Jeb Bush deliberately purged minorities from Fla. voting rolls by wrongly identifying them as felons [View all]

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Jonathan Chait ‏@jonathanchait
Jeb Bush, with malice aforethought, purged minorities from the voting rolls by wrongly identifying them as felons http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/25/jeb-bush-florida-voter-purge_n_7656764.html?1435232658 …

____As the 2016 campaign heats up, an episode from his tenure as Florida governor reveals why Bush's image as a “uniter, not a divider,” as his older brother used to put it, may not stand up. The state's deeply flawed purge of felons from its voting rolls in advance of the 2000 presidential election remains a scar that still has not healed for many in the state.

“I’ll never the forget people that came up to me and said, ‘You let them steal our votes,’” Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), who became state's first African-American elected to Congress since Reconstruction when she won her seat in 1992, told The Huffington Post. “So many people were just wiped off the rolls -- people who’d been voting for years and years. You had the obligation to prove that you weren’t a felon.”

The felon purge wrongfully denied thousands of legitimate voters the ability to participate in a presidential election pitting Republican George W. Bush against Democrat Al Gore. Ultimately, a few hundred Florida ballots would determine the presidency, and with it, the nation’s path for the next eight years and, really, well beyond.

Though it received little notice outside of Florida in the election’s immediate aftermath, as hanging chads and butterfly ballots took center stage during the recount, the purge remains for many the most egregious example of voter disenfranchisement that took place during the 2000 presidential election, which was ultimately decided by a Supreme Court ruling.

“The purge was right out of one of these playbooks in how you diminish minority turnout -- there was absolutely no justification for it,” said Dan Gelber, a former Democratic state legislator and a longtime Bush nemesis...


read: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/25/jeb-bush-florida-voter-purge_n_7656764.html?1435232658