In 2002, Congress passed the wrongly-named "Help America Vote Act" which requires every state to computerize, centralize and purge voter rolls before the 2004 election. This is the very system which the state of Florida used to remove tens of thousands of eligible African-American and Hispanic voters from voter registries before the Presidential election of 2000, WITH A 90% ERROR RATE. That's right, 90%! A ridiculously high and suspect percentage of MINORITY DEMOCRATS were illegally disenfranchised. The Act also lays a minefield of other impediments to voters: an effective rollback of the easy voter registration methods of the Motor Voter Act; new identification requirements at polling stations; and perilous incentives for fault-prone and fraud-susceptible touch-screen voting machines (recently FLORIDA and OHIO certified DIEBOLD machines STATEWIDE).
Bottom line: In 2000, Al Gore would have picked up approximately 80 THOUSAND more votes had this illegal purge NOT taken place (
http://www.gregpalast.com)! With all of these other issues being thrown around, the most vital fact in '04-that MILLIONS of legal voters wil be purged at the whim of the 50 secretaries of state, an elected, and therefore partisan, official- is being overlooked. Their temptation to purge voters of the opposition party is enormous and African-Americans, whose vote concentrates in one party (guess who?!), are an easy and obvious target, as they were before.
Democracy itself was stolen by this administation in '00 and between the purges and black box voting, the thieves well may keep enjoying their spoils..
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