http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ats-ap_politics12jul28,0,6994340.story?coll=sns-ap-toppolitics

this makes me feel good about the coming election. What a circus!

__________________
Cannondale ST600 XL
Redline Monocog 29er
2011 Mini Cooper Clubman
2005 Honda Element EX

www.djugurba.com
www.waldenwellness.com

sheesh! We need to go back to drawing straws. Or maybe just use a dart board. Would be more accurate.

__________________
past MB rides:
'68 220D
'68 220D(another one)
'67 230
'84 SD
Current rides:
'06 Lexus RX330
'93 Ford F-250
'96 Corvette
'99 Polaris 700 RMK sled
2011 Polaris Assault
'86 Yamaha TT350(good 'ol thumper)

Thought y'all might enjoy this one.

Dems Won't Permit Facts to Get in Way of '00 Election Myth Print Mail


By John R. Lott Jr., Brian Blase
Posted: Wednesday, July 28, 2004

ARTICLES
Investor's Business Daily
Publication Date: July 28, 2004

You know that the political debate has been poisoned when 85 percent of African-Americans feel President Bush stole the 2000 election. At least that is what a CBS poll released last Friday finds.

Possibly this just reflects the same 85 percent of African-Americans who disapprove of the job that Bush is doing. But if nobody really believes the election was stolen and it is all window dressing, it is hard to explain why the Democrats keep raising the issue at almost every possible opportunity.

Michael Moore is not alone in asserting the election was stolen. On Monday night at the Democratic Convention, both former Vice President Al Gore and former President Bill Clinton raised the election issue that “this time every vote is counted” and “this year, we're going to make sure they're all counted.”

Before both the NAACP and the Urban League during July, Senator John Kerry said that in 2000 there were “a million disenfranchised African Americans” and that it was the “most tainted election in history.”

Jesse Jackson recently claimed that “in the year 2000, the loser won and the winner lost” and that “our birthright was stolen.”

The continued charges of Bush stealing the election from Gore are remarkable considering that exhaustive studies by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and newspaper organizations have found little, if any evidence voter harassment, intimidation and disenfranchisement occurred in Florida.

Probes Come Up Empty

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights began an investigation in January 2001 following the public outcry after the election. Although Democrats appointed 6 of the 8 commissioners and the hearings were often hostile toward Republicans, the Commission could not find evidence that a single person was intimidated, harassed, or prevented from voting by Florida law enforcement.

The Commission could not find evidence of systematic disenfranchisement of African-American voters, and concluded that state officials were not at fault for widespread voter disenfranchisement.

A favorite charge is that Republicans threw African-Americans off the voter rolls to take votes away from Democrats.

Florida bans felons from voting, unless they had been granted clemency. Before the 2000 vote, the state hired Database Technologies to purge rolls of felons and dead people. Unfortunately, some non-felons were erroneously removed from the rolls--but the errors didn’t target minorities.

The liberal-leaning Palm Beach Post found that “a review of state records, internal e-mails of [Database Technologies] employees and testimony before the Civil Rights Commission and an elections task force showed no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted.”

In fact, while more African-Americans were removed from the voter roles simply because most felons in Florida are black, whites were twice as likely to be erroneously placed on the list as African-Americans were.

The evidence does not support the charges that there was a nefarious plot to deny African-American voters their right to vote.

In fact, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reports that in 24 of the 25 counties with the highest percentage of non-voted ballots for president, the county supervisor was a Democrat. In the remaining county, the supervisor was an independent.

Spoiled Ballots

Additionally, the overall rate of spoiled ballots was 14 percent higher when the county election supervisor was a Democrat, and 31 percent higher when the supervisor was an African American Democrat. The famed butterfly ballots of Palm Beach County were creations of Democrats.

Thus, if these nonvoted ballots are viewed as disenfranchisement, not simply that some voters didn’t intend to vote in a particular race, then the ire of Democrats should be directed toward Democrats in Florida.

Recent research published by one of the current authors in the Journal of Legal Studies shows that if any African-Americans in Florida had an unusually high rate of spoiled ballots it was African-American Republicans, not African-American Democrats.

By income, it was voters with family income over $500,000, hardly a group that one could attribute their nonvoted ballots to mistakes on their part.

To start the Democratic convention, newspaper headlines blared: “Democratic Convention aims to stay positive.”

Of course, there were the obligatory charges from speakers such as Jimmy Carter that President Bush had lied about the Iraq war.

But Bill Clinton is the master at simultaneously claiming that Democrats have sought to unite Americans, while Republicans “need a divided America,” and lacing his speech with issues that divide Americans: the supposedly stolen election or rich versus poor being just two.

Senator Kerry and the Democratic Party elites will undoubtedly continue to trumpet their message of the 2000 election as “stolen” and “tainted” because it resonates with their base. But at what costs are these short-term electoral gains achieved? How harmful is it to race relations that African-Americans believe that others are conspiring to keep their votes from being counted?

John R. Lott Jr. is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and was the statistical expert for the Republican minority on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on Florida. Brian Blase is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article seems to have details your "Investors Daily" (Gee, I wonder who THEY want to win) seemed to gloss over. It also directly contradicts the main point of the articel you posted, that race was unknowable and therefore not a factor:


Winning the Election: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida

Boston Globe

Tuesday, April 22, 2003
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version


Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida
by Liam Scheff



When future historians want to know what happened to America in 2000, they’ll read Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The book follows the paper trail of perjury, deception and incompetence left by the Bush family, and the billionaires who fund them, as they trample through the world – from mining disaster cover-ups to the California energy scandal to the pre-9/11 intelligence black-out that let a handful of Saudi terrorists slip past the NSA, FBI and CIA.

The book also uncovers inside documents on the IMF and World Bank, Pat Robertson‘s unholy money-schemes, and the co-opted US media that won‘t report what the rest of the world gets on the front page.

The book opens with the crime that keeps on stealing – the 2000 presidential election. George Bush lost the popular election by 500,000 votes, but won the electoral vote by winning hotly contested Florida, the state that tipped the scales, and the state where his brother Jeb is governor. His tiny 500-vote win there was accompanied by a torrent of hanging chads and unhappy voters, who claimed their votes were stolen. Last week Palast came to Boston to promote the new edition of The Best Democracy… I asked him exactly what he uncovered.

What really happened in Florida?

Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered voters. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get to vote.

If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you‘re “scrubbed” from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it’s an uncivilized vestige of the Deep South.


My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime – except for being African American. We didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race.

When I questioned Harris’ office about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, “Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.”

But these people weren’t felons, so why were they scrubbed?

The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely vote as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony “scrub” lists and replaced them with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job. [DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive work for the FBI.]


There are a lot of Joe Smiths in the Florida phonebook. DBT was hired to verify which Joe Smith was a felon and which was not. They were supposed to use their extensive databases to check credit cards, bank information, addresses and phone numbers, in addition to names, ages, and social security numbers. But they didn’t. They didn’t use one of their 1,200 databases to verify personal information, nor did they make a single phone call to verify the identity of scrubbed names.

So where did DBT get their data?

From the Internet. They went to 11 other states’ Internet sites and took names off dirt-cheap. They scrubbed Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off Florida voter John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels, or even J.R. Michaelson. DBT matched for race and gender, but names only had to be similar to a certain degree. Names could be reversed, and suffixes (Jr., Sr.) were ignored, but aliases were included. So the felon John “Buddy” Michaels could knock non-felon Michael Johns or Bud Johnson Jr. off the voter rolls. This happened again and again.


Although DBT didn’t get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, they were very careful to match for race. A black felon named Mr. Green would only knock off a black Mr. Green, but not a single white Mr. Green. That’s how DBT earned its $2.3 million.

Why didn’t DBT use their own databases?

They didn’t, because the state told them not to. Choicepoint vice-president James Lee was grilled by a Congressional committee, headed by Cynthia McKinney, and he admitted everything, but said DBT was following state directives. Florida state officials told DBT to knock off voters by incorrectly matching them with felons.

Congresswoman McKinney led this commission to her own peril. Choicepoint is in her Atlanta district. She was destroyed in the last election by fabricated quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign.

Is this the only way votes were stolen?

No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. Katherine Harris’ office illegally scrubbed people who’d served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and Jeb Bush’s office illegally barred these people from registering to vote at all.

The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black rural counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state, thousands of votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots which are read by an optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark were considered “spoiled“ and not counted. The buttons used to fill out the ballots were set up – with approval from Bush and Harris – to make votes appear unclear to the machine. One in eight ballots in Gadsden was voided by the state.


The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white. There only one in 100 votes was “spoiled.” What made the difference? In Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the black counties, the votes were trucked off immediately. There were no machines on site. Voters weren’t told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly weren’t permitted to re-vote.

When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they weren’t well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadn‘t. He didn’t even bother to ask how the machines were set up. In Britain, this story ran 3 weeks after the election, when Gore was still in race. It was in the papers and on TV. In the US, it was seven months before the Washington Post ran it, and then it was only a partial version. After the election, Gadsden County replaced its voting commissioner. In 2002 they only lost one in 500 votes. So you can say blacks in Gadsden got smarter in one way – they elected a black elections chief.

What happened to Choicepoint?

Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are being rolled out across the country.

It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting