The fraud perpetrated by the Republican Party begins to surface: How George Bush almost won Florida

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Eliminating fraud -- or Democrats?

Florida's controversial crusade to purge its voter rolls has revived an old partisan debate: Can states crack down on fraud without disqualifying eligible voters?

By Anthony York/Salon Magazine

Dec. 8, 2000 | Behind all the squabbling about dimpled chads and manual recounts, the Florida election debacle has revived debate on an old partisan controversy: when and how to purge voter rolls, to reduce fraud and make sure the ineligible don't vote.

In Florida, Secretary of State Katherine Harris' office removed 173,000 names from state voter rolls this year, based on a list of supposedly ineligible voters provided by a private firm with strong Republican ties. A Salon examination of the list revealed that thousands of voters may have been mistakenly deemed ineligible to vote by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, Florida's private contractor.

ChoicePoint's list included 8,000 people the group said were convicted of felonies and therefore ineligible to vote. But as it turned out, those people had only been convicted of misdemeanors, and should have been able to cast votes in Florida. The mistakes on that list, Democrats argue, disproportionately penalized African-American voters in Florida, more than 90 percent of whom voted for Al Gore.

"The horror stories about perfectly innocent black voters being turned away from the polls because they had been targeted as convicted felons started coming in early on the morning of Nov. 7, Election Day. And they're still coming in," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. "Blacks turned out to vote in record numbers in Florida this year, but huge numbers were systematically turned away for one specious reason or another."

Yet some complain the state didn't go far enough in its efforts to prevent voter fraud. The Miami Herald reported that at least 455 felons voted illegally in Florida, most of them in Palm Beach and Duval counties, despite efforts by election supervisors in those counties to get them off the rolls.

"There's a lot about the way Palm Beach County has conducted itself in this election that upsets me, and this of course would be one more outrage," State Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Palm Harbor, told the Herald.

The Voting Integrity Project, which has focused on cleaning up national voter rolls, said the problems in Florida have shined the spotlight on widespread voter fraud across the county. "Election 2000 and the ensuing controversy in Florida have focused public attention on the need to combat voting fraud," the group's Web site reads.

The Florida skirmish is just the latest battle in an old and partisan war: Republicans are usually on the side of cleansing the rolls energetically, and Democrats tend to fight back, claiming efforts to purge ineligible voters often cast eligible low-income and minority voters off the rolls. The battle goes back to Huey Long's Louisiana and Richard M. Daley's Chicago, cesspools of Democratic voter fraud where legend has it ballots were cast by dead people.

VIP itself has come under fire for leading what some have called partisan crusades, opposing programs that make it easier to register voters, and supporting those that aggressively clean the voter rolls, which Democrats say disproportionately knocks low income and minority voters off voter lists. Though the group maintains it is bipartisan, it is true that it often allies with Republicans on voter-roll cleanup efforts.

VIP gave an award to ChoicePoint for its Florida work, praising its "innovative excellence [in] cleansing" the state's voter rolls. VIP is promoting the firm's proprietary methods to purge voter rolls nationwide, and has partnered with Database Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint, to identify small communities that need pro-bono voter roll "scrubbing."

This year, VIP launched a pilot voter registration clean-up program, focused on Fayette County, Pa., and Atlantic Beach, N.C. In Fayette County, Democrats outnumber registered Republicans better than 3-1, according to data from the Pennsylvania department of state. In Atlantic, Democrats hold a 58-42 percent registration advantage over Republicans, according to the state department of elections.

VIP says Fayette was chosen because it was home to an absentee ballot fraud scheme that resulted in three election fraud convictions earlier this year, according to its Web site.

-- Anne (interesting@piece.to.say.least), December 08, 2000

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HMMMMMM WHY DO REPUBS. WANT=RECOUNT IN N.M.??

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), December 09, 2000.

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