I guess this is old news...

But I just found it. Basically, Greg Palast reported that the Secretary of State's office had 57,700 voters, most of whom were black and almost all of them non-felons, removed from the voter rolls before the 2000 election. The election that Bush won because he got Florida's electoral votes by a margin of 537 votes. Would those thousands of voters made a difference? Who the heck knows?

Apparently, Katherine Harris hired a company to search for the names of convicted felons to be sure they were off the voter rolls. She was instructed to do so by the Florida legislature. The company was instructed to find "potentially ineligible voters". As Palast notes, this includes someone who was convicted of a felony in 2007. Amazing. Palast also claims the company was supposed to call these people and check to see if they were convicted felons. I can imagine that phone call.

"Hi, I work for the Florida government. Did you rob a jewelry store ten years ago? Because we think you did, but we're just not sure, and we really want to make sure we've removed all the felons from the voting rolls. No, we're not incompetent. Why do you ask?"

Apparently, someone decided calling all 57,700 voters would be too much work and so the potentially ineligible voters were just removed from the voter rolls. Wow. Even if it's not an intentional voter fraud, it's a mistake of incomprehensible proportions. Our right to vote is sacred. And someone in the Florida government just took that away from 57,700 voters just because they could.

The NAACP filed a class action suit which was settled in 2002, I think. The settlement requires the state or state agencies to take concrete steps to improve the voting proces. Check out that link for the specifics. I didn't see that any of the 57,700 disenfranchised voters were compensated monetarily.

So what do I think about this? Well, Jeb Bush is the governor of Florida. I mean, it looks bad, you know? Even if there wasn't a concerted effort to make sure Florida went Bush in 2000, it looks really, really bad.

Do I believe there could have been a conspiracy to make sure Bush was elected? And do I believe Bush himself could have been involved?

Yeah, I do. But there's no proof of that. Not one bit of proof.