Some Democratic operatives have apparently acknowledged privately that former Governor Jeb Bush, has a biography and demeanor that could chip away at the Democratic coalition that elected and re-elected President Obama to the White House in 2008 and 2012.
But Jeb Bush's critics in Florida, however, scoff at the notion that Jeb Bush can appeal to minority voters, after Jeb Bush's leading role in Florida's deeply flawed purge of felons from its voting rolls in advance of the 2000 presidential election, which remains a scar that still has not healed for many across the state.
“I’ll never the forget people that came up to me and said, ‘You let them steal our votes,’” Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), who became state's first African-American elected to Congress since Reconstruction when she won her seat in 1992, told The Huffington Post. “So many people were just wiped off the rolls -- people who’d been voting for years and years. You had the obligation to prove that you weren’t a felon.”
The felon purge wrongfully denied tens of thousands of legitimate voters the ability cast a ballot in a presidential election pitting Republican George W. Bush against Democrat Al Gore. The purge remains for many the most egregious example of voter disenfranchisement that took place during the 2000 presidential election.
“The purge was right out of one of these playbooks in how you diminish minority turnout -- there was absolutely no justification for it,” said Dan Gelber, a former Democratic state legislator and a longtime Bush nemesis. “It was almost a purposeful crashing of a car. They knew it was irresponsible and about something incredibly important, and they went forward knowing that the only mistakes were going to benefit them.”
The State of Florida has banned convicted felons from participating in elections since 1868. But for the first time, in 1998, the year before Jeb Bush took office, Florida's state legislators passed a law intended to clean up the voter rolls.
The secretary of state’s office awarded Database Technologies Inc., (DBT) a $4 million contract to carry out the effort to ensure that felons, deceased voters, and non-residents would be blocked from participating in the 2000 election by purging the voter rolls. Since Florida did not track its voters by Social Security number, the company was instructed to engage in a subjective process that attempted to match felon names and dates of birth with voter records, allowing for “ near matches” that were close, but not exact.
After Jeb Bush took office in 1999, this process continued. In the months leading up to the 2000 presidential election, local election supervisors began receiving lists from state officials of people DBT had identified as convicted felons and thus needed to be eliminated from the voting rolls. And the whole process soon turned into a complete disaster.
It became immediately clear that the effort was generating a slew of false positives. Voters in good standing, who happened to share names with convicted felons, but had never been in trouble with the law, were being taken off the voting rolls.
But election officials in Tallahassee -- led by Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who would later gain infamy over her controversial handling of the election recount -- declined to make the process more transparent and uniform. No surprise there.
Charges that the purge was politically motivated grew louder when it was revealed that the man responsible for determining the parameters for voter removal was Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell IV -- a Division of Election attorney who went on to become general counsel for the Florida Republican Party.
In early 1999, DBT product manager Marlene Thorogood warned Mitchell of false positives generated by the guidelines that he had set. Thorogood clearly knew what a huge problem the guidelines were causing, but in an email Mitchell sent in March of that year, he told Thorogood not to concern herself with wrongly eliminating non-felons from the voter rolls. Mitchell said it was better to purge too many people than too few and that county elections supervisors could make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.
Many county officials sent certified letters notifying people on the lists that the Department of Law Enforcement had identified them as felons and told that they would need to provide evidence to challenge that conclusion or be permanently removed from the voter rolls.
Some Floridians who learned that they had been wrongfully removed from the voting rolls attempted to bring the matter directly to Governor Jeb Bush.
In a message sent on Aug. 28, 2000, to jeb@myflorida.com -- one of the governor's official email addresses -- a man named Gene Gay noted that he had recently received a letter indicating that he had lost his right to vote.
“I have search all weekend for a site to access that type of records with no success,” Gay wrote. “Where do U go online to get that sort of information without paying these scalpers prices … This is a lot of stuff, for a person whom knows, he has NOT been convicted of any felony. This is very important to me please respond asap.”
Estimates vary on just how many non-felons in Florida were unable to cast ballots in the 2000 presidential election, but the total was at least 1,100, according to a 2001 Palm Beach Post analysis, and may have been much higher.
But of course, by the time the recount began in Florida post-election, the damage had already been done by both Jeb Bush.
Following the election recount, in which he officially recused himself, Jeb Bush sought to distance himself from the botched purge, arguing that as governor, he was not charged with administering the election.
A post-election investigation by the U.S. Commission On Civil Rights, however, in which Bush was subpoenaed, was dubious about this reasoning, noting that the actions Bush took immediately after the 2000 election demonstrated that he did, in fact, have the ability to act on voting-related matters.
“Florida’s governor insisted that he had no specific role in election operations and pointed to his secretary of state as the responsible official,” the commission wrote in its report. “After the election, however, the governor exercised leadership and responsibility in electoral matters in the commendable action of appointing a task force to make recommendations to fix the problems that occurred."
The purging fiasco in the state of Florida in 2000 lead by Jeb Bush was a scheme crafted by the GOP in Florida to deny many minority voters the right to vote. But this scheme, was really the genesis of the GOP's modern day nationwide efforts to implement laws to restrict minorities, the elderly, and the poor from casting ballots by implementing outrageous voter ID laws in many states like North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. And Democrats need to keep reminding voters of Jeb Bush's huge role in this process.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...