In a message dated 2/18/2003 6:06:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: >You live in a representative democracy, not a direct one. You voted >for Bush, >albeit by the slimmest of margins. That means he gets to >decide. That's what your >democracy is.>>Sarah
No, no, no ... Bush was not elected ... not by popular vote, not by electoral college, and it's got nothing to do with chads, hanging, pregnant, or otherwise. Here are some facts that have been reported by the BBC, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, as well as others. Go ahead, check it out for yourself. In 1999, Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State in charge of elections and, in a neat coincidence, George W. Bush's presidential campaign co-chairwoman, hired an independent accounting firm, Database Technologies, to purge Florida's voter rolls of not only actual former felons, but anyone *suspected* of being an ex-felon (rehabilitated felons are not allowed to vote in Florida, this is a law that varies from state to state; incidentally, in the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic). DBT was instructed to scan for people with similar names to those of actual felons, with the same birthdate as actual felons, or a similar social security number; they were instructed to scan for an 80 per cent match of relevant information. The inevitable result was that thousands of legitimately eligible voters would be barred from voting. DBT, although generally sympathetic to Republicans, at least had enough integrity to warn Harris' office! that "programming in this fashion may supply you with false positives." The State of Florida, however, was unconcerned and told the firm to go ahead; in Harris elections office files, next to the DBT's recommended cross-check and verification plan, there is a handwritten note: "DON'T NEED." In Miami-Dade, Florida's largest county, 66 per cent of the disenfranchised voters were black; overall, black voters went 90 per cent for Gore. You do the math. But that's not all ... an additional 8000 Floridians were barred because their names were on a list of former felons who had moved from another state; they had done their time and their voting rights had been reinstated. Some on this list had committed only misdemeanors, even parking violations or littering. What was that other state? Of course, it was Texas ... another neat coincidence. All told, more than 180,000 registered voters in Florida were permanently wiped from the voter rolls. Were some of these legitimately barred, at least according to Florida law? Yes. But Linda Howell, the elections supervisor of Madison County, was just one of several thousand with squeaky clean records who were barred from voting on Election Day. Remember, Bush "won" Florida by a mere 537 votes; is it safe to say that of 180,000 disenfranchised voters (many of them questionably), many of them black, at least 538 had the dumb luck to simply have had the same name as a felon, or the same birth! date, or a similar social security number, and would likely have voted for Gore? I think so. But forget about all that for a moment ... no one could possibly believe that thousands of Jewish voters would have intentionally voted for Pat Buchanan, not even Pat Buchanan himself believes this. So, all this hanky-panky (and, really, much more ... just for instance, the head of the Fox network's election coverage, who went way out on a limb and declared Bush the winner before any other network, before the polls had closed in California, before the massive irregularities had even begun to be resolved, is none other than a first cousin of George and Jeb) goes down in a state where the "winner's" brother just happens to be governor, where the secretary of state in charge of elections just happens to be the "winner's" Florida campaign manager (how is that fact alone not an egregious conflict of interest that automatically invalidates all her shenanigans?), where thousands of legitimate voters are disqualified because of a faulty list that came from the state where the "winne! r" just happened to be governor, where the "winner" was declared prematurely by a media executive who just happened to be the "winner's" first cousin ... this was all just coincidence? Yeah, right. It was a coup, that's what it was, enabled with the help of a partisan Supreme Court decision led by judges appointed by the father of the "winner," and, no, I won't "get over it." Our emperor -- the man who told the Swedish prime minister, "It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity, and incumbency" -- is wearing no clothes. -Fred (no, not that one ... the other one)
