization based in Virginia, the Voting Integrity
Project.  Established in 1996, the VIP has been exposed as a conservative
front group in exposes by Salon and Slate magazines (12/8/00, 4/4/00).

-According to an NAACP lawsuit, thousands of citizens who registered to
vote in a new polling place (or for the first time) were not added to rolls
by county officials in time to allow them to vote in the election. 


DURING THE BALLOTING

-Problems reported on election day included "spot-checks" of
cars driving to vote in African-American areas and requests that Latino
voters produce additional IDs beyond the one required.  Some precincts
reportedly ran out of ballots or closed while legal voters were in line.

-By far the largest documented problem was the absence of voters from
the voting rolls.  For some of these voters, the problem could be
addressed by precincts placing a call to the county election office.
Due to the large number of problems, these help lines were jammed and
many voters had to wait for hours to be approved to mark a ballot.
Many gave up.  Some precincts had laptop computers to allow precinct
workers to directly access voting rolls. However, of 28 precincts in
Hillsborough and Miami counties provided with laptops, only one was a
"majority-black" precinct (source: NAACP lawsuit filed on 1/10/01).

-Confusing ballots resulted in a whopping 41,000 "overvotes" for
multiple presidential candidates in Duval and Palm Beach counties
alone.  Some Florida counties had error-checking voting equipment that
made it impossible for a ballot to be submitted with multiple votes. 
The counties with error-prone equipment were disproportionately in
Black and Hispanic areas, a clear violation of US civil rights laws.


AFTER ELECTION DAY

-All of the counties were immediately asked to conduct ballot
recounts due to the closeness of the race. Five smaller counties in
mostly white areas of Florida used partial hand counting in order to
produce the most accurate count. However in the larger urban counties
the ballot recounts were delayed and impeded by court cases,
unsubstantiated accusations of fraud, a coordinated national media blitz
to discredit hand counts, and by paid demonstrators flown to Miami from
DC congressional offices just before Thanksgiving.

-Some counties were pressured, again by a national media blitz, into
counting overseas ballots for George Bush that were clearly postmarked
after election day.

-Even Pat Buchanan and his campaign manager Bay Buchanan stated that
Gore would have won the election if Palm Beach county votes intended for
Gore did not end up going to Buchanan.

-The Supreme Court of the United States eventually took up the case of
Bush v. Gore.  By an incredible stretch of legal doctrine, they applied
arguments involving the issue of "equal protection" to the differing
standards in hand counting of ballots.  However, they failed (along with
the Gore legal team) to raise the serious "equal protection" problems
associated with differing voting equipment.  The equipment-related errors
were SIXTEEN TIMES the errors that the Supreme Court cited, in their 7-2
ruling, when they used an equal protection argument.

-The arguments on equal protection that swayed the Court were developed
by lawyers with close ties to the Bush administration and funded in part
by a private foundation with a long history of supporting "eugenics"
theories, dating back to the use of these theories in Nazi Germany.

-Hand recounts conducted so far by the media (from 12/18/00 to 1/3/01
in six counties) have already given Gore enough votes to overtake Bush
by over 300 votes.

[For a slightly longer version of this article with 22 references, in
a nicely formatted 1-page version that can be printed out and copied,
see the Organizers' Collaborative "myths" project at www.13myths.org]