Debunking the 2000 election theft CT

[Caustic Logic]

But that Chapter Five also explains why Florida was so actively purging the rolls of dead people, felons and those who had moved:
Discussion of the infamous 1997 Miami race is here:

You have all the talking points down! Yes, there had been precedent for such abuses, hence the use of purge lists. There was reason from this precedent to try for a complete list. Did they go overboard in general? No one I've heard of yet were told they couldn't vote since they were dead. The one woman at least was perhaps deleted for resembling someone who had moved. It's only on the felon purge list we see systemic error with genuine effect. Now it's often noted that felons vote overwhelmingly Democrat, which would effect those who WERE felons, but not necc. those whose names resemble felons.

So you set the standards for striking someone from the rolls loosely, purging more than is necessary, with the understanding that people can object. See also here, from that same chapter five:

Of those voters who contacted the FDLE to appeal the notice from a local supervisor of elections that they were ineligible to vote, approximately 50 percent were found to be convicted of felonies in Florida and 50 percent were determined to not have Florida felony convictions.[88]

Interesting. I haven't read all this stuff myself, including this. Okay, Fl Dep of Law Enforcement was involved in this project:

The Division of Elections, in addition to paying over $3 million to DBT Online, compensated the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for its role in the removal of felons from the voter rolls. In addition to its own toll-free hotline for voters who wished to confirm their eligibility status,[84] the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) performed record checks on a listing of 13,190 alleged felons in December 1999.[85] At a cost of $8 per record, the Division of Elections received an invoice for $105,520 from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.[86] The FDLE responded to approximately 5,000 voters whose names appeared on the felon exclusion list.[87] Of those voters who contacted the FDLE to appeal the notice from a local supervisor of elections that they were ineligible to vote, approximately 50 percent were found to be convicted of felonies in Florida and 50 percent were determined to not have Florida felony convictions.[88]

Thaere's a lot of detail there for some reason. $8 per record, 13,190 which means $105,520 if they checked all. Then... 5000 people of the 13,190 call in and request a check - and half are still wrongly listed. Or am I getting the order wrong?

Sounds like 50-50 among those purged, but those are only the people who appealed the notice; presumably among those who did not appeal the rate of Florida felony convictions was probably much higher.

There's logic to that. It's also possible a lot of the people weren't properly informed.

Although Florida election law required that the supervisors of elections, who received the exclusion lists compiled by Professional Analytical Systems & Services and DBT Online, attempt to verify the accuracy of those lists,[129] it appears that this procedure was not followed with any degree of uniformity.

Each county election supervisor decided their own metod of verification, with different alert letters. Ex - see Leahy's and Sancho's letters (ch 5 search). Accused were given 30 days to respond or else I guess the listing stood.

Interestingly, there was an earlier exclusion list for the 2000 election made by Professional Analytical Systems & Services (PASS) in 1998. Director of Elections Edith Baxter sent out numerous memos in 1998 regarding the lists, advising extra vigilance to county supervisors to be sure and verify felons, as the lists may be well in error and if there was doubt, let them vote prov. at least. DBT supplied two lists in 1999 and 2000. Sometime prior to the election, Baxter was replaced with Clayton Roberts. All the talk I've seen of errors with the rolls in in 1998 and after the election.

Now, I don't know why those who objected weren't allowed to cast provisional ballots; that seems to have varied by polling location according to the testimony.

That I'll have to look into further.

Is that a range among several counties? As noted above, right about half of the people who appealed were found to have been guilty of a felony; among those who did not appeal I'm sure it was substantially higher.

The 15% is from ch 5 "Professor Darryl Paulson testified that the Hillsborough County supervisor of elections estimated that 15 percent of those purged were purged in error and they were disproportionately African American." The 95 is a reading of Sancho's findings in Leon county. All we can really say is he found it at least 5% correct and helpful, the rest is unverified, I don't think we can say its all wrong as Palast does.

So... we have error of some size ... corrections of some degree ... unfixed error and people blocked from voting, uncertain number ... at one end Florida state policy setting the formula that led to error, and on the other the benefits to be reaped from this contextless Florida election thing.

 

[Caustic Logic]

So for what it's worth, I statrted out this thread with only limited information, believing as gospel the 95% wrong felon lists had disenfranchised something like 20,000 mostly Democrat voters, but I find it's not that dramatic at the least. But there is good circumstantial evidence for the theft. As Smarty Pants quoted Bill Maher, George Bush may not have stolen the election, but it did fall off a truck - that was driven by Jeb Bush, who was responsible for securing the load and failed, after promising the election to his brother. Ooops!

Brainster, thanks for the engaging comments - you've been able to put the fear in me that maybe I'm wrong. To prove otherwise is beyond me right now - more exacting evidence would need to be found on voting patterns, complaint call logs - FOIA perhaps? Serious study? Interviewing electoral procedure experts? Not today. Maybe one of them tomorrow or next week... maybe not.

Oh and Kestrel, thanks for popping in. You stepped in the trap at first but then got it, and thanks for the assists.


Anyone else - additional thoughts are welcome, esp. if you're an expert!

 

[SmartyPants]

So for what it's worth, I statrted out this thread with only limited information, believing as gospel the 95% wrong felon lists had disenfranchised something like 20,000 mostly Democrat voters, but I find it's not that dramatic at the least. But there is good circumstantial evidence for the theft. As Smarty Pants quoted Bill Maher, George Bush may not have stolen the election, but it did fall off a truck - that was driven by Jeb Bush, who was responsible for securing the load and failed, after promising the election to his brother. Ooops!

Well, you added that last part on your own.

My question is this: What if Al Gore had carried his own state, or any other state worth 4 or more electoral votes?

 

[Caustic Logic]

Well, you added that last part on your own.

Sorry, I should've said "to expand on..."

My question is this: What if Al Gore had carried his own state, or any other state worth 4 or more electoral votes?

He would win? I haven't studies all the margins and stuff to where I can say off the top of my head. It's pretty sad Gore didn't take Tennessee. Bush got his own state easy, and his brother's as well. Gore couldn't even get the first. Democrats should be blaming Gore for running a sub-par campaign, conceding the race early, and/or for failing to pull the right strings to at least carry Tennessee. Because as we have seen, it doesn't matter if you steal a state, so long as you can keep it slightly unprovable and sneak it in just before the deadline. If you lose a state for lack of proactive measures, it's your own dumb fault.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Oooh, oooh, another article with more details
Again, it's Greg Palast, but from Salon in Dec 2000
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/print.html

In the 10 counties contacted by Salon, use of the central voter file seemed to vary wildly. Some found the list too unreliable and didn't use it at all. But most counties appear to have used the file as a resource to purge names from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or no -- effort at all to alert the "purged" voters. Counties that did their best to vet the file discovered a high level of errors, with as many as 15 percent of names incorrectly identified as felons.

[In the later Unprecedented video, Palast claims "AT LEAST" fifteen percent.]

Etta Rosado, spokeswoman for the Volusia County Department of Elections, said the county essentially accepted the file at face value, did nothing to confirm the accuracy of it and doesn't inform citizens ahead of time that they have been dropped from the voter rolls.

[Volusia County 2000 pop 443,343 (wiki) 77% NH white 10.5% black]

Sancho in Leon County has different numbers in this piece - in the video he mentions a list of 690 where only 33 were later confirmed as felons.

Using the information received in January, Sancho sent 200 letters to county voters, by regular mail, telling them they had been identified by the state as having committed a felony and would not be allowed to vote. They were given 30 days to respond if there was an error. "They had the burden of proof," he says. He says 20 people proved that they did not belong on the list, and a handful of angry phone calls followed on Election Day. "Some people threatened to sue us," he said, "but we haven't had any lawyers calling yet."

Sounds like two different lists, one 200 long the other almost 700.

Leon County used the central voter file sent in January 2000 to clean up its voter rolls, but set aside the one it received in July. According to Thomas James, the information systems officer in the county election office, the list came too late for the information to be processed.

It was apparently the second unused one that was allegedly 95% wrong while the first was only somewhat over 10% off, and sent at the last minute, with note enough time to re-instate hundreds of mistaken purges.

Others:

Hillsborough County's elections supervisor, Pam Iorio, tried to make sure that that the bugs in the system didn't keep anyone from voting. All 3,258 county residents who were identified as possible felons on the central voter file sent by the state in June were sent a certified letter informing them that their voting rights were in jeopardy. Of that number, 551 appealed their status, and 245 of those appeals were successful.

Many Orange County voters never got the chance to appeal in any form. Condrun noted that about one-third of the letters, which the county sent out by regular mail, were returned to the office marked undeliverable. She attributed the high rate of incorrect addresses to the age of the information sent by DBT, some of which was close to 20 years old, she said.

no figures for how many voters were able to successfully appeal their designation as felons.

for Orange and Miami-Dade.

 

[Klimax]

It was apparently the second unused one that was allegedly 95% wrong while the first was only somewhat over 10% off, and sent at the last minute, with note enough time to re-instate hundreds of mistaken purges.

Was that other reviewed after elections? And is result (verified) available?

And sentence appears to be bit awkard. Which one was the "last-minute" and if that second had large errors and yet wasn't used,then where is "not enough time"?

Thank you.

 

[SmartyPants]

Sorry, I should've said "to expand on..."



He would win? I haven't studies all the margins and stuff to where I can say off the top of my head. It's pretty sad Gore didn't take Tennessee. Bush got his own state easy, and his brother's as well. Gore couldn't even get the first. Democrats should be blaming Gore for running a sub-par campaign, conceding the race early, and/or for failing to pull the right strings to at least carry Tennessee. Because as we have seen, it doesn't matter if you steal a state, so long as you can keep it slightly unprovable and sneak it in just before the deadline. If you lose a state for lack of proactive measures, it's your own dumb fault.

Not only would he win, but the Florida controversy becomes a moot point. Obviously you need to win more than one state to steal an entire election, knowing, of course, that the 2000 election was going to be close and delivering Florida would a blow to whichever side lost it. Nevertheless, Gore wins any number of other winnable states such as Missouri, Tennessee, New Hampshire, etc, and he would've been President.

When presented with what we both know is obvious, does it become a more far-fetched to have a "stolen" election? I think so.

 

[Kritikos]

[In the later Unprecedented video, Palast claims "AT LEAST" fifteen percent.]

See Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2002), chapter 1, "Jim Crow in Cyberspace: The Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida." Palast says at the opening of the chapter that he has "two silvery CD-ROM disks right out of the office computers of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris" containing the information on 57,000 people purged from the state voter lists for being convicted felons (p. 11). After giving an example of one person listed as having a date of conviction in 2007 (the disks would date from 2000), he says: "At least 90.2 percent of those on this 'scrub' list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, over half—about 54 percent—are Black and Hispanic voters. Overwhelmingly, it is a list of Democrats" (p. 12). This figure includes not only people falsely identified as convicted felons but also, according to Palast, 40,000 Florida residents who had served time for felonies in other states where felons do not lose their voting rights and who therefore, under Florida law, could not be legally deprived of their right to vote in Florida (pp. 34–36; the book reproduces an article by Palast published in The Nation in the issue of February 5, 2001, but on the magazine's Web site the article is available only to subscribers).

The sample from which the figure of 90.2 percent is derived is the list of supposed felons given by the state to the Leon County election board. The election board investigated all 694 names on the list and determined that only 34 were actually ineligible to vote in Florida. Palast, after mentioning that he used to teach a course in statistics at Indiana University, then says (p. 46):

The statewide list of felons is "homogeneous" as to its accuracy. Leon County provides us with a sample large enough to give us a "confidence interval" of 4.87 at a "confidence level" of 99 percent. Are you following me, class? In other words, we can be 99 percent certain that at least 90.2 percent of the names on the Florida list are not felons—52,000 wrongly tagged for removal.

Things look even worse when you start looking into the unsavory record of ChoicePoint, the large corporation that owned Database Technologies, the company hired by the State of Florida to compile the felon lists. Palast reports that ChoicePoint vice president James Lee stated over the telephone that the state of Florida "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon" on the list (p. 57). ChoicePoint representatives denied that race was used as a "search criterion" in compiling the purge lists. As Palast explains, this is quite true: race was not used as a search criterion; it was used as a match criterion (pp. 59–60).

 

[Brainster]

Note that we have not discussed John Fund's book on Democratic voter fraud in Florida. There's an aspect of "both sides were doing it" that is getting ignored. What about this story?

Several days after presidential votes were tallied in what has become the hotbed of Florida’s post-election confusion, police in Palm Beach County confiscated a ballot-box mechanism from the car of a well-known local Democrat.
The mechanism, called a “Votomatic,” did not contain any ballots. It’s a device used on some types of ballot boxes to punch votes through ballot cards, which are then tallied by computers.
According to a police report filed at the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office and obtained by ABCNEWS, Irving Slosberg, 53, pulled the mechanism from his car and handed it over to police on Nov. 11 after denying to a county government employee that he had it.

Palm Beach county had a very high rate of "overvotes" compared to the rest of the state, ballots where more than one hole was punched for the presidential race. The idea is, if you want to steal the race, you punch a whole bunch of ballots for Gore. If the individual ballot was already for Gore, nothing happens. If the individual ballot was for Bush, then there are two votes, and the ballot is spoiled and not counted.

 

[Kritikos]

Note that we have not discussed John Fund's book on Democratic voter fraud in Florida. There's an aspect of "both sides were doing it" that is getting ignored.

Fund's book is not primarily about Florida but about voter fraud in general. It has been several years since I read it, but the impression that I recollect getting from it is that the author makes a good case against "motor voter" registration arrangements as facilitating bogus voter registrations. I do not recollect his making much of a case for the widespread occurrence of voter fraud. But, as I said, it has been several years since I read the book, and these recollections (to say nothing of the original impressions) may be biased.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Was that other reviewed after elections? And is result (verified) available?

And sentence appears to be bit awkard. Which one was the "last-minute" and if that second had large errors and yet wasn't used,then where is "not enough time"?

Sorry that did come out wrong. I'm guessing the larger list with 690 names came in July, since he acted on the January info, sent only 200 letters, and got only 20 to confirm an error. If he checked the second list and found it ,

Dang, a few comments! Unfortunately it's Friday, my busy day, so I can't absorb muh til tonight.
Kritikos: Cool, I knew he had a book too, and now I remember its name. I appreciate the supporting info and now it's 90% all around?! It keeps getting worse the longer Palast looks at it - a sign of his initial caution or of deepening error? I'll read this stuff closely later - great stuff!

On-the ground realities are key tho - how many voters purged didn't get the warnings or chance to reinstate?

Brainster: I mentioned Fund inderectly in the OP. That site quoted his book, and it mentioned nothing about the voter rolls, only talked about cops and the recount. If the book is so, then it's strategically slanted. Interesting story on the machine, sounds odd. Both sides are capable and may be guilty, in FL or elsewhere, and that's a problem for Democracy in general. You say both sides do it? Is that an admission then that the Bushes were trying to steal?

 

[Kestrel]

Note that we have not discussed John Fund's book on Democratic voter fraud in Florida. There's an aspect of "both sides were doing it" that is getting ignored. What about this story?



Palm Beach county had a very high rate of "overvotes" compared to the rest of the state, ballots where more than one hole was punched for the presidential race. The idea is, if you want to steal the race, you punch a whole bunch of ballots for Gore. If the individual ballot was already for Gore, nothing happens. If the individual ballot was for Bush, then there are two votes, and the ballot is spoiled and not counted.

To start with, you don't need a Votamatic machine to vote with that punch card ballot system. The punches are already perforated. Votes can be entered using a paper clip or other simple tools to remove the chad. In fact, that is how absentee voters are instructed to enter votes using these ballots.

But to a layman unfamiliar with how Votamatic punch cards work, the story of someone having a "special" machine to punch ballots is fodder for a great conspiracy theory.

The conspiracy theory also ignores how election materials are handled. Voted ballots are not just left lying around in the office where anyone could come by and alter them. They are kept in boxes with numbered seals that must be broken to open the box. The numbers on these seals are checked when the boxes are opened for counting. Counting is done only when representatives of at least the two main political parties are present.

 

[Minadin]

I think he was talking about pre-punching the ballots, rather than post-punching.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Sorry again Klimax
that time it was my girlfriend's TV show and the rush to leave.
To finish, I'm just guessing the larger list with 690 names came in July, since supervisor Sancho acted on the January info, sent only 200 letters (presumably around 200 names), and got only 20 to confirm an error. If he checked a list and found it almost all wrong, it's more likely the July one, probably only studied after the election, and probably after Palast's Dec 4 article (no 95% error mentioned this early). If so, it had no effect on the election but would have been a major mess if it were used. It would also raise the question of why there were suddenly 490 more exclusions in six months in a county of only 150,000.

Kritikos:

The sample from which the figure of 90.2 percent is derived is the list of supposed felons given by the state to the Leon County election board. The election board investigated all 694 names on the list and determined that only 34 were actually ineligible to vote in Florida. Palast, after mentioning that he used to teach a course in statistics at Indiana University, then says (p. 46):

Quote:
The statewide list of felons is "homogeneous" as to its accuracy. Leon County provides us with a sample large enough to give us a "confidence interval" of 4.87 at a "confidence level" of 99 percent. Are you following me, class? In other words, we can be 99 percent certain that at least 90.2 percent of the names on the Florida list are not felons—52,000 wrongly tagged for removal.

Okay, so the at least 90.2% is from Leon county, again. That's sancho's county, the one we've been on. In the video Sancho says he identified 33, here it's 34, leaving an error rate of 95.1%, - 4.9% "confidence interval" = 90.2% orgreater statewide. One oddity is how sure he is here that 90-95 is the right range when he said in the video statewide was "AT LEAST 15%"? Hadn't he also taught these classes and known these formulas at that time? Hmmm...

ChoicePoint representatives denied that race was used as a "search criterion" in compiling the purge lists. As Palast explains, this is quite true: race was not used as a search criterion; it was used as a match criterion (pp. 59–60).

FWIW USCCR's report, ch. 5 states

The Division of Elections instructed DBT Online on the information it was to use in the data processing/data matching procedure.[32] George Bruder maintained that the “color blind” search criteria used to create a list of voters with a potential problem included name, date of birth, and social security number.[33] He claimed that neither race nor party affiliation was used to create the list.

Kestrel: That story sounds odd to me too, and your reasons for doubting it are convincing. For example, this line doesn't sound right:

Irving Slosberg, 53, pulled the mechanism from his car and handed it over to police on Nov. 11 after denying to a county government employee that he had it.

No I don't have it, here cops, here it is. What happened in between? Did he just hand them a "votomatic" straightened paperclip? Anyway, I plan to check out Fund's book once I get some old business settled with the county library, tomorrow I hope.

Klimax, Kritikos, and Kestrel, why are there three of you with K names? That's creeping me out!

 

[Caustic Logic]

From brainster's link, John Fund

With its hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, the Florida fiasco compelled this country to confront an ugly reality:

That he fails to even mention these real problems we're discussing here. He's all about election manipulation and systemic errors harming democracy and not one mention in the article of this widespread disenfranchisement? Now I'll grant he probably makes plenty of factual points, that the system is troubled (not that the solutions haven't made it worse), that Democrats and liberals and illegal aliens and etc. are sometimes guilty of election fraud, ballot stuffing, what have you. But he's got "2000" mentioned 11 times, Florida 9, usually together. In these spots he mentions problems like "the illegal votes of felons and aliens" but not ones like this;

if voters’ names did not appear on the rolls, they were not allowed to vote, even if they presented valid identification.

But he'll point out

Many of the suggested improvements, such as requiring voters to show ID at the polls, are bitterly opposed.

Example - all mentions of "roll"

upgrade technology, cull voter rolls and enhance training [listed improvements]
...
More insidious are flawed voter rolls, voter ignorance, lackadaisical law enforcement and a shortage of trained volunteers. [flawed is vague - in what way?]
...
We're going to bring challenge to those people that disenroll people [in a quote from John Kerry, in Florida specifically, said "before a single ballot was cast, counted or disputed," as part of the problem of liberal election by litigation, ]
...
The "Motor Voter Law," the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Clinton upon entering office, imposed fraud-friendly rules [...] making it difficult to purge "deadwood" voters (those who have died or moved away) [or have names similar to felons?]
...
In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age eighteen. Philadelphia's voter rolls, for instance, have jumped 24 percent since 1995 at the same time that the city's population has declined by 13 percent.

His take on voter rolls and their danger to Democracy is clear: they're too big, less names is good, purge purge purge. Dangers of overdoing it? Apparently none.

The guy's a Republican hack - I'll bet $1 right now his book spends pages discussing the dead people that voted in FL in '97 without one mention of the many living citizens who weren't allowed to in 2000.

And anyway, he dances right around this issue so well, I'm gonna go ahead and call his opinions irrelevant or worse.

 

[Caustic Logic]

The Media Consortium Florida Ballot Project found that a full recount of all Florida ballots statewide would have given a narrow election victory to Al Gore.

Can you believe i was so eager to believe you walked into my clever trap I though you said "Bush" instead of Gore? But it was such fun to imagine another debunker just walked in and said "media group recount, Bush won."

Ballot issues, how counted, the different chads, are all important issues too when dealing with such (depressignly) narrow differences, that different counting "scenarios" could easily yield victory to either side - both have been found to have truly won. All this stuff is clearly relevant, but again we'd be dealing with votes cast.

So we're looking at vote fraud; extras added in, and I'd guess there were some, and those excluded from even entering the system. The "no chads" are somehow the least talked about ballot problem! Perhaps the two manipulations were as balanced as the votes cast, again leaving us depressingly divided, uninspired, and uniformly deceitful? Luckily we can never know for sure.

 

[Kestrel]

I think he was talking about pre-punching the ballots, rather than post-punching.

Pre-punching Votamatic ballots has a similar problem. On election day, individual ballots are taken from a pad and handed to the voter by an election judge. This is done in full view of the voter, other judges at the polling place and other voters standing in line. If anything was already punched out, it would be visible to these witnesses.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Pre-punching Votamatic ballots has a similar problem. On election day, individual ballots are taken from a pad and handed to the voter by an election judge. This is done in full view of the voter, other judges at the polling place and other voters standing in line. If anything was already punched out, it would be visible to these witnesses.

And again that doesn't seem to work. Hmmm...

When Slosberg was asked by Denise Cote, director of public affairs for Palm Beach County if he would return the votamatic, Slosberg became confrontational and denied having the mechanism.

"I asked Mr. Slosberg to return it to me, and he said no, he intended to use it," Cote told ABCNEWS.com. She said Slosberg did not say how he wanted to use it and he declined to say how he had obtained it.

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/noframes/read/5449

Strange behavior. What did he intend to do with it, even when he was found out? Why insist on keeping up until the police arrive to take it? It was during the hand-count, he intended to use it, but:

When told of the incident, Palm Beach County's supervisor of elections, Theresa Lefore, declined to press charges, according to the report. She noted that this incident did occur during the hand count of the presidential election and Lefore stated she did not wish to pursue further this matter at this time due to extenuating circumstances...

Now I'm curious how Lefore handled Palm Beach County's purge lists... Did this Slosberg guy ever go to jail, or was he just a pretend criminal?

 

[Caustic Logic]

USCCR ch 2 - ouch.

According to Ms. Ramsey, the phone lines remained busy for three and a half hours—a delay she had never experienced during her time as a poll worker. Ultimately, the poll workers refused to allow her to vote because they could not verify her voter status.

Maria DeSoto, a poll worker in Palm Beach County, testified that she used her personal cellular phone to call the supervisor of elections office all day, but was only able to get through two or three times over the course of 12 hours. Ms. DeSoto added that if voters’ names did not appear on the rolls, they were not allowed to vote, even if they presented valid identification.

She returned to the precinct later that afternoon and was allowed to vote only after she discovered that her name had been misspelled on the rolls.

Susan and Joel Newman arrived at the Water Works Department in Palm Beach to vote at approximately 6:15 p.m. Upon their arrival, they noticed
"[T]he iron gates at the entrance were closed, preventing entrance . . . Several cars pulled into the entrance lane and tried to attract attention by honking horns and ringing an intercom. We waited 5–10 minutes but no one showed up and the gates remained locked. We drove off thinking we were wrong about the closing time—that the polls must have closed at 6:00. A few blocks away we spotted a police car and pulled up to check. He verified that the polls were open until 7:00. We complained about the situation we had just experienced and he told us to go to the Board of Elections (some 20 minutes away). We drove there and met a policeman as we entered the building. He listened to our complaint and politely told us there was nothing he could do. We would have to register our complaint with the [supervisor] of elections, Theresa LePore. Unfortunately, he told us her office had closed at 5 p.m. and her staff went home [and] we would have to complain the following day. We left, realizing that we would have no opportunity to vote this year.[19]

Yeah, they went home at 5:00. It's not like they had a backlog of calls to take on election day, people requesting permission to vote, anything like that...

 

[Caustic Logic]

Crickets. Alright, something fresh then, a well-documented example of scrub-list error I haven't even mentioned yet.

DBT's first list in January 2000 featured app. 65,700 names of felons to purge, and app 8000 of these were quickly found to be in error. It was probably the systemic nature of this block that tippped off county officials processing complaints - all were convicted of misdemeanors in Texas.
DBT double-checked their sources and found they made a mistake - in trusting the data supplied to them by officials in Texas. DBT announced the error and the fix in May, and by June had a new list out to the counties with 57,700ish felons rather than 65,700. Thus one single block error had provided 11% of the original "deadwood" list to clear out, but that one was also caught.

Now, mis-categorizing misdemeanors as felonies can happen by mistake. It can't do so with 8,000 cases one-at-a-time but only if it's done at the data-block level - one error repeated on all files. That this block error was made just as a company was specifically asking Texas about felons who needed to be barred from voting in the upcoming election is troubling. The worst of all of course is that the Governor of Texas was one of the candidates, and this "accidental" boost was being handed to his brother's people, perhaps well-prepared to maximize the edge.

My question is: can anyone here honestly tell me this is not a suspicious pattern worth considering a conspiracy over? I'm willing to consider Democrat counter-measures, like Slosberg's machine theft or the dead vote as it worked in 2000, or whatever. I suspect when we compare scale, however, the State has the advantage and they leaned Bush.