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Election 2000 continues

Published by marco on

The Great Florida Ex-Con Game… by Gregory Palast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine, reopens the supposedly settled and recounted case of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. With all of the talk of President Bush’s financial history and his run-ins with the SEC, which he deems “old news” (Bush: It’s Old News… in the New York Newsday), perhaps this examination of some of the tactics used in Florida will also be consigned to history. There are some interesting bits in here, though, that lend credence to those writers that keep calling Bush, ‘the unelected President’.

It seems that the state of Florida wasn’t too happy with the company that took care of auditing the voter rolls in order to remove criminals, who are not allowed to vote by state law.

“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.”

The new company is paid about 750 times as much as the old one and did a bang up job. It found “57,700 ex-felons” to remove from the voter rolls. Unfortunately, many of these people were removed without statistical proof that the person registered to vote was actually a felon. They were removed if their “name, gender, birthdate and race matched − or nearly matched − one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States”. This necessarily would create a lot of false positives, mostly with blacks. In fact:

“African-Americans − who account for 13 percent of Florida’s electorate and 46 percent of U.S. felony convictions − were four times as likely as whites to be incorrectly singled out under the state’s methodology.”

False positives are only part of the problem, with “325 names on the list with conviction dates in the future” and “one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts”. That’s a lot of false positives, and, it seems, almost deliberately so, no?