Unprecedented – The 2000 Presidential Election Fraud
This weekend I watched a documentary which really made me sick. I am one of those people who firmly believe that the election of George W. Bush was the worst thing to happen to the United States since the depression. This documentary I watched made me realize just how close the election was, and the sinister forces which allowed Bush to prevail in Florida.
Here is the documentary, I highly reccomend it:
I’ll briefly outline what happened. Florida has a very old law which states that convicted felons can not vote, but hasn’t cleaned up its voter registry in a long time. Jeb Bush, the governor at the time decided that the upcoming election was the best time. So he handed over a list of convicted felons and registered voters to a data company, and asked them to remove any names that appeared as both convicts and voters. This was legal. What wasn’t legal is that the company was intentionally asked to be as lenient as possible in matching names. For instance a Patrick Smith would be removed from the voter list if a Pat Smith was a convict. Sometimes a matching first initial was enough. What ended up happening was a huge amount of unwarranted disenfranchisement. Because most of the Flordia convicts were ethnic minorities, anyone with a similar enough name was removed from the voter list. Estimates of 15% of the removals were people who were completely innocent. And because minorities tend to vote Democrat, this meant a huge number of registered Democrat voters were turned away at the polls!
The media, (and by that I mean Republican Rupert Murdoch) focused entirely on the faulty ballot sheets as the main cause of controversy when in fact the manipulation of the voter list was the real problem.
We often criticise other countries for not having transparent, free and fair elections. But with this and the Robocall scandal, who are we to judge. Can you imagine the world today if 534 of the tens of thousands of disenfranchised voters had been able to vote for Gore?