Republicans Plan Voter Challenges in Florida

An anonymous reader writes "Greg Palast, the journalist who first reported on the initial Florida voter scandal (Warning large PDF), thinks he's found a new threat for this election, reported here at the BBC. He did uncover some interesting shenanigans last time, is this significant, or is he just fishing this time?"

What a sad state of affairs

[Dancin_Santa]

The idea behind voter challenges is that anyone can challenge the legitimacy and eligibility of a voter. This is especially important in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California where there are large numbers of illegal immigrants who may be influenced to illegally vote. This is also a problem because there are even American citizens who are not eligible to vote such as felons.

Unfortunately, this law is also a door to abuse. Indiscriminate use of the challenge procedure is akin to Scientology's use of lawsuits to silence the opposition. It produces a chilling effect and keeps people away from the polls.

However, despite this list being available, the article (neither of them) does not delve deeply into the names nor the reasoning behind them, only going so far as to say that it could possibly be a Republican plot. However, if the names all belong to felons who are not eligible to vote in the first place, such a list is absolutely necessary.

This is a story looking for more research, not more explosives. Unfortunately, most people would rather toss bombs than to do the hard work of finding out what is really going on.

Re:Please...

[Doc Ruby]

Palast is an *investigative reporter*. He finds out about bad stuff, then comes up with the evidence, carefully researched and coherently presented. He used to be a prosecutor before he became a full time journalist, bucking the reverse trend of bad PR writers becoming journalists. Ask yourself whether his facts tell the story, not whether he should be digging up "the other side of the story", which is produced by a Republican spin machine.

"The facts are clearly biased against George Bush." - a la _The Daily Show_

Not at all

[metalhed77]

Well, considering that the republican party in FL has tried a number of shennanigans (remember the felons list recently?) in the hope of preventing dems from getting to the polls it's bloody hard to trust them on this. Especially in an election where bush has all but given up the black vote (he didn't even meet with the NAACP!)

Re:What a sad state of affairs

[BandwidthHog]

Unfortunately, most people would rather toss bombs than to do the hard work of finding out what is really going on.

Check back Nov. 3rd, when we know how the lists were used.

I agree with everything you said, but isn't this one of those situations where, according to prevalent thinking, you have to act preemptively, otherwise it'll be too late to avert whatever's about to happen?

Re:Yeah, yeah ...

[Lord Kano]

Actually it's around 1800 and the intent is to intimidate minority voters.

In short. I call bullshit.

Florida has a large number of minority voters who are Republicans. Miami Cubans alone are a huge block of Republican voters. Jeb Bush is married to a Latina.

If you're trying to argue that people who are voting illegally are more likely to vote Democrat. I won't argue, I don't know for sure, but minority does not equal Democrat. Especially in Florida.

LK

Re:Please...

[cheezedawg]

You should try reading Palast's _The Best Democracy Money Can Buy_. He dissected that "felon list", and documents how something like 90+% of its names were wrongly listed. And how the Florida election board, run by Republican Katherine Harris (cochair of Bush's Florida campaign, and Secretary of State to Bush's brother, Governor Jeb), disqualified voters with any similarity to the listed names, including crossing gender lines, matching only initials, etc. The list was so bad that several counties refused to use it, but not enough.

And yet, interestingly enough, when the USCCR [usccr.gov] held hearings, they were unable to find a single person that would testify that they were actually incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list.

Yes, the felon list had mistakes (nowhere near 90%, though). But the law was designed for that! The county election supervisors were responsible to verify the names as actual felons before any action was taken. If somebody was disenfranchised, the blame lies solely on the Election Supervisor of the county that he/she lives in.

Re:Yeah, yeah ...

[MillionthMonkey]

Oh spare us the politically correct bullshit, will you? Nobody said "minority equals Democrat". That's your own strawman.

It's perfectly valid to evaluate an attack on minority voting demographic as a partisan maneuver, even if it involves what look like stereotypes when applied at an individual level. "So-and-So is black so he must be voting for Democrats" is a politically incorrect statement. "Blacks tend to vote Democratic" is not, especially if it happens to be true. Politically incorrect assertions about minorities tend to lack statistical validity. That's partly why they're offensive.

Interesting too, from a statistical viewpoint, is how 22,000 Democratic-leaning blacks but only 61 Republican-leaning Hispanics were among the 48,000 people on the 2000 felons list.

Quit pretending to be stupid. Everyone can see what is going on here.

Re:List of Names == EVIL!

[Anonymous Coward]

You bet, we should just ignore this. No need to take it seriously. Not like anything untoward has ever happend in Florida WRT election legal wrangling and fraud in the past. Yeah.

Article presented an incorrect statement

[ugmoe]

The article states "NAACP officials claimed he was the first president since the 1930s to skip the annual gathering."

Truman was the first president to address the NAACP. Truman took office in 1945.

Roosevelt was president until 1945 and never addressed the NAACP.

Therefore, Roosevelt was the first president since the 30's to skip the annual NAACP gathering.

Since Roosevelt was the first president since the 30's to skip the gathering, it is impossible for Bush to also be the first president since the 30's to skip the gathering

So, it is technically correct to say "the NAACP officials said blah" when the the NAACP officials did in fact say "blah." But, it is poor journalism to include a quote with an easily verifiable falsehood.

Re:Yeah, yeah ...

[MillionthMonkey]

It's not logically consistant to claim that the whites were going to split their vote evenly but that the "minority" voters were going to vote Democrat. If that was reality, Republicans would never win.

"Whites split their vote evenly" is another strawman of yours. I never said that. They don't split their vote evenly but per capita white people still affect the vote less than blacks do because they tend to split their vote more evenly than do blacks. But there are lots of white people. If white people voted Republican the way blacks vote Democratic we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

I mentioned the movie because it illustrates that this guy (from central America) is Latino. But the government still calls people like him white.

"What the government calls people" should be reflected in the census data. And like I explained even if 9 out of 10 Hispanics on this list were misclassified as white, the chance of randomly picking even as much as 600 Hispanics out of a group of 26,000 whites and Hispanics is 10^1400 to 1. It's a straightforward binomial calculation. If they make up 20% of the population you should expect to find about 5000 on the list. Not 60, not even 600. This won't happen by chance, even with the help of Diego Delgado.

All we'd need is 1. How many lottery tickets does someone have to buy to be a winner? Just 1. I'm not sure if you're intentionally misrepresenting probability or you just don't understand.

Do you even understand the difference between possible and probable?