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DigitalDuality said:
Bush himself has become more left on certain issues and strayed from party lines.. especially with his actions concerning illegal immigrants (which will buy a signifigant amount of the hispanic vote, but also lose a few (but negligbile amount of bigots).

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Clean said:
whoever wins, the people of america and the world will lose.

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I have an irking feeling Bush will win. And i'm not a conspiracy nut about it (ala Annapurna).

I do think there will be a media scandal (and possibly a real one) concerning voting screw ups, and especially with voting machines..and i don't think Dems will puss out with this fight this time.

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so im a conspiracy nut because i used the same conspiracy theory (the diebold effect) that your using above ...

but if you are a conspiracy nut..then the diebold conspiracy only becomes significant when kerry actually has a real shot at winning..which he doesnt have at the moment...if your not a conspiracy nut..then the impending bush win is strictly the result of ideological preference towards bush.. or in laymans' terms..most americans are just plain bigots ...

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mushmaster said:
...the impending bush win is strictly the result of ideological preference towards bush.. or in laymans' terms..most americans are bigots



become a writer. please.

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Isn't Badnarik on more ballots than Nader?

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Haven't Libertarians recieved more ballot spots in Presidential races for the last 10-20 years.

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Why the hell aren't they given media attention?

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Evolving said:

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DigitalDuality said:
Bush himself has become more left on certain issues and strayed from party lines.. especially with his actions concerning illegal immigrants (which will buy a signifigant amount of the hispanic vote, but also lose a few (but negligbile amount of bigots).

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Interesting... Are you under the impression that unfettered immigration is only opposed by bigots? Are you of the opinion that if a person thinks people should not be rewarded for breaking the law that he is a bigot? Is it your contention that those who are worried about the increasing fiscal burden of hospital emergency rooms being used to treat everyday medical conditions of uninsured illegal aliens and those burdens being passed on in the form of higher insurance premiums are somehow bigots? Is it your insinuation that those who are concerned about the whole host of other services consumed by illegal immigrants that are placing a financial burden on municipalities are bigots because of their concern? Are those who are wary of terrorists coming across the borders among the flood of illegal immigrants bigots because of their recognition of the possibility? If so, those are very ignorant assumptions, not born out by a careful examination of the issue and the various reasons people hold the opinions that they do.

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DigitalDuality said:
I'm glad to see you wasted your time with a rant merely b/c you didn't read what i said.

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But i don't think the issue (and Bush's current actions over it) are really going to lose him any votes, except for hardcore bigots.

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Extremists (which could include bigots, but not limited to in this case) over any issue will react in such a fashion.

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...that a portion of the group which opposes it.. are bigots.

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There's a good portion of people who don't agree with bush's actions over the issue, but this is not enough for him to lose their vote, especially with the religious in this country.

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mushmaster said:
i dont know why you find it so amusing..but you would have to be a bigot to vote for bush...

or you could just be voting for the "lesser of two evils".

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DigitalDuality said:
Well if we ever really found out who won, maybe people wouldn't bitch.

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AhronZombi said:
a win for kerry is more of a win for bush than anything. his win will be a false victory for actavists and protesters that have been fooled Bush is the only bad guy. kerrys win willjust let him have a easyer time taking away the same rights his skull and bones brother was takeing.

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REAL AMERICANS DONT VOTE

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luvdemshrooms said:
Yup. While you like complaining about Florida, what about areas where 100% of the vote went to Gore? What about his attempt to disallow military votes on technicalities? What about uncounted votes in democratic strongholds? What about the 46,000 voters from Florida that are registered in both NY and Florida? How about the dead who voted? What about the judges who allowed polling places to remain open past the time set in law?

Why not whine about all that as well? Could it be because your guy lost?

Gore lost. Get over it.

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luvdemshrooms said:
Sorry to all. As I was searching I recalled it was HRC who received 100% in a precinct in (I believe) NYC. As I am unable to find percentages by precinct I'll be unable to say which one.

I was wrong. I withdraw my statement.

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luvdemshrooms said:
Yup. While you like complaining about Florida, what about areas where 100% of the vote went to Gore? What about his attempt to disallow military votes on technicalities? What about uncounted votes in democratic strongholds? What about the 46,000 voters from Florida that are registered in both NY and Florida? How about the dead who voted? What about the judges who allowed polling places to remain open past the time set in law?

Why not whine about all that as well? Could it be because your guy lost?

Gore lost. Get over it.

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Why is a soldier protected from "technicalities" and i am not? Is there some subsection to a rule around there claiming they're exemption from it. If you can't vote on time then don't vote.

And no it isn't b/c my guy lost. Frankly i hate Gore. But with hindsight vision, he might have been the better option. There is always going to be individual voting scams.

Kinda how Republicans will vote for certain Dems in primaries, and vice versa. There needs to be a crack down on that, I agree.

But you're avoiding heavily documented data about blacks being ticketed for loitering while in voting lines, blacks who weren't even felons being not allowed to vote, an old jim-crow law banning ex-felons from voting who already served their time being handled in the most sloppy way imaginable by a privatized company (who's board members were all prominent GOP vets), while the head of elections in FL.. just so happened to be the head of the Bush campaign in Florida.

Why were 175,000 votes not re-counted? Why weren't ALL the machines re-checked like they were supposed to be. Why are we NOW moving to computerized voting with no paper trail, and audits becoming an impossibility due to company's claiming them as they're property? Why is a GOP dominated government giving a tax incentive for states to use these voting machines with no paper trail?

Hispanic votes were already "mistakenly blocked" with these machines in Florida. Choicepoint/DBT admitted there was a high false positive list in their database.. yet the gov't and DBT/Choicepoint kept this list long enough (2 more years) in order to get Katherine Harris into the House of Rep. and to get Jeb Bush re-elected.

From the votes that were counted, yes Gore lost the popular vote. But 100s of thousands were not counted and/or illegally told they couldn't vote.

But the illegal disenfrachisement of black votes through innaccurate "felon reform" and the fact that the Republicans took it to court (Federal court mind you, not state court.. gee wonder why) to keep the rest of 175,000 votes from being counted.. the answer is "we still don't know who won". But after 55,000 people being kept from voting, many not felons.. just have matching last names.. or matching birthdays.. how can you claim you know? And if this innaccurate and unjust voter reform was just a mistake.. why did they keep it for 2 more years when the FL Governor election came about?


The issue is NOT just the fact that they purged felon voters.
It is that Harris, Sandra Mortham, (both prot?g?es of Governor Jeb Bush) and their crew hired DBT Online (now owned by Choicepoint)and paid them $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service, to create these Felon 'black lists' then send those lists to each county in FL.
Now there shouldn't be a problem if the lists were somewhat accurate...but here take a look at 20 names from the actual DBT list.

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Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. In Harris?s elections office files, next to DBT's sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: 'DON'T NEED.'



Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida?s elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race. Harper's found 325 names on the list with conviction dates in the future, a fact that did not escape Department of Elections workers, who, in June 2000 emails headed, "Future Conviction Dates," termed the discovery, "bad news." Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that ?blanks would be preferable in these cases." (Harper's counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts. Some counties defied Harris' directives; Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge list after she found her own name on it.



Rev. Willie Dixon (3), seventy, was guilty of a crime in his youth; but one phone call would have told the state that it had already pardoned Dixon and restored his right to vote. On behalf of Dixon and other excluded voters, the NAACP in January 2001 sued Florida and Harris, after finding that African-Americans?who account for 13 percent of Florida's electorate and 46 percent of U.S. felony convictions ?were four times as likely as whites to be incorrectly singled out under the state's methodology. After the election, Harris and her elections chief Clay Roberts, testified under oath that verifying the lists was solely the work of county supervisors. But the Florida-DBT contract (marked "Secret" and "Confidential") holds DBT responsible for 'manual verification using telephone calls.' in fact, with the state's blessing, DBT did not call a single felon. When I asked Roberts about the contract during an interview for BBC television, Roberts ripped off his microphone, ran into his office, locked the door, and called in state troopers to remove us.



Johnny Jackson Jr. (4), thirty-two, has never been to Texas, and his mother swears he never had the middle name 'Fitzgerald.' Neither is there evidence that John Fitzgerald Jackson, felon of Texas, has ever left the Lone Star State. But even if they were the same man, removing him from Florida's voter rolls is an unconstitutional act. Texas is among the thirty five states where ex-felons are permitted to vote, and the "full faith and credit" clause of the U.S. Constitution forbids states to revoke any civil rights that a citizen has been granted by another state; in fact, the Florida Supreme Court had twice ordered the state not to do so, just nine months before the voter purge. Nevertheless, at least 2,873 voters were wrongly removed, a purge authorized by a September 18, 2000 letter to counties from Governor Bush's clemency office. On February 23, 2001, days after the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights began investigating the matters, Bush's office issued a new letter allowing these persons to vote; no copies of the earlier letter could be found in the clemency office or on its computers.



Wallace McDonald (5), sixty-four, lost his right to vote in 2000, though his sole run-in with the law was a misdemeanor in 1959. (He fell asleep on a bus-stop bench.) Of the "matches' on these lists, the civil-rights commission estimated that at least 14 percent - or 8,000 voters, nearly 15 times Bush's official margin of victory - were false. DBT claims it warned officials "a significant number of people who were not a felon would be included on the list"; but the state, the company now says, "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified." Last May, Florida's legislature barred Harris from using outside firms to build the purge list and ordered her to seek guidance from county elections officials. In defiance, Harris has rebuffed the counties and hired another firm, just in time for Jeb Bush's reelection fight this fall.
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A99749-2001May30

Botched Name Purge Denied Some the Right to Vote

By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 31, 2001; Page A01

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TAMPA -- Kelvin King was turned away from the polls here in November when records showed that he was ineligible to vote as a convicted felon. County election officials learned days later that King's civil rights had been restored eight months earlier.

Sandylynn Williams had voted in every election since she was 18. But this time, election officials confused her with her sister -- a felon who had once used Williams's name -- and refused to let her vote.

"They sent me a letter of apology, and I just laughed," recalled Williams, 34, who said she had planned to vote for Democratic nominee Al Gore. "I was cheated out of voting."

The Tampa residents were among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-felons in Florida who civil rights lawyers contend were wrongly prevented from voting in the Nov. 7 election after state election officials and a private contractor bungled an attempt to cleanse felons from voter rolls.

The effort was so riddled with errors that a more precise tally will probably never be possible. But it is clear that at least 2,000 felons whose voting rights had been automatically restored in other states were kept off the rolls and, in many cases, denied the right to vote.

At the same time, some felons who should not have been allowed to vote slipped through and cast ballots.

Although the troubles with Florida's election procedures have been widely reported, the full breadth of the flaws in the state's system has emerged only over time. Florida's many problems, according to state and national inquiries and a review by The Washington Post, include unreliable voting machines, improper counting of absentee ballots and arbitrary and conflicting decisions by county election officials, to name a few.

Still underway is an examination of approximately 170,000 Florida ballots rejected by counting machines in November. The project, conducted by a consortium of news organizations that includes The Post, is designed to learn how so many potential votes went uncounted.

Six months removed from the charged post-election recounts, it is also clear, in the words of a state task force that reviewed the election, that many of the difficulties were "most serious in precincts with large numbers of elderly, low-income, immigrant, minority or inexperienced voters."

The impact of the botched felon purge fell disproportionately on black Floridians and, by extension, on the Democratic Party, which won the votes of 9 out of every 10 African American voters, according to exit polls.

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http://dir.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/index.html

Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program

Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a firm to vet the rolls for felons, but that may have wrongly kept thousands, particularly blacks, from casting ballots.

Excerpt:

December 04, 2000 | If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 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 that included purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.

Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters. But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the list -- the state of Texas.

Florida officials moved to put those falsely accused by Texas back on voter rolls before the election. Nevertheless, the large number of errors uncovered in individual counties suggests that thousands of eligible voters may have been turned away at the polls.

Florida is the only state that pays a private company that promises to "cleanse" voter rolls.The state signed in 1998 a $4 million contract with DBT Online, since merged into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta. The creation of the scrub list, called the central voter file, was mandated by a 1998 state voter fraud law, which followed a tumultuous year that saw Miami's mayor removed after voter fraud in the election, with dead people discovered to have cast ballots. The voter fraud law required all 67 counties to purge voter registries of duplicate registrations, deceased voters and felons, many of whom, but not all, are barred from voting in Florida.

In the process, however, the list invariably targets a minority population in Florida, where 31 percent of all black men cannot vote because of a ban on felons. In compiling a list by looking at felons from other states, Florida could, in the process, single out citizens who committed felons in other states but, after serving their time or successfully petitioning the courts, had their voting rights returned to them. According to Florida law, felons can vote once their voting rights have been reinstated.

And if this unfairly singled out minorities, it unfairly handicapped Gore: In Florida, 93 percent of African-Americans voted for the vice president.

In the 10 counties contacted by Salon, use of the central voter file seemed to vary wildly. Some found the list too unreliable and didn't use it at all. But most counties appear to have used the file as a resource to purge names from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or no -- effort at all to alert the "purged" voters. Counties that did their best to vet the file discovered a high level of errors, with as many as 15 percent of names incorrectly identified as felons.

News coverage has focused on some maverick Florida counties that decided not to use the central voter file, essentially breaking the law and possibly letting some ineligible felons vote. On Friday, the Miami Herald reported that after researching voter records in 12 Florida counties -- but primarily in Palm Beach and Duval counties, which didn't use the file -- it found that more than 445 felons had apparently cast ballots in the presidential election.

But Palm Beach and Duval weren't the only counties to dump the list after questioning its accuracy. Madison County's elections supervisor, Linda Howell, had a peculiarly personal reason for distrusting the central voter file: She had received a letter saying that since she had committed a felony, she would not be allowed to vote.

Howell, who said she has never committed a felony, said the letter she received in March shook her faith in the process. "It really is a mess," she said.

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In every national American election since Reconstruction, every election since the Voting Rights Act was passed, voters ? particularly African American voters and other minorities ? have faced calculated and determined efforts at intimidation and suppression. The bloody days of violence and retribution following the Civil War and Reconstruction are gone. The poll taxes, literacy tests and physical violence of the Jim Crow era have disappeared. Today, more subtle, cynical and creative tactics have taken their place.

Here are just a few recent examples:

- In 2004 in Texas, students at a majority black college were challenged by a local district attorney?s absurd claim that they were not eligible to vote in the county where the school was located. It happened in Waller County ? the same county where 26 years earlier, a federal court order was required to prevent the local registrar from discriminating against the students
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- In 2003 in Philadelphia, voters in African American areas were systematically challenged by men carrying clipboards, driving a fleet of some 300 sedans with magnetic signs designed to look like law enforcement insignia.

- In 2002 in Louisiana, flyers were distributed in African American communities telling voters they could go to the polls on Tuesday, December 10th ? two days after a special Senate election was held.

- In 2000 in Florida, thousands of voters whose names mistakenly appeared on a flawed list of felons were purged from the state?s voter rolls. Despite the ensuing outcry and litigation, the state has not yet restored the rights of many of those voters --and in fact has begun a new purge of an additional 40,000 names for the 2004 election.

- In 1998 in North Carolina, GOP officials openly planned to videotape voters in heavily Democratic districts in a partisan attempt to avoid alleged ?voter fraud,? until the Justice Department stepped in to warn that taping minority voters at or near the polls would violate federal election laws.

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we can get rid of the government w/o it being bloody

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