Republicans Plan Voter Challenges in Florida

An anonymous reader writes "Greg Palast, the journalist who first reported on the initial Florida voter scandal (Warning large PDF), thinks he's found a new threat for this election, reported here at the BBC. He did uncover some interesting shenanigans last time, is this significant, or is he just fishing this time?"

Comments

Please...

[Keebler71]

Please consider that source. Visit his website and ask yourself if he is capable of unbiased critical thought or is this another hatchet-job.

Greg Palast

[Keebler71]

He did uncover some interesting shenanigans last time

Greg Palast claims that in the last election, the GOP's efforts to *gasp* enforce the law and prevent felons from voting cost the democrats 22,000 votes. While I think that any vote denied is a tragedy and don't want to trivialize it, lets look at this 22,000 figure and some of the other "disenfranchisement" claims.

I will use this Wikipedia entry as my source. Let go through the various "disenfranchisement" claims.

From the article, 57,700 "felons" were struck from the voter list. These people were all contacted (although I assume it is reasonable that many of these people were not reached), of which 4,874 appealed. Of the 4,874 appeals, 2,430 were re-instated. Now, lacking an additional info, I assume that someone compared these two numbers, and figured that 50% of the listed names were incorrect, where in reality, it is only 50% of those on the list who came forward to dispute the error. Granted, anyone being denied a vote is tragic, but 2,430 (all of whom were reinstated) is a far cry from 22,000. Why didn't the other 53,000 people on the list appeal? More likely, most didn't appeal because outside of the 2,430, nearly all were convicted felons. Which brings us to ...List Demographics:

Voter demographics authority David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC, reviewed The Nation's findings and concluded that the purge-and-block program was "a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters." He noted that based on nationwide conviction rates, African-Americans would account for 46% of the ex-felon group wrongly disfranchised.

Breakdown of the distribution for 3 major counties:

• Miami-Dade, 20% voters are Black, 66% names on list were Black (3,794)
• Leon County, 29% voters are Black, 55% names on list were Black
• None of the names on the list were Hispanic.

First off, David Bositis is expecting a 46% rate of black names on the ex-felon group list. What is his criteria? national averages. African Americans comprise 12.6% of the US population, but make up 46% of the ex-felon group (according to Bositis). Florida has slightly more aftican-americans than the national average at 14.6%. Lets look at Miami-Dade and Leon counties that the Bositis cites: Both counties have significantly higher (about double) the national average of African-Americans. Wouldn't it make some sense that the they would appear on the felon list with greater frequency than the national African-American breakdown of ex-felons? (46%)

Now lets go after that last bullet: None of the names on the list were Hispanic. Greg Palast has this screenshot on his website of a segment of the list. (Ignore for the moment that he apparently uses Windows, AOL, and has 16 non-standard icons in his system tray.) While I don't dispute that ChoicePoint used poor methods to determine matches, what else can we glean from the spreadsheet? For one thing, there are no "Hispanics" in the race column, despite there being two names that appear to be hispanic in origin. One is listed as unknown, and one as white. So, the argument that "hispanics have been removed because they tend to vote Republican" is probably bunk. Much more likely, ChoicePoint correctly identified Hispanics as an "ethinic group" and not a race. This would very reasonably explain why there are no "hispanics" on the list.

Bottom line, while I don't doubt that some African-American voters were disenfranchised, maybe even enough to change the outcome, I seriously doubt it was 22,000.