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Fraud and racial segregation in the
land of true brotherhood
A
study reports racist electoral laws in the United
States, inspired by legalized segregation of the
19th century • Florida, the champion of arbitrary
exclusion of ex-convicts • Governor Jeb Bush, who is
keeping 600,000 people off the electoral rolls and
who determines their reinstatement, has an eloquent
history that he prefers to forget
ACCORDING to a new study by experts at the
University of Minnesota and Northwestern, the
exclusion of more than 1.4 million African-American
ex-convicts from the U.S. electoral process is
deliberately racist and stems directly from
segregationist laws established during the 19th
century. And it is Florida that holds first place
among the states that most cruelly applies such
discriminatory procedures.
In
the country that proclaims itself to be such a model
of democracy, more than 1.7 million citizens do not
have the right to vote because of having a criminal
record. Of that number, a large majority is Black, a
social group that tends to vote mostly for the
Democratic Party.
The
state of Florida, strategic for Republican President
George W. Bush’s reelection, and governed by his
brother, is “distinguished” by the fact that 600,000
of its citizens are deprived of the right to vote, a
national record.
Governor Jeb Bush himself controls the electoral
system, via Secretary of State Glenda Hood, a
personal friend of Cuban-American Mel Martínez,
former federal secretary of housing and a well-known
accomplice of Miami’s Cuban-American mafia.
According to the study by a group of researchers
into the U.S. election system, Florida, Georgia,
Texas, Virginia and Kentucky are among the states
where the last Senate elections were the most
hard-fought (like the 2000 presidential elections)
and won by Republicans, to a great extent thanks to
the laws excluding ex-convicts from voting.
The
study, titled “Felon Voting Rights and the
Disenfranchisement of African Americans,”
compliments a previous study, “Ballot Manipulation
and the ‘Menace of Negro Domination,’ “ a joint
project between the University of Minnesota and
Northwestern.
“African Americans are a significant part of the
excluded population,” Christopher Uggen, a
sociologist at the University of Minnesota,
co-author of the study, commented on the web site
Bet.com.
During the second half of the 19th century, many
U.S. states refused to comply with the Fifth
Amendment, which guarantees Black people the right
to vote. These states applied a number of laws and
regulations with the aim of minimizing the
African-American vote under the pretext of a
supposed “threat of Black domination,” Uggen
explained.
The
spirit of that refusal to grant the descendants of
slaves their elemental rights is present in every
regulation that blocks access to basic democracy for
that important minority. Little has changed in that
sphere in many former slave states and other
countries that the United States invaded to teach
its concept of democracy.
Thirteen percent of all Black men in the United
States are deprived of their right to vote. More
than 245,000 women are in the same situation.
In
six of the states that withhold such an important
right via racist laws – Alabama, Florida, Kentucky,
Mississippi, Virginia, and Iowa – one out of every
four people of African origin is deprived of his or
her right to vote.
Only
the states of Maine, Massachusetts Utah and Vermont
allow inmates to participate in elections while
serving a prison term.
Internationally, the norm is for people convicted of
crimes to automatically recover all of their civic
rights upon completing their prison sentences.
In
Florida, ex-convicts who wish to have their full
rights restored have to go through a lengthy
bureaucratic process for this “privilege.” In the
case of serious crimes, they must somehow be called
and present themselves in person in a special
hearing presided over by Governor Jeb Bush, an
extremely humiliating, medieval process in which
they have to beg the governor to restore their
rights.
In
2003, some 21,000 former convicts recovered their
rights after civil rights organizations intervened
and demonstrated the vast number of people who were
unable to participate in the 2000 elections on
account of having been wrongfully excluded.
With
four months to go before the November presidential
elections, 8,000 persons who have solicited that
right have yet to be attended to, according to
Bush’s own services.
The
election for the next U.S. president could be
decided in Florida by a very narrow margin of votes,
according to all observers.
Last
month, Bush’s officials announced that they had
discovered 47,000 people registered to vote who
“could be” ex-convicts, and the governor ordered
their exclusion, a process so absurd and arbitrary
that the state’s senior elections official, Ed Kast,
resigned.
Because it is a secret, in line with a Florida law
approved by the Republicans shortly after George W.
Bush robbed the “election,” the list of those 47,000
“excludables” cannot be consulted by the population
like any other electoral roll, in what is doubtless
a case unique in the world. The state recently
consented to hand over a copy of the list to the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the country’s
most important civil rights group, after it was
recognized as the legal advisor to the Green Party.
In
addition to this scandalous situation, Florida
continues to lack a trustworthy voting system. All
indications are that the next elections will produce
situations as absurd as those seen in 2000, in
Miami-Dade and Broward.
The
computerization of the voting system is taking place
in the midst of that crisis. A report by a
Miami-Dade official has just revealed that the
Votronic brand voting machines, used in Miami-Dade
and Broward counties, present a “serious defect.”
According to that expert, those apparatuses cause
votes to be lost and for entire machines to
disappear during the final voting audit.
Lacking a mechanism for printing on paper, the
Votronic machines, which are banned in California,
do not allow voting results to be checked in a
detailed manner. Florida Secretary of State Glenda
Hood had repeatedly failed to authorize the purchase
of the printing accessories needed for such a
process. •
The
racist exclusion of voters with criminal records,
the manipulation of secret lists and – according to
some observers – the probable conclusion of the
upcoming elections in another confusing situation
propitious for fraud, is convenient for a Republican
Party that openly allies itself with the
Cuban-American mafia.
The
dubious past of Jeb Bush – who was an associate of
well-known dissolute characters in his financial
adventures – would allow him to easily orient
himself in that giant swindling operation.
Upon
his arrival in Florida from Texas, Jeb Bush was
hired by Armando Codina, a businessman at that time
a member of the executive council of the terrorist
Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF). Via a
complacent millionaire friend, they obtain $4.56
million in loans from the Broward Federal Savings &
Loan Association in Sunrise, Florida to buy a
building in Miami. When they couldn’t repay the
loan, they managed to get the federal regulators to
reduce the building’s value to $505,000, and then
repaid that amount, kept the building and sued the
former administrators of Broward Federal Savings &
Loan Association, which was bankrupt.
Jeb
was also associated with Leonel Martínez, a
well-known drug trafficker who smuggled more than
1,500 kilograms of cocaine into Miami between 1985
and 1986. When he was arrested in 1989 and then
convicted, federal prosecutors had in their hands an
eloquent photograph of Jeb shaking hands with
Martínez, but refused to hand it over to the press.
Meanwhile, Martínez had contributed, with a number
of checks, to the so-called Fund for the Future of
America, headed up by Vice President George Bush
(Sr.) and later, by his presidential campaign.
Another one of Jeb Bush’s dubious business partners
who won’t cost him exclusion
from the voter rolls is Mario Castellón, an
extreme-right wing Guatemalan businessman who
introduced himself to a leader of the Nicaraguan
contras to provide “medial services” to
mercenaries via the illegal network overseen by
Oliver North, Donald Gregg and narco-terrorist Félix
Rodríguez.
Jeb also linked up with “Manny” Díaz, whose business
buddies include Charles Keating Jr., convicted of
having cheated dozens of investors in Lincoln
Savings & Loan of a record $6 billion.
He also had an extensive relationship with Miguel
Recarey, another “successful” Cuban-American, who
diverted a large amount of a federal subsidy
destined for public health services in Miami.
Likewise, through his firm, International Medial
Centers (IMC), he organized hospital services for
the Nicaraguan contra mercenaries, a
specialty of then-Vice President George Bush.
Simultaneously, Jeb received $75,000 from IMC as its
real estate agent to find a new headquarters site
for Recarey, which he never did.
Recarey now appears on the FBI’s most-wanted list.
And Bush, who has overlooked his own past, is the
man who is deciding who may or may not vote in the
state where in 2000 the U.S. dream of democracy was
violated in the most spectacular way ever witnessed.
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