American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [79]
Changing the vote electronically was far from the only scam going down in Florida in 2000. Journalist Greg Palast was reporting soon after the election about how Katharine Harris and Jeb Bush set out to do some “ethnic cleansing” on the voter rolls ahead of time. You see, Florida has a state law that convicted felons aren’t allowed to vote. So they hired a private contractor called Database Technologies (DBT), a division of ChoicePoint, whose board was studded with Republican bigwigs, to look for any crooks who were also registered voters. The database eventually listed 57,700 Florida citizens, and local election supervisors were told to purge them.
Except, more than 90 percent of those people never committed any felonies! More than half of them were either black or Hispanic, and likely to have voted for a Democrat. Early in 2001, when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission became the only agency to look into how Florida handled the disputed election, it concluded there had been a possible conspiracy by Katharine Harris and others. Besides denying the so-called “felons” their voting rights, Jeb Bush had ordered state troopers near the polling sites to delay people for hours while they searched their cars. Two photo IDs were required at some precincts, even though Florida law only required one. In certain black precincts, ballot boxes disappeared or ended up found later in strange places, never having been collected.3
This story ran big in the media—but only across the Atlantic in England. Palast tried to get it into the American media in the weeks when the recount was still happening. CBS told him it didn’t seem to hold up. Why? Well, because they’d called Jeb Bush’s office to ask.4 The Washington Post did run a Page One story, but not until June of 2001—even though they’d had the story seven months earlier, when it might have made a difference. 5 Our media should be ashamed of their part in undermining American democracy. You had newsmen like Tim Russert saying, the day after the election, that it was probably time for Gore to “play statesman and concede.”6 Did you ever hear of any media suggesting that Bush call it a day? Not a one!
The dirty tricks just kept on happening. Remember how both sides fought about the counting of absentee ballots from overseas? One Republican operative says there was a long conference call after the election where Bush’s boys talked about having some people near overseas military bases organize a little get-out-the-vote drive. They’d be registered voters, of course, but just happened to have forgotten to cast their ballot on election day. So what if it was a few days later? As of November 13, a total of 446 military absentee ballots had arrived; by the 17th, the number had soared to 3,733. Raise any eyebrows that maybe somebody should’ve been charged with a felony?7
I get a sense of déjà vu when I see what’s happened more recently with the disrupters of the Obama Administration’s Town Hall meetings on health care. There was a manual recount underway in Miami-Dade County when dozens of screaming GOP demonstrators—shipped in from Washington—started banging on doors and a picture window at the election headquarters. Several people got “trampled, punched or kicked.” Gore had already received a net gain of 168 votes when the canvassing board panicked and stopped the recount. Most of the mob ended up receiving nice rewards within the Republican Party.8
So, on December 12, just when a Florida District Court judge was about to order a complete statewide hand recount, the Supreme Court rendered its decision. Justice Anthony Scalia said he thought that to keep on counting would “threaten irreparable harm to the petitioner [Bush] and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legality of his decision.”9 What legality? I have never understood what precedents the Supreme Court used in doing this. You had a branch of federal government stepping in and interfering with what should be completely a states’ rights issue. The feds should have no dog in the fight. I agree with Vince