Florida 2000 and Al Gore’s New Book

By Hank Edson

posted May 23, 2007

The release of Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, provides an appropriate occasion for a brief revisit to Florida, November 7, 2000, to once again consider the debacle in which the Republican party stole democracy from the America people and then proceeded to claim exclusive right to the American Flag for the next seven years. What better landmark can we find for the commencement of the “assault on reason” than Florida 2000? Going back to that time, I find we still haven’t done all the math necessary to understand as a people key aspects of the assault on democracy we suffered again in 2004, and are vulnerable to experience yet again in 2008.

To put the math in context, we must first realize that there were several independent strategies the Republican Party used to steal the 2000 election. Here are a few:

• Disobeying two explicit court orders, Jeb Bush instructed election officials to remove from the registered voter list all convicted felons who had had their right to vote restored before moving to Florida, costing Al Gore a conservative estimate of 30,000 votes;
• Voting machines were set to swallow and not count ballots filled out improperly in counties with large black populations but elsewhere were set to return the improperly filled out ballots to the voter for correction so each could be counted;
• Bush’s cousin, John Ellis, who headed the team at Fox News deciding when to call the winner of each state for Fox News on election night, after speaking with Jeb by telephone, called Bush the winner of Florida at Jeb’s urging and the rest of the networks followed suit, not wanting to left out of the story;
• Diebold machines in two precincts were found to have inexplicably subtracted votes from Al Gore’s vote total, raising suspicions that other “Gore subtractions” occurred unnoticed and uncorrected;
• Flaunting court order, Kathleen Harris “used her discretion” to refuse to extend the deadline state law imposed on Canvassing Boards without justification, even though there was ample good cause to do so, including widespread complaints about police intimidation, an absence of translators, confusing “butterfly” and “caterpillar” ballots, and ballot instructions that if followed correctly resulted in an overvote;
• Bush Pioneer, soon-to-be-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff fronted the money and Bush Pioneer, soon-to-be-disgraced Enron CEO Ken Ley provided the jets to fly scores of Republican congressional staffers to pose as outraged Florida voters, who entered the Miami-Dade polling headquarters, screaming “Stop the fraud” and “let us in,” and pounding on the doors and windows—an effort that successfully stopped American votes from being counted; and
• Five Supreme Court justices, three of them with blatant conflicts of interest, abandoned their allegiance to legal principle and stopped the recount in order to give the presidency to George Bush.

A number of these strategies were sufficient individually to swing the election to George W. Bush. My purpose in revising Florida 2000, however, is to do a little number crunching I haven’t found anywhere else concerning yet one more strategy employed by the Republican Party to steal Democracy from the people: the convicted felon purge, as reported by journalist Greg Palast.

Weeks before Al Gore conceded the election, journalist Greg Palast was pounding on doors trying to get a story published about the convicted felon purge list and no one in the supposedly liberal media would listen. Palast had to publish his articles in England in the non-profit Guardian and Observer. Eventually, Salon.com did publish one story on the internet, but balked on the follow-up. The Washington Post did not publish Palast’s investigative work until June 2001, long after it was too late to do much good. [i]

The way this scheme worked was that Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State, Kathleen Harris, who was also chairwoman of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign, used her office’s oversight of the Department of Elections to require that “loose parameters” be used in finding matches between the list of convicted felons and the list of registered voters. All matches would be deleted from the registered voter list and deprived of the vote. In Florida, convicted felons lose their right to vote.

The problem was that the Department of Elections instructed the private firm organizing the purge to consider as “a match” any registered voter whose last name matched just 80% of a convicted felon’s last name. Several other similar parameter decisions guaranteed that thousands of people legally entitled to vote would be considered convicted felons, and that, as a result, they would be disenfranchised. These mistaken results are called “false positives.”

By leaving “race” as a matching parameter, however, the purge guaranteed that the false positives were not random, but that they would reflect the disproportionate and racist demographics that disgrace our criminal justice system. 46% of convicted felons are African-Americans, roughly four times the actual proportion of African Americans in the national population. Guess what? In the Florida 2000 election, 93% of the African Americans who got to vote voted for Al Gore.

When warned about the large number of false positives, Kathleen Harris’ office told the firm conducting the purge not to worry about it, that they wanted “these lists to be pretty broad and encompassing,” at least as long as the lists were disproportionately African-American. Ultimately 57,700 voters were disenfranchised. Palast’s research indicated that a stunning 90.2% of the names on the list were not convicted felons! Florida’s Department of Elections was knowingly robbing the right to vote from tens of thousands of innocent, mostly black, most democratic Americans!

One aspect of Palast’s work I have not seen fleshed out, however, is the simple math by which all the available statistics can be used to establish exactly how many actual—not potential, but actual—votes the convicted purge list cost not just Gore, but Bush as well. This math is necessary to conclusively demonstrate to America that by virtue of this scheme alone, an honest election would have placed Al Gore in the White House.

Palast quotes Mary Frances Berry, the Chairwoman of the Civil Rights Commission as saying that the real story of the 2000 election was not the recount, but the “no-count,” referring to the wrongful disenfranchisement that occurred before the election, and which wrongly determined the election. Until the math behind the no-count is made crystal clear, the real story has not been well told.

It is easier to understand an election is stolen when the method of theft involves ballots actually cast. Thus, our pre-occupation with the drama of the recount is understandable, if not justified. The American people need to become aware, however, that another equally illegal method involves preventing votes from ever being cast. In the case of the “convicted felon purge,” we can determine with confidence a minimum number of actual votes intended for Gore that never got to be counted because they were never allowed to be cast. This is theft of our democracy.

Starting with the statistic that the 57,700 name “purge list” was disproportionately 54% black, here is the math that makes the theft clear:

• 54% of the 57,700 voters disenfranchised by the “purge list” equals 31,158 disenfranchised black voters.
• Using Palast’s finding that 90.2% of the individuals purged from the registered voter list were never convicted of a felony, we find that 90.2% of the 31,158 disenfranchised black voters on the “purge list” equals 28,194 black voters who were wrongfully disenfranchised.
• In Florida—a record number—80% of registered black voters actually voted in the 2000 election. 80% of 28,194 wrongfully disenfranchised black voters equals 22,483 wrongfully disenfranchised black voters who actually would have cast a vote if they had been allowed to do so.
• Recalling that 93% of the African-American vote in Florida went to Democrat Al Gore, we find that 93% of 22,483 wrongfully denied actual black votes equals 20,909 actual votes for Al Gore! If the remaining 7% of the African-American vote in Florida went to Bush, we find that there were 1,573 actual votes for George Bush.

Now let’s consider the “non-black” vote. Even though Bush won 81% of the Cuban vote, among Latinos overall he only won 49% of the vote, Cubans included. Bush won 57% of the white vote in Florida. The remainder of the vote amounts to about 5% of the Florida population. Bush almost certainly did not win more votes among Asians, Native Americans and other races than he did among white voters. Using these numbers, we can create an estimate that completes the picture.

If we generously grant to Bush even 60% of the non-black vote in Florida—that’s 11% higher than what he actually won among Latinos and 3% higher than what he actually got among whites—we can then make the following calculation to arrive at a conservative estimate of just how many actual rightful American votes were prevented from being cast by the rigging of the convicted felon purge. When we perform these calculations, we will find that the purge cost all Americans their democracy. We start with the fact that 46% of the purge list was non-black:

• 46% of the 57,700 voters disenfranchised by the “purge list” equals 26,542 disenfranchised non-black voters.
• Using Palast’s finding that 90.2% of the individuals purged from the registered voter list were never convicted of a felony, we find that 90.2% of the 26,542 disenfranchised black voters on the “purge list” equals 23,940 non-black voters who were wrongfully disenfranchised.
• I was unable to find statistics for the non-black registered voter turn out rate in Florida. Nationally, the 2000 election turnout rate was 50%. With 74% of the 206 million voting age adults being registered voters, the national registered voter turnout rate is approximately 66%. If we generously apply the same record breaking 80% turnout rate achieved by registered black voters in Florida, we are likely giving Bush more votes than actually were intended to be cast. Nonetheless, using this number as the actual non-black turn out rate, we find that 80% of 23,940 equals 19,152 wrongfully disenfranchised non-black voters who would have actually cast a vote if they had been allowed to do so.
• Using our equally generous assignment of 60% as the proportion of the non-black vote in Florida that voted for Republican George Bush and the less than fair assignment of 40% as the proportion of the non-black vote in Florida that voted for Democrat All Gore, we find that 60% of 19,152 equals 11,491 actual non-black Bush votes and that 40% of 19,152 equals 7,660 actual non-black Gore votes.

When we add together the actual non-black votes and actual black votes that would have been cast for both candidates, our statistical analysis tells us Gore won the election, but the Republican Alliance stole it from him. Here’s the math:

• 20,909 black Gore votes plus 7,660 non-black Gore votes equals 28,569 actual Gore votes denied by the purge versus 1,573 black Bush votes plus 11,491 non-black Bush votes equals 13,064 actual Bush votes denied by the purge. Strictly among the actual purged votes, Gore leads by 15,505 actual purged votes.
• Bush was declared the winner by 357 votes. When we add back in the wrongly purged actual votes, Gore wins the state of Florida by 15,148 votes and in so doing becomes President of the United States.

The deliberateness of the theft of our democracy by the Republican Party was belied by the fact that employees working with the purge list complained that individuals who were being purged had convictions attributed to them that were listed as occurring seven years in the future. How can a registered voter be a convicted felon in 2000 when the conviction purportedly occurred in 2007?

When such apparent absurdities were brought to the attention of the Florida Department of Elections, the employees handling the purge list were told simply to blank out the column with the nonsensical conviction date rather than to remove the individual from any purge list. Thus, race data was left in as a means of transferring the discrimination apparent in felony convictions across to all the innocent black individuals scooped up in the voter purge. At the same time, however, erroneous conviction date data was erased as a way of ensuring that as many innocent black voters as possible would be included in the purge and thus prevented from voting in the election.

Overall, the purge list was found to have 4000 entrees in which the conviction date was erased, suggesting that 4000 individuals, who should have been removed from the purge rather than from the registered voting list, were deliberately deprived of their right to vote by authorities who had been clearly told that the purported convictions were clearly in error. Just these blanked out convictions were enough to swing the election. Using the same math demonstrated above, Gore would have gained 1075 actual votes over Bush if just these 4000 individuals with blanked out “future-dated convictions” were not wrongly disenfranchised. Gore would have erased Bush’s 357 vote lead and won Florida by 718 votes.

Greg Palast tried to call attention to the crime being committed while it was being committed. Our nation owes him the debt of making sure that in future elections our press will print stories that question the integrity of our political process. So far, we have avoided paying this debt and as a result, another Secretary of State/state Bush-Cheney campaign chairperson was able to steal the 2004 presidential election: Ken Blackwell of Ohio. I would humbly submit to former Vice-President Al Gore, that he too owes a debt to Mr. Palast to prevent these crimes from happening in the future. In talking about the assault on reason, I hope Gore’s new book also says something about the Republican Party’s assault on the American vote. 2008 is just around the corner.

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copyright © 2007 by Hank Edson

[i] For a more detailed account of Palast’s investigation, see Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Also consult, Greg Palast, “Black-Out in Florida,” The Observer, November 26, 2000; Greg Palast, “Florida’s Ethnic Cleansing of the Voter Rolls,” Salon.com, December 5, 2000; Greg Palast, “A Blacklist Burning for Bush,” The Observer, December 10, 2000; Greg Palast, “Florida’s Disappeared Voters,” The Nation, February 5, 2001. For statistical data cited, see “The Hispanic Vote and the U.S. Presidential Election,” November 3, 2004, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1062&specialid=23; Derrick Z. Jackson, “Does the Black Vote Count,” The Boston Globe, December 1, 2000; http://factfinder.census.gov/home/.