Investigate the Jeb Bush Administration for Rigging the 2000 Election

Jeb Bush was the Republican Governor of the State of Florida and brother of the Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush during and prior to the 2000 Presidential election.

Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris was also co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, clearly a conflict of interest in conducting a fair and impartial election.

Jeb Bush promised to “Deliver Florida” to his brother, George W. Bush as reported in numerous newspaper articles.

Secretary of State, Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush had the motive and the means to make sure Florida’s decisive electoral votes were “delivered” to George W. Bush.

Video regarding the 2000 election can be viewed at https://youtu.be/FJopOtIa5Xo

According to Wikipedia, “Harris’s purge of voters in Florida removed both ineligible and eligible voters. Harris, along with state division of elections director Clay Roberts, and Governor Jeb Bush used an inaccurate ineligible-voter list that eliminated a disproportionate number of eligible African Americans from Florida voter rolls”.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 12,000 eligible voters, a number twenty-two times larger than George W. Bush’s 537 vote triumph over Al Gore, were wrongly identified as convicted felons and purged from the voting rolls in Florida. African Americans, who favored Gore over Bush by 86 points, accounted for 11 percent of the state’s electorate but 41 percent of those purged.

ChoicePoint / DBT was given a $4 million no-bid contract under the Jeb Bush administration which purged thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter rolls.

Jame Lee, Vice President of Choicepoint / DBT testified to a panel called by US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney that the State of Florida Division of Elections stated they only wanted 80% accuracy on the list. In other words, to be identified as a convicted felon, one only need to have a similar name to that as someone listed on a Texas convicted felon’s list.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice: “Florida registrants were purged from the rolls if 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of persons with criminal convictions. Those wrongly purged included Reverend Willie D. Whiting Jr., who, under the matching criteria, was considered the same person as Willie J. Whiting. Without specific guidelines for or limitations on the authority of election officials conducting purges, eligible voters are regularly made unnecessarily vulnerable”.

You can view the testimony of Jame Lee, Vice President of Choicepoint / DBT in a documentary called American Blackout (around 12 minutes into the film). As a result, ChoicePoint identified thousands Florida residents as convicted felons, which caused them to be illegally and wrongfully purged from the voter rolls.

As it turned out, almost everyone on the Florida purged voters list had the right to vote.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2000 Election Investigation Report
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights conducted an extensive public investigation of allegations of voting irregularities during the 2000 presidential election in Florida. To follow is some of the text from the report at http://usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch9.htm

“Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election”

“The investigation, utilizing the Commission’s subpoena power, included three days of hearings, more than 30 hours of testimony, 100 witnesses, and a systematic review of more than 118,000 pages of pertinent documents

Findings:

Despite the closeness of the election, it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election.

Disenfranchisement of Florida voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of African Americans. Statewide, based on county-level statistical estimates, African American voters were nearly 10 times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected in the November 2000 election.

Recommendations:

The U.S. Department of Justice should immediately initiate the litigation process against the governor, secretary of state, director of the Division of Elections, specific supervisors of elections, and other state and local officials responsible for the execution of election laws, practices, and procedures, regarding their contributions, if any, to the extraordinary racial disparity in the rate that votes were rejected, through their actions or failure to act before and during the 2000 presidential election, in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended. Appropriate enforcement action should be initiated to ensure full compliance with the election laws.
The Civil Rights Division in the Office of the Florida Attorney General should initiate the litigation process against state election officials who violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended, and/or Title IX of the Florida statutes through their actions or failure to act before, during, ...