They'll Do it Again in Florida

[paft.livejournal.com]

Why wouldn't they? It worked in 2000.

Via Crooks and Liars

The last time, the target was black voters and the rationale for removing names was the voters were convicted felons. This time the target is Hispanic voters and the rationale offered that they are “illegal immigrants”:

The full universe of potentially ineligible voters that state elections officials plan to check for possible removal from the roles is about 180,000, a spokesman for the Division of Elections said Friday, reports David Royse of the News Service of Florida.

Elections spokesman Chris Cate told the News Service that in all, when matching voter rolls against newly available citizenship data from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, officials found that number of possible matches, and began further investigating each one to see if they were likely to be wrongly registered to vote…

But earlier this week it wasn’t clear how many more names might eventually be checked. On Friday, Cate said the larger number was the total identified so far, but that it will take some time to further cull through that list to determine which names are most likely accurately identified as non-citizens.

(Emphasis added)

A list of “suspect voters?” Matching names to voter rolls? Anyone who remembers the 2000 presidential election, and is up on what happened in Florida is going to find this nastily familiar.

This news story was aired in Great Britain in the wake of the last election. It goes into devastating and well-documented detail about how the election was stolen in Florida. But one of the most telling moments, one that helps explain the mystifying inertia of Democratic leadership in the wake of that fiasco, comes near the end, at about the 11:35 mark, when reporter Greg Palast talks to Democrats at a $5,000 a plate fundraiser.

It’s back to champagne politics as usual. One Democrat, a big shot at the soiree, whispered they would have done the same as Katherine Harris [Florida Elections official who oversaw the purging of thousands of legal Democratic voters from the rolls] if they had the chance.

The Democratic Party Chairman, Bob Poe, who was apparently attending that fundraiser, does bitterly denounce the disenfranchisement of voters in this clip. But here in 2012, with our greater awareness of the divide between rich and poor, that unnamed Democratic fat cat whispering his contempt for the vote resonates painfully. For many Democrats back then, it was a shock to discover how little the integrity of the vote mattered to the people in power, Democrat or Republican. Those of us (like the Black Caucus) who objected too loudly and too persistently were essentially told to sit down and shut up. It was an sign of just how much big money had come to matter, and how little the rest of us did.

The Republicans plainly haven’t changed. Have the Democrats?

We’ll see.

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

Comments

[paft.livejournal.com]

u: In theory, in practice it's perfectly feasible for electors to vote against the will of the population of a state.

In practice, it is usually tied to the popular vote, and there is no reason it wouldn't have been in this case.

u: And in reality if Gore knew what he was doing, he should have asked for a statewide recount, not selecting four individual counties.

I agree. But the fact that he miscalculated does not make the established facts about Republican shenanigans in the 2000 elections a mere "conspiracy theory." The legal voters who were turned away from the polls were not "theoretical."

u: But if Gore knew what he was doing the election would not have come down to four counties in one state. That Americans are spineless and resort to conspiracy theories to explain events with perfectly prosaic, mundane causes, well......

The "perfectly prosaic, mundane cause" of a Republican administration engaging in the age-old practice of voter caging and purging rolls.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Practice is not the same as theory, however, which is where the problem comes in. It's actually perfectly feasible for the US variant of an "election" to be a convention of the College, Sans vote, and they choose POTUS without that. It's impossible to create that now, but it's how things worked up to the second Adams Administration.

Except that you can't ignore that Gore's miscalculations here illustrate what a bad candidate Gore was, far more than it illustrates what a good one Shrub was. An election where one guy can and does get more votes than the other should never come down to four counties. It's fashionable nowadays to look for insane conspiracies to avoid facing the obvious, but Jeb Bush has as much to do with the outcome of the 2000 election as ACORN did with 2008. That is none outside a select group of people incapable of fathoming that the other guy *can* in fact win an election if the choice comes down to a bad candidate v. a terrible one.

In one state that would not have been the focus of any such conspiracy even if it had existed.

[paft.livejournal.com]

u: s actually perfectly feasible for the US variant of an "election" to be a convention of the College, Sans vote, and they choose POTUS without that.

There's no reason to believe that would have been the case in the 2000 election.

U: Except that you can't ignore that Gore's miscalculations here illustrate what a bad candidate Gore was, far more than it illustrates what a good one Shrub was. An election where one guy can and does get more votes than the other should never come down to four counties.

I don't ignore Gore's miscalculation, or the lame response of the Democratic party. In fact, that's a big part of the OP.

U: It's fashionable nowadays to look for insane conspiracies to avoid facing the obvious, but Jeb Bush has as much to do with the outcome of the 2000 election as ACORN did with 2008.

Calling the GOP's well-documented and legally established history of voters suppression an "insane conspiracy theory" and claiming that Jeb Bush had nothing to do with the outcome of the 2000 election requires deliberately ignoring history and reality.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I just said that it was feasible, not that it would actually happen. Words have meanings, and I tend to go for some very literal and exact ones in how I phrasee things.

Oh, so when you said that GWB ensured Jeb would hand him the election you instead credited Bush with the kind of future-foresight that was lacking in the 100% of his Presidency that followed after the election?

No, it requires crediting the fuckwits that botched Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, Rita, and pretty much everything else with inerrant prescience just in time to get elected and it appearing nowhere else during said Administration's history.

[paft.livejournal.com]

U: I just said that it was feasible, not that it would actually happen. Words have meanings, and I tend to go for some very literal and exact ones in how I phrasee things.

Indeed, words do have meanings. When you assert, in the course of insisting that the 2000 election was not stolen, "Frankly put Gore was subject to that little-understood reality that POTUS just means winning the electoral college, not the popular vote," the logical interpretation is that you are citing the Electoral College as always trumping the popular vote.

U: Oh, so when you said that GWB ensured Jeb would hand him the election you instead credited Bush with the kind of future-foresight that was lacking in the 100% of his Presidency that followed after the election?

No brilliant "future-foresight" was required for a governor to promise his brother his state in a national election. Whether or not George W. Bush won the election, he would want to avoid the humiliation of losing in his own brother's state, and I'm a bit surprised you're unaware of this very basic political reality.

U: No, it requires crediting the fuckwits that botched Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, Rita, and pretty much everything else with inerrant prescience just in time to get elected and it appearing nowhere else during said Administration's history.

As I've already explained, it was not the George W. Bush administration who suppressed the vote in Florida.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) Um, in the US system the College *does* trump the popular vote.

2) Actually yes, future-foresight was required, and from the bunch that are able to rig an election like this in 2000 but failed to do little things like, I don't know, faking evidence of WMDs in Iraq when this would be a very obvious similar example of such a track record.

3) As you've already explained the circumstances where this comes about requires unrealistic foresight on the part of a buncha palookas who failed to show it at any other time.

[paft.livejournal.com]

U: Um, in the US system the College *does* trump the popular vote.

Not in most elections. In most elections, the popular vote DETERMINES electoral votes. You persist in acting as though the opposite were the norm when it is not.

U Actually yes, future-foresight was required, and from the bunch that are able to rig an election like this in 2000 but failed to do little things like, I don't know, faking evidence of WMDs in Iraq when this would be a very obvious similar example of such a track record.

And you also persist in pretending that it was the George W. Bush administration that rigged the election when it was not. It was the Jeb Bush administration.

U: As you've already explained the circumstances where this comes about requires unrealistic foresight on the part of a buncha palookas who failed to show it at any other time.

I've explained nothing of the kind. I've pointed out that the voter suppression that took place in Florida was no freakish wacky conspiracy theory, but business as usual when it comes to voting in the south. There's no need for a state to be a swing state for voter suppression to take place.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) Actually it doesn't strictly speaking work like that. There have been multiple elections where the winner of the Electoral College triumphs over others who have a popular vote majority. 2000 was the fourth.

2) JEB didn't do a very good job, then, if the result was actually able to be challenged. Which is only an example of the kind of stupidity that most conspiracy theories run on.

3) Business as usual used to mean that people were hung and targeted in pogroms, not what you're talking about.

[paft.livejournal.com]

U: 2000 was the fourth.

...because Harris halted the vote count.

U: JEB didn't do a good job then, if the result was actually able to be challenged.

The result was challenged? Really? Bush didn't end up "winning" Florida and ultimately the presidency?

I'd say JEB succeeded.

U: Business as usual used to mean that people were hung and targeted the pogroms, not what you're talking about.

Not for the past 30 years it hasn't

Don't lecture me about what "business as usual" has been in the south since the 70s. You don't have a clue.