More scary stuff, and all totally disgusting.

WorkingForChange-The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Part III

On December 4, 2000, I wrote, “Florida’s Ethnic Cleansing of the Voter Rolls,” printed in Salon.com. It began:
If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chads, he might want to look at a “scrub list” of 57,700 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list of purported “felons” provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.
How did we know the “felons” were innocent? We asked a county elections official, Linda Howell, of Madison County, Florida. In March 2000, Harris sent the supervisor a list of criminals — and Ms. Howell’s own name was on it.
“I was very upset,” Howell said. “I know I’m not a felon.” Howell, a white Republican, refused to remove her own name from the voter rolls and threw out the Harris list. In another county, an elections official restored the rights of one “felon” on the list — a local judge.

Of the 3,258 names on the original list, the county concluded that more than 15 percent were in error, and tried to restore as many as possible. If that ratio held statewide, no fewer than 7,000 voters were incorrectly targeted for removal from voting rosters. Gore lost by 537 votes.