Author-filmmakers Michael Moore and Greg Palast joined with Representatives Corrine Brown (D-Jacksonville) and Peter Deutsch (D-Ft. Lauderdale) to demand steps, as Palast said, “To prevent Republican hacks in Florida swiping the election of 2004 as they did four years ago.”
Last Wednesday morning Corrine Brown watched an advanced copy of our new DVD, Bush Family Fortunes, including the details on how the Republican party stole the election in 2000. After seeing these facts, Congresswoman Corrine Brown, a black woman w/ a height end sense of justice, walked over to the capital on Thursday and put on the record the facts she had seen.
Noon, Friday, National Press Club, 14 Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC
The New York Times has reported that the State of Florida has stopped purging voters from registries. This is plain false, a canard traceable to the partisan office of the Florida Secretary of State.
The US Civil Rights Commission has asked Greg Palast to testify before a special commission hearing Thursday, July 15th at 11am, to discuss his continuing investigative reports for BBC Television on Florida and other states’ cleansing of Black voters from voter rolls. Palast’s reports provide the basis for the story on the vote fix in Florida featured in Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’
On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.
This week came the payoff when President Bush appointed James Baker III to “restructure” the debts of the nation of Iraq.
For Harper’s Magazine
In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush.
But however one reads the ballots, Bush’s win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state – Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protegees of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 “ex-felons,” who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls.
If you liked the way Florida handled the presidential vote in November, you’ll just love the election reform laws that have passed since then in 10 states, and have been proposed in 16 others.
The US civil rights commission was yesterday investigating allegations by the BBC’s Newsnight that thousands of mainly black voters in Florida were disenfranchised in the November election because of wholesale errors by a private data services company.
Greg Palast reporting for BBC Newsnight First Broadcast 16 February 2001 WATCH THE REPORT
View the full video here.
GREG PALAST: Washington, the marine band plays ‘Hail to the Chief’ for George W Bush, 43rd President of the United States. But in Florida, some are singing ‘Hail to the Thief’.
For The Nation
In Latin America they might have called them votantes desaparecidos, “disappeared voters.” On November 7 tens of thousands of eligible Florida voters were wrongly prevented from casting their ballots–some purged from the voter registries and others blocked from registering in the first instance. Nearly all were Democrats, nearly half of them African-American. The systematic program that disfranchised these legal voters, directed by the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was so quiet, subtle and intricate that if not for George W. Bush’s 537-vote eyelash margin of victory, certified by Harris, the chance of the purge’s discovery would have been vanishingly small.
