i thought palast's account of the elections process was pretty good. i think its obvious where his sympathies are (with gore). but, i don't think that takes much away from the story.
after reading through it, its pretty clear that at least 2 or 3 of the key people involved intended to purge democrats from the voter rolls. palast talked about the company that was hired to find felons in the voter lists and remove them. the company (called "database technologies") was paid $4 million to do this. palast was given "secret" memos showing the criteria the company was supposed to use, that d.t. was told not to follow up with any of the individuals who were purged - even though that was a stipulation of the $4 million contract, and that d.t. was asked to match 90% of names (and then only 80%) and not to cross check identities in databases the company was originally contracted to search. Leon County FL did a study of the list of felons it was given by the state of florida, and found that the list was 95% inaccurate (the list was from the state of florida and contained 694 names). a lot of this was already reported by the bbc.. just not all together like it is in the book, i think.
there's a story in there about the folks that were turned away at the polls.. most of them just don't bother to do anything about it. if any of them are actually felons, they probably don't know that they do have the right to vote anyway. the state's been telling them that if they've ever gotten a felony conviction, that they don't ever get to vote again. even though the state courts have said that's bullshit. no one has called the florida government's bluff. just think, jeb bush wants to run for president.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: on the election...
Date: 2003-01-18 05:39 pm (UTC)after reading through it, its pretty clear that at least 2 or 3 of the key people involved intended to purge democrats from the voter rolls. palast talked about the company that was hired to find felons in the voter lists and remove them. the company (called "database technologies") was paid $4 million to do this. palast was given "secret" memos showing the criteria the company was supposed to use, that d.t. was told not to follow up with any of the individuals who were purged - even though that was a stipulation of the $4 million contract, and that d.t. was asked to match 90% of names (and then only 80%) and not to cross check identities in databases the company was originally contracted to search. Leon County FL did a study of the list of felons it was given by the state of florida, and found that the list was 95% inaccurate (the list was from the state of florida and contained 694 names). a lot of this was already reported by the bbc.. just not all together like it is in the book, i think.
there's a story in there about the folks that were turned away at the polls.. most of them just don't bother to do anything about it. if any of them are actually felons, they probably don't know that they do have the right to vote anyway. the state's been telling them that if they've ever gotten a felony conviction, that they don't ever get to vote again. even though the state courts have said that's bullshit. no one has called the florida government's bluff. just think, jeb bush wants to run for president.
its pretty revolting, overall.