Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Wingnut Blogs Claim Black Voter Disenfranchisement In 2000 Election Never Happened

By MARC MCDONALD

Wingnut blog Flopping Aces, among others, is disputing the Democrats' "false accusations" that the Bush campaign tried to disenfranchise black voters in Florida in 2000.

The Kool-Aid-drinking wingnuts have been working overtime the past few years, trying to rewrite history, as they claim that the GOP theft of the 2000 election never happened.

But as the ace investigative reporter Greg Palast has documented, an incredible 1 million black votes didn't count in the 2000 presidential election.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I'm seeking The Truth and I have a choice, I'm going to go with a widely acclaimed, world-class investigative journalist with a stellar track record before I'm going to rely on a hack, partisan, Bush-ass-kissing blog. But that's just me.

As Palast points out:

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

Remember, Bush "defeated" Gore in Florida by razor-thin 537 votes.

In case anyone is wondering if the Bush Crime Family really had anything to do with all this, keep this in mind: Palast notes that he "discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush's office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote-count procedures."

Palast continues, "It's not surprising that the First Brother's team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled."

But now wingnut sites like Flopping Aces are trying to rewrite history.

I have no doubt that the GOP and its allies will once again try to steal the vote in 2008. We need to do everything in our power to prevent this from happening---and if it does happen, we need to take to the streets and remove this illegitimate government by force.

4 comments:

Lotus said...

There was also the point, which I think was again something covered by Palast, that the outfit that created the "scrub list" of supposed felons for the state told officials that because of the lax matching criteria they were told to use, the list was sure to contain numerous errors. Despite being so informed, the state did nothing to uncover or avoid them.

Even beyond those falsely accused of having felony records, there were those ex-felons from other states who had had their voting rights restored but found it impossible to convince Florida officials of the fact: They were told to produce the document from the prior state restoring voting rights - but in several states, those rights are restored automatically upon release and there is no such document to produce!

And, if memory serves, there are a few states where felons do not lose voting rights. How can you produce proof of the "restoration" of something you never lost?

Batocchio said...

Wow. I've followed this stuff to a degree, but that's an astonishing statistic.

Anonymous said...

Wingnuts! That's even more ridiculous than "hatewing". Come one, how does being devisive and polarizing help anything?

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