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Maybe Gore actually won the 2000 election after all.

It really never was about "the chads", except in the U.S. media. What really happened is far worse.

Check this and this and this out. And this. And why not this, as well.

Maybe Gore actually won the 2000 election after all.

It really never was about "the chads", except in the U.S. media. What really happened is far worse.

Check this and this and this out. And this. And why not this, as well.

Maybe Gore actually won the 2000 election after all.

It really never was about "the chads", except in the U.S. media. What really happened is far worse.

Check this and this and this out. And this. And why not this, as well.

Actually there have been lots of problems with the "fill in the bubble" system of balloting - just not in white districts.

The machines used for that purpose in Florida had two settings. One setting had the machine tell you when you submitted your vote whether or not there was a problem, the other had the machine just accept it regardless. Which setting a given machine was given depended on how that district was likely to vote.

The result was about 10% of ballots being spoiled ballots in black neighbourhoods (usually vote democratic), and around 1% in white neighbourhoods.

See the voting apartheid section of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (page 61 of chapter 1, free download) for details on this. Page 66 of the same source describes the "recount" which verified among other things that the spoiled ballots legitimately were spoiled, but deliberately avoided keeping records on how many of the 180,000 spoiled ballots were was blindingly obvious who those votes were supposed to be for. (Hint: Gore should have won.)

It is getting attention in the mainstream press.
Only problem is it's in the wrong country.
US media doesn't seem interested in reporting on US election problems.
Read about what Greg Palast found about the 2000 election that the US media wouldn't report on here.

Well, seeing as he stole the last Presidential election, and there's some funny shit going on with Diebold, it doesn't seem like much of a strech that he might steal the next election. Read about the stolen 2000 election in Chapter 1 here .

...we're rebuilding their cities

Actually lots of WMDs have been found, you just don't want to count _those_ WMDs.

Notice how it whimpered away? It had no legs b/c it was shit

But we don't arrest people for their religion,

we allow people to vote

The day when capital punishment is abolished in the US and when elections are not rigged will be the day when anyone stateside is in a position to criticise China for its human rights abuses and lack of representative democracy.

This article details the underreported Arnold - Enron link (http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=283&ro w=0)

Arnold Unplugged - It's hasta la vista to $9 billion if the Governator is selected
Friday, October 3, 2003

It's not what Arnold Schwarzenegger did to the girls a decade back that should raise an eyebrow. According to a series of memoranda our office obtained today, it's his dalliance with the boys in a hotel room just two years ago that's the real scandal.

The wannabe governor has yet to deny that on May 17, 2001, at the Peninsula Hotel in Los
Angeles, he had consensual political intercourse with Enron chieftain Kenneth Lay. Also frolicking with Arnold and Ken was convicted stock swindler Mike Milken.

Now, thirty-four pages of internal Enron memoranda have just come through this reporter's
fax machine tell all about the tryst between Maria's husband and the corporate con men. It turns out that Schwarzenegger knowingly joined the hush-hush encounter as part of a campaign to sabotage a Davis-Bustamante plan to make Enron and other power pirates then ravaging California pay back the $9 billion in illicit profits they carried off.

Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and
the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.

It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz
Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger.

Now follow the action. One month after Cruz brings suit, Enron's Lay calls an emergency
secret meeting in L.A. of his political buck-buddies, including Arnold. Their plan, to undercut Davis (according to Enron memos) and "solve" the energy crisis -- that is, make the Bustamante legal threat go away.

How can that be done? Follow the trail with me.

While Bustamante's kicking Enron butt in court, the Davis Administration is simultaneously

demanding that George Bush's energy regulators order the $9 billion refund. Don't hold your breath: Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is headed by a guy proposed by ... Ken Lay.

But Bush's boys on the commission have a problem. The evidence against the electricity
barons is rock solid: fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, megawatt "laundering," fake power delivery scheduling and straight out conspiracy (including meetings in hotel rooms).

So the Bush commissioners cook up a terrific scheme: charge the companies with
conspiracy but offer them, behind closed doors, deals in which they have to pay only two cents on each dollar they filched.

Problem: the slap-on-the-wrist refunds won't sail if the Governor of California won't play
along. Solution: Re-call the Governor.

New Problem: the guy most likely to replace Davis is not Mr. Musclehead, but Cruz
Bustamante, even a bigger threat to the power companies than Davis. Solution: smear Cruz because -- heaven forbid! -- he took donations from Injuns (instead of Ken Lay).

The pay-off? Once Arnold is Governor, he blesses the sweetheart settlements with the
power companies. When that happens, Bustamante's court cases are probably lost. There aren't many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if that a governor has already allowed the matter to be "settled" by a regulatory agency.

So think about this. The state of California is in the hole by $8 billion for the coming year.
That's chump change next to the $8 TRILLION in deficits and surplus losses planned and incurred by George Bush. Nevertheless, the $8 billion deficit is the hang

POWER OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB IN WHITE HOUSE

[ snip... ]

The power outage began in First Energy's Ohio operation. This company was the model for the film, "China Syndrome." Really. Then First Energy's Pennsylvania unit fumbled the power ball. These are the very same Homer Simpsons who melted Three Mile Island.

Next, Niagara-Mohawk blacked out and took down New York. Ni-Mo's claim to fame goes back to the 1980s. They built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.

To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.

I'm not surprised that the Three Stooges of the power industry knocked their heads together and blacked us out. What's surprising is that the US media is clueless about how we ended up with Larry, Moe and Curley in control of our nation's electronic lifeline.

Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility comanies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."

[ ... snip ]

Article continued here

POWER OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB IN WHITE HOUSE

[ snip... ]

The power outage began in First Energy's Ohio operation. This company was the model for the film, "China Syndrome." Really. Then First Energy's Pennsylvania unit fumbled the power ball. These are the very same Homer Simpsons who melted Three Mile Island.

Next, Niagara-Mohawk blacked out and took down New York. Ni-Mo's claim to fame goes back to the 1980s. They built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.

To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.

I'm not surprised that the Three Stooges of the power industry knocked their heads together and blacked us out. What's surprising is that the US media is clueless about how we ended up with Larry, Moe and Curley in control of our nation's electronic lifeline.

Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility comanies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."

[ ... snip ]

Article continued here

In 2000, Florida contracted with DBT Online (Choicepoint) to purge the central voter list. The Commission found that the use of a private entity without clear and effective guidance from the highest state levels, coupled with the absence of uniform and reliable verification procedures, resulted in the disenfranchisement of countless eligible voters in 2000.

But it still does leave many questions. The report is very much a summary, and leaves out just about any detail.

Greg Palast claims to have 2 CDROMS with the complete felons' list. I suppose it would be a violation of privacy and stuff but it would be nice if they were published so we could look at them ourselves.

This Article on Greg Palast's website claims to detail how Choicepoint came up with the list. It would be nice to find an independent source to confirm the details that isn't just quoting from Palast or an associate.

The article said that the NAACP sued Katherine Harris' department and one, but didn't mention any details. I was able to find this page which seems to be the complaint and details specific incidents of people denied to vote. I'm not big on legalise and couldn't find a court case number. Anyone know how to look this up?

err.... I was trying to lookup something I had read before on Palast's website that I thought implied that he was published in the London Times reporting on the Felons' List. But now I can't even find that. Maybe he was refering to the Guardian instead of the Times. Anyone know what I'm talking about here?

Oh one more thing to ask: Supposedly there were lots of roadblocks out on the streets on Election Day 2000. Did anyone get pictures of these? Anyone know of any websites with pictures or specific details on this?

Documentation and sources are a good thing.

I was able to find this Salon article that says 173,000 names were removed from the voter roles, and that 8,000 of them were people who were convicted for misdemeanors, not felonies.

As to media bias, I think the mainstream media is biased, but not according to "liberal" or "conservitive" slant but towards the status quo. Rather than a bias of disinformation, it is underreporting that is the problem. In other words stories that would reflect badly on advertisers or the parent company go unreported. In this case challenging the legitamacy of the current administration would be upsetting to the status quo and bad for business in general. Too bad the economy is in the crapper.

Are Salon and The Guardian unbiased sources? :)

For the record, I didn't vote for Al Gore and was extremely frighten

Hilarious. Instead of trusting the "party line" from Fox News, CNN, and every other news organisation in the country, we should trust a blatantly partisan "journalist" who has renounced his US citizenship, and is desparately trying to make a buck from his criticism of President Bush.

What is even more hilarious is his biography:

Palast has broken some of the biggest stories of recent years - how Katherine Harris stole the 2000 election for Bush by illegally removing African-Americans from voter rolls (named Salon's Politics story of the year)

I guess Greg never bothered to check the Salon Corrections retracting the accusations against Catherine Harris. Maybe thats why nobody else bothered to cover this "story"?

Yes- I have read a lot of Greg Palast's work, and I have concluded that it is partisan crap from somebody with a vested interest in making a name for himself. Take two seconds on his home page to see that he is not an unbiased source of information about President Bush. Do you honestly think he is going to provide you with more unbiased information than CNN? And you accuse me of "buying the party line"?

No- I base my arguments on the findings from the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the actual Florida statute, and documented facts from the election. Why haven't more people made a big deal about the felon purge list? Because IMO it isn't a big deal. The system was not perfect, but as far as we know, nobody was actually disenfranchised because of it. Florida already made some changes to the law, and now its time to move on.

No, you're wrong. Greg Palast did extensive research into what happened. Don't buy the party line from Fox News, CNN, and others who completely whitewashed what happened in Florida.

Now that Diebold has a lock on voting systems, expect more fraud and even less media acknowledgement of it.

Gee, the EU took someone into their fold for money? Who would have thunk it?
I've read ESA's press release several times now, and while I came across references to "international cooperation", "common interest" and the like, no reference was made at all to money. You're probably just overly focussed on the subject because of its closeness to home.

People can bitch about Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, etc. all they want, but they pale in comparison the magnitude of what China did in simply the last 3 decades.
If we were only to deal with countries with impeccable human rights records, we'd all sit alone in our rooms. Or are you suggesting that China's worse than the rest, so it's okay to deal with (for example) the right-wing tyrranies that the US has been propping up for those self-same decades because they're not as bad as China?

Your problem (and that of a lot of others here) is that you think your way is the only way of doing things. Bill Clinton's policy on North Korea was working quite well until Bush's asinine "axis of evil" speech, which turned the DPRK from a country heading towards normalisation back into a paranoid rogue state. How does China's record over the past five years compare with the previous fifteen? And how much of that improvement is down to US posturing, and how much to increased contact with the rest of the world?

I live in Dublin, Ireland, and it's slowly becoming a cosmopolitan city, home at the moment to Chinese people that number in their thousands. Would the world be better off if we told these people to fuck off, that their evil communist leaders were such bastards that we weren't going to let them into the country until it was a Shining Beacon of Democracy?

Oh, and to everyone who's fond of mentioning the Marshall plan: here's your chance to get your money back. Gradually phase out GPS and use Gailileo instead. In the long run, you'll save billions.

That didn't have to do with split votes so much as Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush delivering Florida with voter list manipulation--as many as 60,000 democrats illegitimately denied their vote. See Palast's reporting on the subject for an introduction. Once that was accomplished, appointment by a Rep. Court was easy.

Is having a kitchen an impediment to the free market of restaurants?

Is driving a car an impediment to the free market of taxi and train companies?

Get real, man.

Free market means that people have the freedom to choose which product to use, and these countries choose to make and use their own. There is nothing wrong with that, not even considering the "free market" globalization iron fist of driving poor countries into complete bankruptcy (read the book and articles from Greg Palast for scary documentation about this).

In fact, it is in their best interest to reduce their dependency on software imports from other countries, and everyone acting in their own best interest is exactly the idea of free markets.

What about the ballots which were never counted in the first place?

Florida law required that all absentee ballots have postmarks in them.

In the 1876 Presidential election, it took them 4 months to decide who won Florida

They called Florida for Gore after all the polls in EST closed, and 10 minutes before the polls closed in CST. Maybe Bush lost 5 votes there? Big fucking deal.

Read Chapter 1 here , and tell me if you still believe that the election was fair.

Second - you loose more credibility with generalized comments towards a user community you don't know

but these kids are going to benefit regardless of the technology that's taught to them.

MS is a monopoly and got there because of business practices. When a company does became a monopoly, EVERY action needs to be looked at twice. Reasons like this and this is what makes people not want to trust anything from the MS marketing machine. With MS it all comes down to what can further their grasp on the WHOLE IT market. I have not read anywhere about Red Hat being abusive or having unethical business practices.

And this is even worse.

While Bill Gate made it look like charity, it was really to help control a monopoly. The money helped maybe a few hundred thousand, while making millions go without cheap medication. BILL GATES: KILLING AFRICANS FOR PROFIT AND P.R.

Any kind of donation is a good one? Take a look here: BILL GATES: KILLING AFRICANS FOR PROFIT AND P.R.

Sadly, you should not count on it. The Gates foundation makes donations to get publicity and for their own benefit. Take a look at this: BILL GATES: KILLING AFRICANS FOR PROFIT AND P.R.

Be wary of Gates Foundation donations/charities.

We are all serfs on Microsoft's and Big Pharma's 'intellectual property.'

Actually, that's not entirely acurate according to this article from reporter Greg Palast. In it, he describes how the the voting boxes were setup to reject any ballots with a stray mark. In a predominantly white district, the voters were given the opportunity to correct their mistake, in a black district, 1 in 8 ballots were voided by the state.

Take a look at this article which i believe was posted here a few days ago.

Greg Pallast, a journalist who writes for the Guardian Newspaper and files the occasional report for the BBC's Newsnight show, has plenty of info on how this latest blackout came about. Believe it or not you can trace it back to Britain in the Margaret Thatcher years:

"In the 1980s, "NiMo" [Niagara Mohawk Power Company] built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.

"To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators."

Greg Pallast, a journalist who writes for the Guardian Newspaper and files the occasional report for the BBC's Newsnight show, has plenty of info on how this latest blackout came about. Believe it or not you can trace it back to Britain in the Margaret Thatcher years:

"In the 1980s, "NiMo" [Niagara Mohawk Power Company] built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.

"To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators."

Greg Pallast has some Interesting Comments on the blackout. He cites energy deregulation, passed by George Bush, Sr. under lobbying pressure from Enron (Yes, them again!) Very intersting comments, if true. Politicians and Corporations teaming up to line their own pockets while endangering the public. Nice.

Maybe these links may enlighten the situation:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/333505
and
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row =0

And here it is.

From gregpalast.com ...

Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York where Republican Governor George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid system.

And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven: They allowed a foreign company, the notoriously incompetent National Grid of England, to buy up NiMo, get rid of 800 workers and pocket most of their wages - producing a bonus for NiMo stockholders approaching $90 million.

Deregulation does have a share (and I'd say a major share) of the responsibility. When the systems are deregulated, the standards for service are shot to hell. There are innumerable examples of this but California is the perfect one.

Once deregulation of power, transit, water, or whatever, happens then all the big corporations go and have a field day. The reason there is poor infrastructure is it's cheaper to build with crap components and poor design. Take away all the safety precautions and increase your stock dividends. This is why Niagara Mohawk failed.

There's an informative article about the backstory here.

Voting no longer guarantees democratic-like representation in the USA. The 2000 prez elections saw that in full glory, corruption that would have caused a furore in most countries. There were a variety of fraudulent schemes in that campaign, but the one that takes the cake is the "database of felons" scheme covered by Greg Palast. Amazing how well this info was/is suppressed in the great media machine.

Stem-cell research policy from on-high will likely be highly partisan, influenced by a mixture of 'life-sciences' / pharmaceutical corporate back-room deals and a nod to the christian right doctrine necessary for the right optics to primary supporters. [see: "Iraq, reconstruction graft"]

Well, as you said, feel free to "try."

Thanks for participating, there was some genuinely useful information in the response that warranted repetition. Since I've been involved in politics locally (helping to run a local man for Congress, other local men and women for city boards, and trying to create a Citizen Police Review Board), I've become more interested in seeing where the various blogs and webboards are on politically organizing to express their views succinctly to elected officials.

Fortunately or unfortunately, (and I believe fortunately) the US allows all people (over the age of 18), even those who aren't paying attention, to vote.

I can think of a few dozen thousand Floridians who would disagree with you here. And I think given the triple corporate threat to our future voting rights from Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold (as explained by Bev Harris and her website), I can't help but think that our Democracy is at stake. I see very little awareness of these issues amongst the public I've spoken with.

Be aware that much of what you read on the editorial page of the newspaper, or what you hear on talk radio, is spin.

I would amend that to read all, not much, of anyone's analysis of anything is spin. From my experience with a community radio station where I host an electronic/political public affairs show ("Digital Citizen"), I'd say objectivity is a myth. This is how it has always been. My show, Slashdot, your post, and everyone's followups (including mine) are no exception. We can't help but see things from our own perspective, as Molly Ivins put it so well on her recent book tour appearance/debate with Al Franken and Bill O'Reilly.

So here is an example of murky money: You want to help the EFF? Write a big check. It will allow them to do better research, hire more people to lobby, fly to more conferences, print more flyers, etc. Hmmmm, sounds a lot like "providing funds to political campaigns in exchange for laws/policies/etc that benefit the organization", doesn't it?

To me, the amount of influence and money from a single donor seems vastly different in corporate America than with most individuals. Hilary Rosen, former head of the RIAA, was recently tapped to help form a new copyright regime for Iraq. Is anyone from the EFF in a similar position? I doubt it. Which /. reader can afford to give roughly a million dollars to EFF like Enron gave to each of the two major political parties (giving a little more to the Republicans, but both roughly the same)? I know I can't. I couldn't afford $10,000, which I think most people would consider a "big check".

When the public gets together and speaks with a single voice on an issue of national importance, we still can't wield the same power as the corporations. Corporate media didn't report on the recent FCC decision prior to June 2, 2003 when it would have been most informative to US citizens (with one minor exception I'm aware of: ABC overnight news had a brief mention of what the FCC was considering which aired at around 3AM). In 1996, the same thing happened--the mass media was covering Monica Lewinsky, not the Telecom Act. This time the public was organized and when the House bill came around, it did not stop the entire FCC decision and give the public (as FCC Commissioner Michael Copps says) a chance to "tee up" all the relevant questions. I don't know what the right FCC policy should be here, but I know making decisions on that policy before we can study it in depth is a mistake. As NOW with Bill Moyers has reported, the corporate media is in bed with the FCC who is supposed to be regulating them. Which Congressmembers are on this and what are they doing?

Finally, imagine that the

Black Box Voting

The source code for the software used in one voting machine was discovered on the Internet, on an unprotected FTP site belonging to Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. The software, when compiled and run in tests, showed that it appears to be the code used in the company's AccuVote-TS touch-screen terminals.

This software has been analyzed in detail at Truthout.org: How to Rig an Election in the United States. I think your stomach will start turning just a couple paragraphs in. No, let me start it turning for you: the backend database for this state-of-the-art touch-screen votiong machine is Microsoft Access. But that's only part of the story. Wait until you read about the hidden tables. More details here: How We Discovered The Backdoor. The actual code from the FTP site is here: Original Data.

I don't know about you, but I became a little nauseous reading this.... It's quite the yee-opener.

Some more on "problematic" election results:
Florida Ballots Project

Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

NY TImes: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say

The most stomach churning thing of all, I think, is the Christian Right connection to Deibold and ES&S.

If you find this stuff credible, spread the word around.

as I was saying earlier in the thread . . .

Greg Palast covered this issue thoroughly in the revised for the United States edition of "The Best democracy Money Can Buy". (gregpalast.com)

What? "Eat it" as in like "shred" or "destroy"? What kind of crap is that? What possible reason would there ever be for even making a ballot tabulation machine capable of destroying ballots? Where do you get your "understanding"? Got any links?

• http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row =1
• http://www.commondreams.org/views/121400-108.htm

These are only a few references I've run across, but I'm most familiar with Palast's reporting of what happened in Florida (and perhaps other states). You can also try a Google search on "voting machines problems".

The implication is clear: some districts can adjust the voting machines so that more improperly marked votes can be considered spoiled, and are not counted. As in "destroyed". Other districts can set things up to give the voter another chance so that the vote is counted. The real crime appears to be that these districts can be sharply statistically defined in terms of race or party affiliation.

Has anyone considered that these security issues might not be mistakes? Look at who's contracted Diebold to do this -- the same folks who profited from Diebold's botched 'purge' of the Florida voter roles (see all kinds of fun, well-documented stuff here). Follow the money. The ones hiring Diebold have everything to gain from a completely insecure system.

--------
If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...

Exactly. Refer above to mention of Greg Palast's work.

A quote from his site:

ChoicePoint is an amazingly qualified company to do this kind of work. If florida had wanted them to give accurate results (like their contract said), they would have. The FBI doesn't pay for crap work

So follow the money.

ActForChange Petition: Stop the Florida-tion of the 2004 Election

Sponsored by Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast (author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy") this petition calls for a halt to computerizing the elctions until the process is shown to be resistant to manipulation, fraud, and racial bias.

Read some of Palast's book (pertinent chapters available on his website) for the hardest-hitting investigation into the 2000 Florida elections. Quite the eye opener as to how corrupt the system, irregardless of who won, actually is. The most shocking part, however, is that the main stream press, still to this day, has never picked up on any of his findings.

Us voters, Republican, Democrat or otherwise, have a responsibilty to see that our democratic process is never again misused so horribly.

After discovering widespread fraud where several convicted felons and even dead people voted in a 1997 Mayoral election, the Florida legislature (not the Governor or Secretary of State) passed a law that called for a statewide list of convicted felons to be generated

In 1998, Elections supervisor Ethel Baxter (a Democrat) contracted with Database Technologies to compile the list (Database Technologies later merged with Choicepoint). The list had about 57,000 names on it.

According to the Florida Statute, the intent of the list was to generate as many possible matches as they could. This list was then forwarded to each county where the County Election Supervisors were required to verify the names before they took any action against the voters.

Many counties decided to ignore the list completely. However, if somebody actually was incorrectly kept from voting, by law the county election supervisor (once again, not Jeb Bush or Katherine Harris) is to blame.

If the County Elections Supervisor did validate a name as being a convicted felon, the voter was given notice well in advance of the election that their name had been removed from the voter registration, and they were given a procedure to dispute the decision.

Aside from some anecdotal evidence of minorities being turned away at the polls, there are no actual documented cases of people be incorrectly kept from voting. When the Federal Election Commission held hearings about the election, NOBODY stepped forward to claim that they were denied the right to vote.

The NAACP, who was called in to Florida to represent the minority voters, states very plainly in this settlement that the "Plaintiffs have not alleged that Defendants acted in a purposefully discriminatory manner toward any group". The NAACP also concedes that most of the changes that they requested were already implemented before they filed suit.

Katherine Harris had very little to do with any of this, and Jeb Bush had absolutely nothing to do with it. The law was passed by the legislature, the firm was hired by a democrat, and the final decision on each name on the list was made by the individual counties!

So Palast's shocking story boils down to this:
-Out of the 57,000 people on the list, an unknown number of them were not felons
-Out of that unknown number of innocent people, an unknown number actually lived in counties that decided to use the list
-Out of that unknown number, an unknown number were incorrectly verified by the County Election supervisor and removed from the voter registration
-Out of that unknown number, an unknown number didn't follow the procedure to dispute their removal from the voter registration
-And out of that unknown number, probably about 50% of them would have actually voted anyway (voter turnout)

Palast wonders why nobody else is talking about this- its because this isn't a story at all!

Read all about it. [PDF] Get over that.

Um, no. There are no direct quotes of McKinney saying anything of the sort. She asked tough questions, and accused intelligence agencies of being inept (and covering that up), but she never said or implied that anyone actually knew about that plans and failed to act.

Greg Palast has covered this in some detail:
July 21
June 18

Palast's somewhat diatribic style aside, the fact remains that there are no first-party, original accounts of McKinney's statements. It was a rumor that was reported as fact.

Um, no. There are no direct quotes of McKinney saying anything of the sort. She asked tough questions, and accused intelligence agencies of being inept (and covering that up), but she never said or implied that anyone actually knew about that plans and failed to act.

Greg Palast has covered this in some detail:
July 21
June 18

Palast's somewhat diatribic style aside, the fact remains that there are no first-party, original accounts of McKinney's statements. It was a rumor that was reported as fact.

And rather than spouting off your conspiracy theories about the election, how about providing some proof. If a crime was committed, where are the investigations and indictments?

Go here and you can read Greg Palast's version of the story and the evidence he collected (e.g. pages 60 and 61 of the Chapter 1 PDF).

Where is the public outcry?

Good question. Ask the American public.

Whoever moderated this as flamebait needs to pay more attention to what's going on around them.

I'll respond to points 2 & 3.

The reason I've been told that one isn't allowed to ask for an ID to vote is that it would be a violation of the Constitution - specifically, the 24th Amendment.

Now, you're asking yourself, "why would asking for an ID violate the prohibition of poll taxes?" Think about the time you got (or last renewed) your driver's licence. It wasn't free, was it? Ta-dah! A poll tax.

So, if you've got to show a photo ID to vote, the state's got to provide a free photo ID. And most states right now are too broke to even think about something like this.

And as far as point 3 - Purging of the voting roles led to big problems in the 2000 election in Florida. Basically, some voters that shouldn't have been purged were purged. When they showed up to vote, they were told they couldn't. Big disaster. I suspect most places would rather have voting roles with ineligible voters (99.99% of whom won't show up to vote, because they've moved or are dead - and if "they" do show up, it's unlikely anyone will find out about it, thus causing problems for the officials running the election) than voting roles missing eligible voters (who will make a huge stink if they show up and are told they can't vote, which will cause a problem for the officials running the election).

You can read about the Florida voting list purge here if you wish, and check the mention in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' report here.