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

Outside the box thinking?

[ugmoe]

When told of a list of 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida, the election supervisor said: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."

Isn't it possible that someone wanted to send letters them letters asking them to vote for Bush?

What a sad state of affairs

[Dancin_Santa]

The idea behind voter challenges is that anyone can challenge the legitimacy and eligibility of a voter. This is especially important in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California where there are large numbers of illegal immigrants who may be influenced to illegally vote. This is also a problem because there are even American citizens who are not eligible to vote such as felons.

Unfortunately, this law is also a door to abuse. Indiscriminate use of the challenge procedure is akin to Scientology's use of lawsuits to silence the opposition. It produces a chilling effect and keeps people away from the polls.

However, despite this list being available, the article (neither of them) does not delve deeply into the names nor the reasoning behind them, only going so far as to say that it could possibly be a Republican plot. However, if the names all belong to felons who are not eligible to vote in the first place, such a list is absolutely necessary.

This is a story looking for more research, not more explosives. Unfortunately, most people would rather toss bombs than to do the hard work of finding out what is really going on.

Not at all

[metalhed77]

Well, considering that the republican party in FL has tried a number of shennanigans (remember the felons list recently?) in the hope of preventing dems from getting to the polls it's bloody hard to trust them on this. Especially in an election where bush has all but given up the black vote (he didn't even meet with the NAACP!)

Sent to the wrong address

[ewithrow]

What's interesting about this story is the way the it was uncovered. The "secret" email was only revealed because of the stupidity of the sender. Instead of sending it to an email address at the real bush campaign website, it was sent to georgewbush.org, an anti-bush website. georgewbush.org decided to post all email in their catch-all to in what they call the "dead letter office."

http://www.georgewbush.org/deadletteroffice/

Look for an e-mail with the subject "caging"

Registration seems out of hand this election

[edbarbar]

Let's see. There is some reported voter registration fraud. Here is a case in Ohio were a registrar was paid with cocaine and registered "Dick Tracy" and "George Foreman":
http://www.cleveland.com/crime/plaindealer/index.s sf?/base/iscri/109818543096130.xml

along with non-anecdotal evidence of potential fraud (higher incidence of registrations from incorrect address).

There is record voter registration in important states:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2004/10/17/MNGAB99QEA1.DTL

The democrats have supposedly hired many lawyers to monitor polls, etc.:

http://www.voanews.com/english/US-Democrats-Republ icans-Deploy-Lawyers-for-Possible-Election-Battles .cfm

Al Gore is telling blacks to "vote early" so their vote will count, presumably not like the last time:

"Early voting is a good idea," he said. "You want to give them plenty of time to count all the votes."

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/24/gore.ap/

In all, it seems like the making for a very big mess, and I think this election, with things so close, I for one would be suspicious and at least investigate.

One thing I find interesting about this story, is that there is no evidence of any actual wrongdoing, just innuendo, but perhaps this is just part of the democrat playbook, which is to allege claiming voter intimidation, whether it's true or not:

http://cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2004/10/12700. php

Re:Yeah, yeah ...

[MillionthMonkey]

Why is it that those on the "progressive" side are assuming that criminals who happen to be black were going to vote Democrat?

You are probably not familiar with the controversy. The problem with the list, and the reason it was so controversial to begin with, was that it was full of people who were not criminals, who were put on the list by mistake. Criminality aside, blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic, so it was naturally seen as a very convenient mistake for Jeb to make, especially now that it's 4 years later and many of the same incorrect names are still on it.

So what you're saying, by not actually saying it, is that about 26,000 of those people were white.
More than half of the people on the list that you refer to are not black.

Yeah, so? Are you implying that these white people were all going to vote for Bush? Or they would split their votes between candidates any less evenly than any other group of white people?

Assuming that the numbers are accurate and that someone hasn't "cooked the books" so to speak. It still proves nothing. Let us not forget the numbers of hispanics who are counted as white.

Before you try to say that it doesn't happen...Have you ever seen the movie Blow? The very ethnic Diego Delgado is catagorized as "White" by the government.

Starting from the 2000 census data, so that we include the effects of Florida's weird ideas about movie stars from Blow, Florida is 65.4% white (non-Hispanic), 16.8% Hispanic, and 14.6% black. The ex-felon population will have a slightly different racial makeup, but you can estimate it by assuming that the ratios of whites to Hispanics are about the same as for the rest of the state (blacks are obviously overrepresented). What's the probability that out of a random sampling of 26,000 non-black ex-felons, 4745 (18.25%) of which you'd expect to be Hispanic, you'll find exactly 61 Hispanics?

It's (.8175^(25939)) * (.1875^61) * 26000! / (25939! * 61!) That number is so small it's hard to calculate. You can use Stirling's Approximation to get the log of it: 25939*log(0.8175) + 61*log(.1875) + 26000*(log(26000)-1)) - 61*(log(61)-1) - 25939*(log(25939)-1) = -2270 - 18858 + 88789 - 47 - 88855 = -21241. Even allowing for the probability of finding fewer than 61 Hispanics, which changes the result by log(60) at most, you're still left with a probability of a 1 with at least 21240 zeroes to 1 of finding 61 or fewer Hispanics on the felons list by chance.

Maybe you're right and the felons list is full of movie stars from Blow. Even if the list "really" contains 600 Hispanics, ten times as many as are estimated, the log of the probability would be 25400*log(0.8175) + 600*log(.1875) + 26000*(log(26000)-1)) - 600*(log(600)-1) - 25400*(log(25400)-1) = -2223 - 436 +88789 - 1067 - 86482 = -1419, or a one with 1400 zeroes to one. We'd have to hold more elections than there are protons in the universe for even 600 Hispanics to appear on the list, without someone "cooking the books."

Don't you think you might be wrong?