Old news, but it is interesting to look back on 4 years ago as we enter another election year.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/2/17/222442.shtml

Inquiry Into New Claims of Poll Abuses in Florida
(Nothing became of this inquiry...)

NewsMax.com Wires
Sunday, Feb. 18, 2001

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission was yesterday investigating allegations by the BBC's "Newsnight" that thousands of mainly black voters in Florida were disenfranchised in the November election because of wholesale errors by a private data services company.

Information supplied by the company, Database Technologies (DBT), led to tens of thousands of Floridians being removed from the electoral rolls on the grounds that they had felonies on their records.

However, a Guardian investigation in December confirmed by "Newsnight" found that the list was riddled with mistakes that led to thousands of voters, a disproportionate number of them black, being wrongly disenfranchised.

The scale of the errors, and their skewed effect on black, overwhelmingly Democratic voters, may have cost Al Gore thousands of votes in Florida in an election that George Bush won by just 537 votes. Moreover the Florida state government, where President Bush's brother Jeb is governor, did nothing to correct the errors and may have encouraged them.

Under DBT's contract, seen by "Newsnight," the company was obliged to check its data by "manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling." DBT was paid $4.3 million for its purge of the voters' rolls, but company officials confirmed that they did not call voters they had included on their list to check if they had identified the right person.

James Lee, a vice president of ChoicePoint, which bought DBT last May, said: "Florida law prevents names from being removed from the voting roll unless the information is confirmed by local officials, not us." But he told "Newsnight" that the Florida state government made it clear that it "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon."



http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1

THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME How the "felon" voter-purge was itself felonious
Harper's Magazine
Friday, March 1, 2002
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by Greg Palast

In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.

[more]

http://www.lumpen.com/coup2k/framer.html?pg=5

Party Allies Wrongly Purged 'Felon' Voters

Since the Reconstruction, any Florida resident with a felony conviction is stripped of the right to vote, regardless of where the conviction occurred. After serving their sentences, felons can only be re-enfranchised after filling out mountains of paperwork and then winning the approval of the governor and two state representatives.

In June, between 8,000 and 12,000 Florida voters were wrongly purged from the voting rolls as felons. Many of those disenfranchised had never even been arrested; one was even a sitting judge. Meanwhile, hundreds of genuine felons were not purged and according to post-election analysis by the press were able to illegally cast votes, thus further muddying the election results.  ²⁵  

DBT Inc. got bogus data from the Texas gov't.

The Florida State Government uses an outside contractor to vet their voter rolls; it is the only state to do so. In 1998, the $4 million contract was awarded to a Boca Raton company called Database Technologies (DBT). Earlier this year, DBT was acquired by an Atlanta-area company called ChoicePoint Inc. According to SEC documents, ChoicePoint's acquisition of DBT was completed on May 15, just one month before the grossly inaccurate "purge lists" were turned over to Florida election officials.  ²⁶  

Curiously, it turned out ChoicePoint had obtained this false list of "felons" from the state of Texas.  ²⁷   Yes, Texas. According to the company, a list of Texans convicted of misdemeanors had "somehow" been added to the Florida lists as felons. Some effort was made to contact those who had been wrongly purged, but most did not find out until they had arrived at their polling place only to be refused ballots.

Curiouser and curiouser, it turns out that ChoicePoint is closely tied to the Republican Party, and that its top executives and board members include many high-dollar donors. Among them is billionaire Ken Langone, who served as Rudolph Giuliani's fund-raising chairman in his aborted Senate run against Hillary Clinton. When Guilani dropped out of the race, Langone donated some $250,000 to support his replacement, Rick Lazio. ²⁸   According to Federal Election Committee records, between 1997 and 1999 Langone donated at least $54,000 to Republican committees in campaigns. According to the most recent records available at press time, Langone gave another $29,000 or so within the last year, using multiple addresses and jobs to skirt federal limits. Ken's wife Elaine, who lists "homemaker" as her profession, gave another $8,000 to the Republicans just in the last year.  ²⁹   Not bad for a mere homemaker.

DBT's parent company is packed with Repub. money men.

Another Giuliani politico at ChoicePoint is former NY Police Commissioner Howard Safir. ChoicePoint's lobbyist, former congressman Vin Weber, has donated over $48,000 to the Republicans in the last three years.  ³⁰   Company founder Rick Rozar himself donated $100,000 to the party just before his death in 1998.  ³¹   Other ChoicePoint employees and executives, or at least those who could be identified in the FEC database, have donated an additional $30,000, and probably a good deal more.

(As this edition goes to press, the NAACP, ACLU and several other civil rights groups announced they have filed a federal lawsuit naming DBT and a number of Florida government and election officials defendants.  ³²  )