Greg's Letter Printed In The New York Times

Re: Paul Krugman's Op-Ed on December 2

To the Editor:

Paul Krugman ("Hack the Vote," column, Dec. 2) warns against the danger of computerized voting machines, but the real danger is the new, federally mandated computerization of voter rolls.

As he mentions, the disaster in Florida in 2000 was the wrongful disenfranchisement of voters.
Katherine Harris's office, using a computerized database with known faults, misidentified these citizens as felons, then purged them from voter registries.

Last year, with little fanfare and less scrutiny, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which effectively orders all states to buy the computerized voting machines that Mr. Krugman rightly dreads. Worse, the law requires all states to computerize their voter rolls and purge those lists of suspect voters, a la Florida.

Heaven help us when President Bush and Congress tell us that they are going to "help" us vote.

GREG PALAST New York, Dec. 2, 2003

The writer, an investigative reporter, is the author of a book about the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida in the 2000 election.