This controversy is not about hanging chads or Supreme Court decisions (read this entry to understand that issue); this one is about the suppression of the black vote in Florida via alleged roadblocks and voter lists.
In every precinct there is a voter list that is used to determine who can vote in an election. If your name is not on the list, you don’t vote.
Five months before the 2000 presidential election, Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,000 people from the voter list, because they were convicted felons. Makes sense, right?
The problem though, was 97% of the people on that last were not convicted felons, and most of them were African-Americans and Latinos (the list actually had a column for the voter’s race, which adds to the suspicion).
In case you didn't know, African-Americans and Latinos in Florida vote Democrat. In case you didn't know, Florida has a lot of electoral votes. In case you didn't know, Florida was crucial to the presidency of both Bush and Gore, and it was going to be close. Do you see what was at stake now?
It has been estimated that 90% of those voters were to vote Democrat, had they been allowed as they should have. If you recall, Gore “lost” Florida by 537 votes when Harris decided to stop the recount.
Logically, if you assume most of the African-Americans on the list were going to vote Democrat as they were registered with that party, it is not hard to believe that the people on this list would have easily made up the difference of 537 and handed the presidency to Gore, and the world would have been drastically different.
I must admit, I had never heard of this issue before either, so I found the testimony of Harris and her people afterwards in the investigations of the allegations rather pathetic: “I don’t recall… I don’t know…. I don’t remember… It wasn’t my responsibility….”
Harris is at the center of the controversy because she was the Florida Secretary of State at the time, and because it was her who hired the firm, ChoicePoint
Whether or not there was deliberate action to prevent likely Gore supporters from voting is subject to intense debate, as is Harris' role in the process, but there is no doubt that a major fuck-up took place, yet no one was held accountable.
Bush is still Governor of Florida, and Harris went on to win a seat in Congress (although she did lose a run at the Senate in 2006).
This entire controversy came out only because one Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, held her own hearings in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of ChoicePoint. ChoicePoint testified that Florida election officials were only looking for an 80% match, and not an identical match. This meant that if John Smithe was a convicted felon, and someone named JC Smith was on the voter list, then JC Smith was tagged as a felon and removed from the voter list, even though these are two totally different people and JC Smith has no criminal record.
ChoicePoint was paid $4 million dollars for creating this list, which was never verified for its accuracy, even though ChoicePoint knew and told Florida officials that the method used would result in a significant amount people being incorrectly labeled as a felon, and thus denied their constitutional right to vote.
To make things look even worse, ChoicePoint incorrectly used a list of000 people with misdemeanors in Texas as part of its criteria for removing people as eligible voters in Florida. Since George W. was Gov of Texas, and brother Jeb was in Florida, this adds to the conspiracy beliefs.
I am not sure there was a mass conspiracy to get Bush elected. It is completely believable to me that these horrible mistakes go on in every US election, but unless you have the whole process under a microscope as Florida was in 2000, these things just are never uncovered. If a black person says he was not allowed to vote because he wasn’t on the voter list, officials would just chalk it up to a paperwork error and add him for the next election. Republicans dismiss it as the liberal media giving credence to a non-issue, as if it is impossible to believe racism could ever exist in America.
Our government is incredibly inefficient, as is any large body of people, because people are largely incompetent and self-serving. As such, I don’t believe Bush orchestrated this to get himself elected; he was just the lucky receiver of an incompetent official (Harris) and firm trying to make money (ChoicePoint), who had an agenda and was trying to serve that agenda.
Unfortunately, only about 20 minutes of the movie was on this topic, which is why it is hard to recommend. Overall, the documentary was more a PR avenue for McKinnie than about American-Americans getting screwed at the ballot box, which is a shame, because that is where the real tragedy takes place.
