Friday, November 01, 2002

Salon.com | Jeb Bush's secret weapon Exclusive but first paragraphs are good. I'll extract some relevant below. By the way, Salon has lowered the price to subscribe if you don't mind ads. I would also recommend a popup-stopper.

Moreover, DBT Online, which generated the disastrously flawed list, reports that if it followed strict criteria to eliminate those errors, roughly 3,000 names would remain -- and a whopping 91,000 people would have their voting rights restored.

91,000 people that Jeb Bush and the Republicans are knowingly depriving of their right to vote.

"DBT told state officials that the rules for creating this list would mean a significant number of people who weren't dead, who weren't registered in [in a Florida county], and who were not convicted felons would be included on the list," Lee said, adding that while "DBT made a lot of suggestions to the state on ways to reduce the number of eligible voters on that list," he quoted a Florida official who told them that they "want[ed] to capture more names that possibly aren't matches" and let the county supervisors determine if they were the right person or not.

Since that experience, ChoicePoint has gone out of the business of scrubbing lists. Lee said that "although we had been approached by other states to perform similar work, ChoicePoint has declined to perform voter registration for other states" because "when comes to performing work which may impact a person's right to vote, we are not confident that any of the methods that are used today will guarantee that the legal voters will not be wrongfully denied the right to vote."

Florida, however, seems to have decided to keep using those methods. Even when they're laughably inaccurate.

In 1998, elections officials with the secretary of state's office secretly directed DBT to use "fuzzy" matches of first names such as John, Johnny and Joan. As a result, voter Johnny Little of Leon County was not allowed to vote in 2000, because of a crime committed by one Johnnie Little of "locale unknown." In this case, the legal names did not match, but the two Littles' birth date and race (both are black) did. Johnny Little was tagged for removal from voter rolls. Also, the state, over the objections of DBT, also ordered the company to ignore suffixes such as "Jr." and "II," and mismatches of middle initials.

As part of the NAACP's suit against Florida, ChoicePoint agreed to review all the scrub lists. The company's report, dated Aug. 19, 2002, indicates that of the 94,000 names on the lists, only 3,000 match the nine key criteria (including social security number) that experts -- including DBT’s senior vice president, George Bruder -- have stated is necessary to avoid misidentification.

If I were MacBride I would immediately call for the prosecution of those criminally responsible for depriving 90,000 people of the right to vote.

Joe Conason's Journal also talks about this and other ways the Republicans are trying to suppress the vote.

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