Jeb Bush was the Republican Governor of the State of Florida and brother of the Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush.

Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris was also co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, clearly a conflict of interest in conducting a fair and impartial election. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris promised to “Deliver Florida” to George W. Bush as reported in numerous newspaper articles.

Secretary of State, Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush had the motive and the means to make sure Florida’s decisive electoral votes were “delivered” to George W. Bush.

They accomplished this by illegally purging thousands of black voters off of the Florida voter rolls, ensuring a rigged, unfair advantage to George W. Bush, as shown in the above video.

As shown in the “2000 Election Rigged for Bush” video, ChoicePoint / DBT was given a $4 million no-bid contract under the Jeb Bush administration which wrongly and illegally purged thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter rolls.

 

Jeb Bush’s secret weapon

94,000 people on a voter “purge” list — half of them African-American — continue to be banned from voting in Florida, even though the state knows the list is wildly inaccurate.

Jeb Bush’s secret weapon

94,000 people on a voter “purge” list — half of them African-American — continue to be banned from voting in Florida, even though the state knows the list is wildly inaccurate.

 

Jame Lee, Vice President of Choicepoint / DBT testified to a panel called by US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney that the State of Florida Division of Elections stated it only wanted 80% accuracy on the list. In other words, to be identified as a convicted felon, one only need to have a similar name to that as someone listed on a Texas convicted felon’s list. You can view Mr. Lee’s testimony in the above video.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice “Florida registrants were purged from the rolls if 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of persons with criminal convictions. Those wrongly purged included Reverend Willie D. Whiting Jr., who, under the matching criteria, was considered the same person as Willie J. Whiting. Without specific guidelines for or limitations on the authority of election officials conducting purges, eligible voters are regularly made unnecessarily vulnerable. As it turned out, almost everyone on the Florida purged voters list had the right to vote”.

 

Antonin Scalia and his Corporate Republican appointed majority of 5 “justices” subverted democracy & engaged in partisan politics by stopping the 2000 election vote count. The above video explains the shocking details.

This caused George W. Bush to be installed as President. At the time the votes were stopped by the Supreme Court, there were only 154 votes separating Al Gore from George W. Bush (as detailed in the above video).

With only 154 votes separating Al Gore from George W. Bush, it’s easy to see how purging thousands of black voters being off of the Florida voter rolls rigged the 2000 election and handed it to George W. Bush on a Silver Platter.

If all of the illegally disqualified voters had been allowed to vote and all votes counted, the total votes would have decisively shown Al Gore to be the winner of the State of Florida and therefore the Presidency.

It was the Jeb Bush Administration’s illegal voter purge and Republicans who subverted Democracy by not allowing the votes to be counted that caused the installation of George W. Bush and the US to have a conservative majority in the Supreme Court.

 

 

Let’s not forget that Al Gore received 543,895 more votes than George W. Bush. Al Gore was the majority of American’s choice for president so Democracy was violated.

This is another example of how elections are “rigged” for Republicans… so even when they “lose”… they “WIN”.

 

REPUBLICANS DETERMINED TO STOP THE VOTE COUNT, OBSTRUCTED DEMOCRACY

 

As stated in the above article, “John Bolton was one of the pack of lawyers for the Republican presidential ticket who repeatedly sought to shut down recounts of the ballots from Florida counties before those counts revealed that Gore had actually won the state’s electoral votes and the presidency”.

“Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy argued at the time that 2,257 voters had apparently attempted to mark ballot cards for Gore or Bush but had not had them recorded because they had been improperly inserted into the voting machines. A hand count of those ballots revealed that 302 more of them would have gone for Gore than Bush. That shift in the numbers from just one of Florida’s 67 counties would have erased more than half of Bush’s 537-vote lead in the state”.

“But attempts to conduct a hand count were repeatedly blocked by the Bush-Cheney team, culminating with Bolton’s December 9 announcement that, “I’m here to stop the count.” A few days later, the U.S. Supreme Court would stop the count permanently, with a pro-Bush ruling in which five Republican-appointed justices, in the words of noted attorney Vincent Bugliosi, “committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law.”

 

2000 Election GOP House Thugs “Brooks Brothers Riot” also helped stop the Florida Recount which might have declared Al Gore the winner.

 

In this clip from the 2015 CNN documentary Bush v Gore, John “Mac” Stipanovich admits Republicans were determined to stop the vote count to make sure George W. Bush was installed as President. This proves Republicans only cared about winning and to HELL with Democracy and the will of the American people.

 

 

According to Lance deHaven-Smith, in his book entitled The Battle for Florida…

“Top Republicans used the powers of their offices to inject partisanship and instill fear down through the ranks of the state bureaucracy. In 1998 political operatives working for the Speaker of the house secretly examined voter registration records to learn the party affiliations of specific state employees and to identify agencies with high concentrations of Democrats.

After it was determined that the most Democratic agency in the state government was the Florida Department of education, the department was restructured and the positions of many of its employees were eliminated. Florida law forbids any consideration of partisan orientations in state hiring, firing, and contracting, but it fails to contemplate the more sinister possibility that highly partisan elected officials might purge the state bureaucracy indirectly by reorganization and privatization.”

According to hermes-press.com, “No sooner had he taken the oath of office than Jeb Bush began ferreting out and replacing Democrats throughout Florida state government, his first purge of Democratic voters. Jeb and his cohorts let special interests know that they expected political donations of $2 for every $1 donated to Democrats or defaulters would lose access to the governor and the legislative leadership“.

 

On Election Day 2000, rich white Republican voters stood in short lines and used up-to-date equipment, including electronic machines that let them correct their ballots.

African-American Voters Blocked from Reaching Polling Places by Police Roadblocks

Things were different in black districts. Some voters were flagged down at roadblocks, where highway patrol officers checked their drivers’ licenses. This was documented in sworn testimony to The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. (Click here for more details).

Others waited in long lines for an inadequate number of booths and ancient recording equipment. All too often, innocent citizens whose names appeared on the ex-felons list were informed for the first time that they could not vote when they showed up at the polling place.

Some votes were simply trashed by ballot handlers. In Duval County, 27,000 ballots were discarded, over half of them from black precincts in Jacksonville. No official challenges were filed within the 72-hour time limit, so thousands of mostly Democratic votes were lost. Sixteen-thousand votes for Gore disappeared overnight from the ongoing Volusia County tally and were reinstated only when an election supervisor questioned the subtraction of already registered votes. No voting machine company representative or election official was able to explain what happened.

Greg Palast, an award-winning American reporter based in England, broke the story of the scrub list and documented its sleazy origins in The Observer, London, November 26, 2000. Updates, as well as each edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy have added irrefutable, hard evidence of fraud. (Palast’s most recent estimate of all qualified Florida voters barred from casting a ballot in Election 2000 stands at 90,000.)

The story was huge in Europe, but the American press ignored it completely. Massive civil rights violations that subverted an election just didn’t resonate with the mainstream press. On January 10, 2001, lawyers acting for the NAACP sued and won their case against ChoicePoint’s DBT, Secretary of State Katherine Harris (who coincidentally was enthusiastically co-chairing the Bush campaign), and Bush loyalist Clay Roberts, Director of the Division of Elections. In July 2002, to atone for its staggering error rate of 95%, DBT agreed to remove innocent voters from the now infamous list of purported ex-felons. (In 2002, the purge list hadn’t been corrected. In 2004, another suspicious list appeared. (end quote from hermes-press)

 

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2000 Election Investigation Recommended that the U.S. Department of Justice should “immediately initiate the litigation process against the governor” (Jeb Bush)

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights conducted an extensive public investigation of allegations of voting irregularities during the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

“There emerges a confluence of circumstances that indicates intimidation and harassment of the Florida voters, and that was set in motion long before the November election,” said Commissioner Victoria Wilson of the US Commission on Civil Rights in their report, “Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election.” Issued June 8, 2001, the report accuses Florida election officials of “gross dereliction” and “injustice.”

To follow is some of the text from the report at http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch9.htm

“Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election”

“The investigation, utilizing the Commission’s subpoena power, included three days of hearings, more than 30 hours of testimony, 100 witnesses, and a systematic review of more than 118,000 pages of pertinent documents.

Responsibility Without Accountability

Florida’s governor is the state’s chief executive officer who “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Florida’s secretary of state is the chief election officer and oversees the Division of Elections. Each county has an elected supervisor of elections, except one. Together, the secretary of state and the county supervisors of elections preside over Florida’s elections.

Governor John Ellis Bush

When asked about his responsibilities to ensure the election laws of Florida were faithfully executed during the November 2000 election, Governor Bush testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that he had no real legal authority over election matters except for certifying the election and serving as a member of the state canvassing board. He indicated that he recused himself from participating on the state canvassing board because his brother was one of the presidential candidates. Governor Bush testified that “governors have the moral authority . . . to make sure that the laws, not only the state laws, but . . . also federal laws are upheld. . . .” When asked what authority and responsibility he had regarding preparation for the 2000 presidential election, Governor Bush testified that he had none and that “the secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of elections were responsible for that, and they carried out their duties.”

Under the Florida Constitution, the governor is charged with ensuring that “the laws be faithfully executed,” a responsibility Governor Bush apparently delegated to others with respect to elections. Under Florida election law, the governor is also specifically empowered to “appoint special officers to investigate alleged violations of the election laws . . .” Governor Bush testified that he had not appointed any officers to do any investigation of alleged irregularities surrounding the November 2000 election but would “if there was a reason to do so.” As of the date of this report there is no indication that the governor has exercised this authority by appointing special officers to investigate the widespread allegations of violations of the Florida election law”.

Findings:

Despite the closeness of the election, it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election.

Disenfranchisement of Florida voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of African Americans. Statewide, based on county-level statistical estimates, African American voters were nearly 10 times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected in the November 2000 election.

Recommendations:

• The U.S. Department of Justice should immediately initiate the litigation process against the governor, secretary of state, director of the Division of Elections, specific supervisors of elections, and other state and local officials responsible for the execution of election laws, practices, and procedures, regarding their contributions, if any, to the extraordinary racial disparity in the rate that votes were rejected, through their actions or failure to act before and during the 2000 presidential election, in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended. Appropriate enforcement action should be initiated to ensure full compliance with the election laws.

• The Civil Rights Division in the Office of the Florida Attorney General should initiate the litigation process against state election officials who violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended, and/or Title IX of the Florida statutes through their actions or failure to act before, during, and after the November 2000 election. Based on the results of the investigation, appropriate enforcement action should be initiated to ensure full compliance with the election laws.

• The U.S. Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division in the Office of the Florida Attorney General should initiate the litigation process against all state election officials who through their actions or failure to act violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended, by not obtaining preclearance either from the federal district court of Washington, D.C., or the U.S. attorney general. Based on the results of the investigation, appropriate enforcement action should be initiated to ensure full compliance with the election laws”.

END OF QUOTE:

Note that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recommended that the “U.S. Department of Justice should immediately initiate litigation process against the governor, secretary of state, director of the Division of Elections, specific supervisors of elections, and other state and local officials responsible for the execution of election laws”.