Bush owes Florida “victory” to illegally disenfranchised felons. Alterman

[dArKeR]

Bush owes Florida “victory” to illegally disenfranchised felons.  Democrats fail to make an issue of this practice for fear of … WHAT?  “In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons.  …Critics say that President Bush would have lost in 2000 if disenfranchised felons had been allowed to vote.”  More here and here.

Chalabi, Black, and Sharon.  Are all neocon heroes crooks?

You thought the administration’s sources on bioweapons were thin?  You didn’t know the half of it.  More here. 

And by the way, this is par for the course for the heroic Colin Powell. 

And oh yeah, while they’re starting wars about phony threats, they’re not bothering to protect us from the real ones, something even Judith Miller can’t figure out how to spin for them.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/

[whistle]

1. Not just illegally disenfranchised felons...

...but Katherine Harris made sure that people with the same last names as suspected felons got the ax also. It seems that 100,000 or more people who were legally registered to vote were barred from voting by the Harris purges. Her techniques have been passed along to dozens of republican partisan state secretaries of states, especially in critical states around the country. This worked so well in Florida in 2000, that the RNC plans to use it again.:wtf:

[MonicaR]

2. Those disenfranchised voters

Were disproportionately African-American

[For PaisAn]

4. Of course they were because

9 out of 10 Blacks supported Al Gore. The Republicans are vile disgusting creatures.

[Vitruvius]

5. If you're White, nobody asks if you're a felon -- and you get to vote.

The question simply doesn't come up -- period.

If you're black, and have the same last name as a felon, you're OUT!

Democracy, Rethugnican style.

P.S: One felony conviction can purge 10 Black voters with similar last names & etc -- which is the point of the whole exercise. If the Rethugs were serious about purging felons and ONLY felons, the rule would be one felon, one purge -- period. One White felon, one purge (instead of none); one Black felon, one purge (instead of 10).

[For PaisAn]

3. Alterman brings up important concerns but

he melds 2 seperate problems in this article.

1) “In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons."

-This is about those voters who were NOT felons/ex-felons but were fraudulently removed from the voter rolls by DBT.


2)"Critics say that President Bush would have lost in 2000 if disenfranchised felons had been allowed to vote.”

-This is about Florida's law that felons lose the right to vote forever unless they receive "executive grace" from Jeb-yeah right.

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=21662

...snip
Florida, for instance, treats the matter as one of "executive grace." The governor and three members of his cabinet sit as the Executive Clemency Board, which can refuse the request without citing any reason at all — that is if they are lucky enough to make it past the state's parole commission’s review.
...snip

The first issue was unlawful, the second issue should be.

I believe Florida did the illegal and fraudulent voter "purging" in the 2002 elections and will do them again in 2004.