Customer Reviews

The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held Hostage

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Contrary to some of the fireworks below, this book does not assign any significant partisan blame for the Florida fiasco. In other words, there is no great revelation that "If the GOP/Dem party hadn't done _____, then Bush/Gore would have won the election!"
To the contrary, the book quite effectively and disturbingly demonstrates how the election system--particularly the technology--was a fiasco just WAITING to happen and, alas, with an election as close as that one was, it most certainly did.
The system itself was a taped-together jalopy that's managed to survive all these years because lopsided victories made the exorbinant tossed votes (undervotes/overvotes) seem irrelevant. In 2000--when EVERY vote became relevant--the flaws in the cracked and decaying system became painfully obvious.
You'll be surprised at the outcome of the recounts; the more liberal standards favored Bush, while the most stringent favored Gore--in diametric opposition of what each campaign was fighting for! Irony with a capital "I"!
This book does NOT get into the behind-the-scenes machinations of either campaign during November--with all the drama--but rather sticks directly to the Florida employees within the election office.
There's a few unsettling tidbits: Katherine Harris' barely disguised partisanship and the stream of emails from her office cheering on a Bush victory, for instance--but for the most part this is a pretty dry telling of the election drama. No accusations of theft, of skulduggery, of conspiracy (except what you may read between the lines)--rather, a conclusion that the system was so screwed to begin with it was just begging to be manipulated... before, during and after.
What you will ask yourself after reading this book is: "What now"? How fervently each party pursues election reform ought to clue you in as to their real agenda.
Definitely worth reading if you want to impress friends/co-workers with the actual facts/findings, rather than partisan assertions and accusations. This is the not-glamorous-but-true "real" story of the election from the ELECTION standpoint, and not the candidates. Recommended.

BONUS UNSETTLING FACT: Florida was hardly the only place with reams of tossed votes. In Illinois alone, there were over 123,000 spoiled ballots!

Although I expected the book to lean more towards bashing Bush and the Republicans, Martin Merzer is very fair in his accounts of the problems that allowed this situation to happen. Very well-written and a good read.

"A recently released University of Minnesota study
estimates that, for example, 93 percent of felons of all races favored Bill Clinton in 1996"
Uh--New York reader-reviewer..is this because they like to vote for one of their own?
I enjoyed this book and felt it showed both sides of the battle. The liberals will always think they had the election stolen from them and the conservatives will always feel the right man won.
I would LOVE to see a book written that discusses ALL the goings-on that happened with the elections, past and 2000. The vote-buying in Chicago, the Haitians being helped to vote a straight Dem ticket, the exchange of votes for liquor or cigarettes.
But this book answered a lot of my questions and I will recommend it to others.

Historians will use this book as the chief reference book in documenting the death of democracy. The example after example of immoral and illegal actions that occurred in the 2000 Presidential election should be the rallying cry for reform of the election process for decades to come.

Democracy in America died when tens of thousands of legally eligible voters who had registerd, were turned away from the polls because Jeb Bush & Karl Rove conspired to remove them from the Florida registration lists, or had them blocked from being entered on those lists. This is the true tragedy of Florida, not butterfly ballots and chads. Until Jeb & Karl are in Jail, and W removed from his ill-gotten office, there is no democracy.

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 500-vote eyelash margin of victory, certified by Harris, the chance of the purge's discovery would have been vanishingly small. The group prevented from voting has few defenders in either party: felons. It has been well reported that Florida denies its nearly half a million former convicts the right to vote. However, the media have completely missed the fact that Florida's own courts have repeatedly told the Governor he may not take away the civil rights of Florida citizens who committed crimes in other states, served their time and had their rights restored by those states. People from other states who have arrived in Florida with a felony conviction in their past number "clearly over 50,000 and likely over 100,000," says criminal demographics expert Jeffrey Manza of Northwestern University. Manza estimates that 80 percent arrive with voting rights intact, which they do not forfeit by relocating to Florida. Nevertheless, agencies controlled by Harris and Bush ordered county officials to reject attempts by these eligible voters to register, while, publicly, the governor's office states that it adheres to court rulings not to obstruct these ex-offenders in the exercise of their civil rights. Further, with the aid of a Republican-tied database firm, Harris's office used sophisticated computer programs to hunt those felons eligible to vote and ordered them thrown off the voter registries. After reviewing The Nation's findings, voter demographics authority David Bositis concluded that the purge-and-block program was "a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters." Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC, notes that based on nationwide conviction rates, African-Americans would account for 46 percent of the ex-felon group wrongly disfranchised. Corroborating Bositis's estimate, the Hillsborough County elections supervisor found that 54 percent of the voters targeted by the "scrub" are African-American, in a county where blacks make up 11 percent of the voting population. Bositis suggests that the block-and-purge program "must have had a partisan motivation. Why else spend $4 million if they expected no difference in the ultimate vote count?" Florida's black voters gave Al Gore nine out of ten of their votes; white and Hispanic felons, mostly poor, vote almost as solidly Democratic. A recently released University of Minnesota study estimates that, for example, 93 percent of felons of all races favored Bill Clinton in 1996. Whatever Florida's motive for keeping these qualified voters out of the polling booths on November 7, the fact is that they represented several times George W. Bush's margin of victory in the state. Key officials in Bush's and Harris's agencies declined our requests for comment. The NAACP, tipped off to the racially suspect voter purge by early reports of this investigation, added the tainted felon-hunt to its lawsuit, filed January 10, against Harris, her elections unit chief Clay Roberts and their private database contractor. The suit accuses them of violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Constitution's equal protection amendment. The NAACP demands an immediate injunction to halt the felon purge. The disfranchisement operation began in 1998 under Katherine Harris's predecessor as secretary of state, Sandra Mortham. Mortham was a Republican star, designated by Jeb Bush as his lieutenant governor running mate for his second run for governor. Six months prior to the gubernatorial contest, the Florida legislature passed a "reform" law to eliminate registration of ineligible voters: those who had moved, those who had died and felons without voting rights. The legislation was promoted as a good-government response to the fraud-tainted Miami mayoral race of 1997. But from the beginning, the law and its implementation emitted a partisan fragrance. Passed by the Republican legislature's majority, the new code included an extraordinary provision to turn over the initial creation of "scrub" lists to a private firm. No other state, either before or since, has privatized this key step in the elimination of citizens' civil rights. In November 1998 the Republican-controlled office of the secretary of state handed the task to the single bidder, Database Technologies, now the DBT Online unit of ChoicePoint Inc. of Atlanta, into which it merged last year. The elections unit within the secretary of state's office immediately launched a felon manhunt with a zeal and carelessness that worried local elections professionals. The Nation has obtained an internal Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections memo, dated August 1998, which warns Mortham's office that it had wrongly removed eligible voters in a botched rush "to capriciously take names off the rolls." However, to avoid a public row, the supervisors agreed to keep their misgivings within the confines of the bureaucracies in the belief that "entering a public fight with [state officials] would be counterproductive." That November Jeb Bush had an unexpectedly easy walk to the governor's mansion, an election victory attributed, ironically, to his endorsement by black Democratic politicians feuding with their party. Over the past two years, with Republicans in charge of both the governorship and the secretary of state's office, now under Harris, the felon purge has accelerated. In May 2000, using a list provided by DBT, Harris's office ordered counties to purge 8,000 Florida voters who had committed felonies in Texas. In fact, none of the group were charged with anything more than misdemeanors, a mistake caught but never fully reversed. ChoicePoint DBT and Harris then sent out "corrected" lists, including the names of 437 voters who indeed had committed felonies in Texas. But this list too was in error, since a Texas law enacted in 1997 permits felons to vote after doing their time. In this case there was no attempt at all to correct the error. The wrongful purge of the Texas convicts was no one-of-a-kind mishap. The secretary of state's office acknowledges that it also ordered the removal of 714 names of Illinois felons and 990 from Ohio--states that permit the vote even to those on probation or parole. According to Florida's own laws, not a single person arriving in the state from Ohio or Illinois should have been removed. Altogether DBT tagged for the scrub nearly 3,000 felons who came from at least eight states that automatically restore voting rights and who therefore arrived in Florida with full citizenship. A ChoicePoint DBT spokesman said, and the Florida Department of Elections confirms, that Harris's office approved the selection of states from which to obtain records for the felon scrub. As to why the department included states that restore voting rights, Janet Modrow, Florida's liaison to ChoicePoint DBT, bounced the question to Harris's legal staff. That office has not returned repeated calls. Pastor Thomas Johnson of Gainesville is minister to House of Hope, a faith-based charity that guides ex-convicts from jail into working life, a program that has won high praise from the pastor's friend Governor Jeb Bush. Ten years ago, Johnson sold crack cocaine in the streets of New York, got caught, served his time, then discovered God and Florida--where, early last year, he attempted to register to vote. But local elections officials refused to accept his registration after he admitted to the decade-old felony conviction from New York. "It knocked me for a loop. It was horrendous," said Johnson of his rejection. Beverly Hill, the elections supervisor of Alachua County, where Johnson attempted to register, said that she used to allow ex-felons like Johnson to vote. Under Governor Bush, that changed. "Recently, the [Governor's Office of Executive] Clemency people told us something different," she said. "They told us that they essentially can't vote." Both Alachua's refusal to allow Johnson to vote and the governor's direct

What garbage! If you are going to have customer reviews such as the one posted above then make sure that is what they are instead of allowing biased political statements.