WILL YOUR VOTE COUNT?

[monroncrief]

Feels like beatin' a dead horse, but there are still many who are unaware of this issue...

Can YOU Vote?

In 2002, Congress passed the "Help America Vote Act" which mandates that EVERY STATE purge, centralize, and computerize their voter rolls prior to the 2004 election. This is the same methodology the state of Florida used to remove 94,000 African-American and Hispanic voters from voter registries before the Presidential election of 2000 WITH A 90%+ ERROR RATE. That's right, LESS THAN 10% of these voters were actually ineligible! A suspiciously high percentage of these voters were registered Democrats and were scrubbed by a company called Choicepoint at a cost 1,000 times that of the previous vendor.

HAVA also enacts new identification rules at polling places, effectively rolls back the Motor Voter Act, and rewards states for adopting touch-screen voting machines. Even though CALIFORNIA has recently BANNED these machines and is considering legal action against the manufacturer for misrepresentation and fraud, FLORIDA and OHIO have adopted these no-paper-trail-can't-do-a-recount-easy-to-hack Diebold machines statewide. I'm sure the fact that the owner of Ohio-based Diebold has promised his State's votes to Bush in a widely circulated letter and the fact that George's brother is Florida's Governor are purely coincidental. If you are not aware of this debacle, go to: http://www.blackboxvoting.org

Bottom line: In 2000, Al Gore would have picked up approximately 80 THOUSAND more votes had this illegal purge NOT taken place ( http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=216&row=1 ) and though Katherine Harris denied any responsibility for these purges (big surprise), she has never denied that it did happen. Oddly enough, most of these voter's rights still have not been restored and certainly weren't before Jeb's hotly contested win in '02. The link above is from the incredible investigative reporter who originally broke news of this scandal BEFORE the elections and was promptly ignored by the media. Incidentally, it is his work on which a majority of Michael Moore's new film is based.

With all of these other issues being thrown around, the most vital fact in '04-that MILLIONS of legal voters could be purged at the whim of our secretaries of state- an elected, and therefore partisan, official- is being overlooked. Their temptation to purge voters of the opposition party will be enormous and African-Americans, whose vote traditionally has centered in one party (guess whose?!), are an easy and obvious target, as they were before.

Democracy itself was stolen in '00 and between these purges and black box voting, the thieves well may keep enjoying their spoils…don't wait until you get to the polling precinct to discover that you, too, have been PURGED!

P.S- There is a petition to John Ashcroft from Greg Palast and MLK III (President, Southern Christian Leadership Conference) asking that these violations be addressed. So far, there are 76,289 signatures toward a goal of 100,000. You can sign it at:

http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/petition.cfm?itemid=14993

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