I N T E R N A T I O N A L

Havana. July 19, 2004

‘IF THE PUBLIC ONLY KNEW...’
Elections in Jeb Bush’s Florida

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD-Special for Granma International-

THE English language has a very guttural word to describe con men. They’re called “crooks,” pronounced with a certain tone of disdain. For the man who tried to exclude a further 40,000 ex-convicts from the electoral rolls in a state where 600,000 people with legal records are already deprived of their right to vote, when he himself was closely associated with experts in fraud, this classification fits like a glove.

Three and a half years after the electoral farce of 2000, and five months before the November elections, the incredibly anarchic situation of the electoral system in Jeb Bush’s Florida has not only failed to improve, but has worsened, according to a number of analysts. And the Great Brother governor’s excluded-voter scandal has just demonstrated that he was preparing - aside from the innumerable deficiencies in the electoral system - a gigantic fraud aimed at excluding tens of thousands of voters, in their great majority African Americans.

The scandal of the “felon-purge” voter list now splashed across the front pages of Florida newspapers has not resulted in federal or Florida justice taking action against the Great Brother, even though the issue is gigantic public fraud aimed at cheating the entire state population, robbing tens of thousands of voters of their right to vote and fraudulently favoring the Republican Party and George Bush’s reelection in November.

Jeb Bush’s insistence on imposing the blind elimination of more than 47,000 alleged ex-convicts, which motivated the resignation of Ed Kast, head of the Division of Elections, and the secret character of the document itself, have been explained in recent days by the fraud that was being prepared.

After analyzing the list - finally obtained after an intense struggle by the American Civil Liberties Union - The Florida media has revealed that Hispanics, including Cuban-Americans who traditionally vote Republican, are virtually absent from the document that contained the names of more than 20,000 African Americans.

Only 61 Hispanic names appear on a list of nearly 47,763 names, while citizens of Hispanic origin represent 17% of the state’s population.

It’s worth recalling that in a country that touts itself as a model of democracy, more than 1.7 million citizens have lost their right to vote for having legal records. Of this number, a large majority are African Americans, a social group whose votes generally go - nearly 90% of them - to the Democratic Party.

In that way, the state of Florida, strategic for Republican George W. Bush’s reelection, and governed by his brother, keeps some 600,000 ex-convicts out of the democratic process, a national record.

The most recent information from the U.S. Justice Department shows that by the end of 2002, some 6.7 million people in the United States were on parole, in prison, or free on bail.

Only four states, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts and Utah allow prisoners to vote. Six states, including Florida, deny ex-convicts the right to vote, simultaneously taking away their right to seek employment with a significant number of state agencies and businesses.

In recent weeks, revelations on the Bush list of excluded persons have increased.

Election supervisors from various Florida counties, in a meeting in Key West, affirmed that they found - along with its other problems - an error rate of 6-7% in voter registration.

For its part, the Miami Herald found that 59% of the individuals eliminated were officially registered as Democrats, while only 19% were registered as Republicans.

In addition, 2,119 ex-convicts, mostly African Americans and Democrats, had their voting rights restored after a long and humiliating process, but were also appearing on Bush’s. Glenda Hood, Bush’s secretary of state, finally had to admit that the electoral rolls do not include the names of thousands of people whose rights were restored ... before 1977.

After weeks of refuting every attack on his list, on July 10 Jeb Bush had to abruptly drop it after so many scandalous revelations.

He then announced that he was withdrawing the document ... even though election supervisors in each of the state’s counties would have the responsibility of identifying and removing ex-convicts from their polls - which opens the door to new partisan maneuvering.

Secretary Hood - an intimate friends of Mel Martínez, godfather of Miami’s Cuban-American mafia - explained the decision as due to “an unintentional and unforeseen discrepancy...related to the Hispanic classification” of the names.

Bush’s sudden decision has provoked numerous commentaries among those groups against which the Great Brother maintained a totally intransigent attitude during the debate that preceded his decision. Many saw in that withdrawal the fraudulent nature of the operation and admission of guilt by the governor.

“This smells to high heaven. It strains credulity to think that Hispanics were somehow left off the list, while African Americans remained on the list,” declared Ralph G. Neas, president of People For the American Way Foundation, a group that has been heavily involved in denouncing the fraud.

“This is a pattern of deception and a pattern of actions aimed at preventing Democratic voters from voting,” commented Robert Wexler, a Democratic representative for Boca Ratón. “This is Jim Crow in Florida of 2004,” he added, referring to a 19th-century theater character whose name is used to describe segregationist laws in the United States, among them laws used to deprive Blacks of their voting rights.

But it was not known at the time what the Orlando Sentinel was to reveal in the following days: the fraudulent list has cost the state of Florida “a minimum of $1.8 million”... which was paid to a firm called Accenture, a private company whose owners are “closely associated with the Republican Party.” Another $125,000 was later paid to a law firm of Republican lawyers for hampering lawsuits by civil rights groups.

“Jeb Bush wasted millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money in an attempt to purge voters,” said Scott Maddox, president of the Democratic Party in Florida.

“He spent millions with Accenture and hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers to defend an indefensible position,” Maddox asserted. He then added something that was very surprising coming from the mouth of a U.S. politician: “If the public only knew that a politician who is supposedly conservative when it comes to taxes has spent millions to try to manipulate the electoral process, a general protest would ensue.”

“If the public only knew,” he said, suggesting that the “public” is NOT adequately informed.

If the public also only knew that Accenture’s lobbyists include a former president of the Republican Party in Florida and two former officials of that same party, as well as an former assistant to... Jeb Bush.

If the public only knew that Glenda Hood’s office agreed to pay a $425 hourly fee to Miami lawyer Joe Klock Jr, plus another $300 hourly to six more lawyers ... when the state of Florida supposedly has no money for child care centers, drug detox programs, public health, etc.

If the public only knew... how Noelle Bush, Jeb’s daughter, who was arrested for drug possession, did not lose her right to vote thanks to the indulgence of the courts.

If the public only knew... how many times its media - “the freest in the world” - and the legal authorities maintain a criminal silence to protect the crook who, from Tallahassee, governs Florida with deception, lies and fraud.

U.S. Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson has urgently asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to make an official request that the United Nations provide observers for the November 2 elections in the United States to “ensure free and fair elections.”

Thirteen Democratic congressmen, led by Johnson, a Representative from Texas, sent a letter on July 8 to UN General Secretary Kofi Annan requesting the presence of UN representatives in every county of the country during the voting process and any vote recount afterwards.

The UN immediately responded that the request could not be accepted, as such a request, if not made by the U.S. government, could be considered “intervention in a country’s sovereignty.”

“As legislators, we should guarantee the American people that our country will not experience another nightmare like the 2000 presidential elections,” the congress members emphasized in their letter to Annan, adding that this is the first step of avoiding history being repeated.

In November 2000, current President George W. Bush arrived at the While House thanks to the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in his favor in rejecting a manual recount of Florida votes. In that state’s counties of Miami-Dade and Broward, Cuban-Americans paid by a group called Vigilia Mambisa, led by Republican Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart, showed up to paralyze the democratic process and provoke the intervention by the court.

In her letter to Powell, Johnson expressed the public’s grave concerns regarding electoral system reforms that were not undertaken after that scandalous election, the exclusion of voters from the electoral rolls and suspicious failures in the electronic voting system.

Studies have shown that between “four and six million votes” were not counted during the 2000 presidential elections, Johnson says in her letter.

Immediately, Republican congress members presented an amendment in the House banning the use of public funds for requesting UN election-monitoring equipment.

For her part, Corrine Brown, a Florida Democrat, announced that the Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has confirmed that it will be present in the United States - specifically, in Florida - on Election Day.

However, state election authorities in Florida have already announced that such observers are not to be allowed access to the voting process and that, in any case, they would have to remain at a distance of more than 50 feet from the polls. (J-G. A.) •