From Tuesday's Democracy Now!:
GREG PALAST: Well, Help America Vote Act. As soon as the Bush family tells us, Amy, that they're going to help us vote, I immediately start investigating. And what we have here is, under the guise of a reform, we have a prescription for another, basically a "Jim Crow" election. And one of the things, you know in the last election I discovered that there's tens of thousands of black voters illegally purged from the voter rolls on the grounds that they were felons. You know, people listed with conviction dates of 2007, and 3007. That gave us the current guy in the White House. But now I'm finding something else. That's going to be, by the way, extended, those purges, to all fifty states under the Helping America Vote Act. Now, there's something else we're finding. In the last election, I was working with the raw statistics from the Harvard University Law School's Civil Rights Project and the United States Civil Rights Commission statistics. Rooting through that, it looks like we had 1 million – this is an astonishing figure – 1 million black votes were cast in the year 2000, and were never counted. Altogether, 1.9 million Americans, in the United States of America, to which we stand, so 1.9 million votes cast not counted, they were thrown away, they were called "spoil votes." And about half of those were cast by African-Americans. Now we discovered this – I was first investigating for BBC in Florida – and I stumbled upon this when I went to Gadsen County, the blackest of 67 counties in Florida, and 1 in 8 votes, it turns out, were simply thrown out, thrown into the dumpster. Never counted.
Heard Mr. Palast talking about this on Operation PUSH on Saturday, and tried desperately to convince myself I'd heard him wrong.
Guess not.
Not feeling much anger or outrage. Can't even say I'm surprised, really. Guess the right wingers finally succeeded in killing that last flickering bit of faith in humanity.
Thank you so very much.
I'm really not sure how to repay you for this.
I am, of course, open to suggestions.
When I try to think of a proper response, I just keep picturing Big Bad Willow pulling that satanic pink naked lady steeple thing out of the ground and sucking the life out of the earth. I'm getting veiny just thinking about it.
back in 2000, i said the election would come down to florida. little did i know how true that was & now we see why.
and, how 'bout a little bit more - disney telling miramax to can m. moore's movie....why? oh, well, because of disney's sweet little tax break's from jeb. wouldn't want to piss him off, would we?
USA...home of the free & the brave? not in this day & age.
1.9M lost votes is absurd. and we wonder why people are apathetic towards voting.
What's even more sickening is the thought that black people won't even raise whimper. I think back to the 60s and 70s - there is no way Bush would've gotten away with this shit, not without a fight, a major battle. He wouldn't even have tried. But we've turned into sheep since then. From panthers to sheep, fucking sheep.
Thanks Aaron for giving a heads up. I'm going to go throw up now.
I think it's more color-blind. How the heck can Bush still have these approval ratings - cuz this country is full is sheep. It isn't one color or another, but all across the board.