GREG PALAST - WATCH THIS GUY GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday June 27, 2002 14:07 by bLISSET

The Janes Ellroy of Journalism scores a direct hit

KATHERINE HARRIS SAYS PALAST 'TWISTED AND MANIACAL' - in July Harper's Harper's Magazine Tuesday, June 25, 2002 E-Mail Article Printer Friendly Version

KATHERINE HARRIS SAYS PALAST 'TWISTED AND MANIACAL' - in July Harper's
Harper's Magazine
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version


Have I upset Kate? Darn. The Florida Secretary of State has sent me a heartfelt billet-doux in time for my birthday. Twisted and maniacal? I won't deny it. Most important, she doesn't say I was wrong: her office sent out lists of 57,700 voters - most of them black, almost all of them innocent, to remove from the voter rolls. Harris' letter, despite its berserker tone, is in fact an astonishing confession. Read it all in this month's Harper's Magazine, along with my reply.

Ms Harris begins:
”Greg Palast's Annotation ["Ex-Con Game," March] distorts and misrepresents the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election in Florida in order to support his twisted and maniacally partisan conclusions. To the chagrin of responsible journalists everywhere, Palast's effort implodes under the slightest scrutiny, owing to his abject failure to check the accuracy of his facts.”

Katherine Harris does not deny the central allegations of my Annotation: that her office ordered 57,700 Florida citizens be removed from the voter rolls, despite the knowledge that many, if not most, of these citizens were innocent of all crimes. Rather, she delegates the blame: state law forced her to hire a private firm that compiled this racially corrosive hit list. The Florida secretary of state may cite the law to the fourth decimal, but her interpretation of it-that her office was to provide county officials a list of "potentially ineligible voters"-is chilling. The law required that Harris's office provide a list "identifying" voters who had been convicted of a felony and that it contract with a private entity only to "meet its obligations" under the requirement. Maybe by "potentially" ineligible voters she means thousands like Thomas Cooper, whom her office lists as having been convicted of a felony in the year 2007.

The documents amusingly labeled "Secret"-thank you, Ms. Harris; as a reporter I am well versed in the Sunshine Laws-indicate that payment to her contractor depended specifically on "manual verification using telephone calls." Despite numerous requests from Harper's Magazine and the BBC, Harris has never explained why the private firm was paid millions for this work that was not done. Harris's apocryphal claim that county officials asked to take over this expensive work counters both the correspondence in her files and my own conversations with the county election supervisors.

Even if she wrongly took away the rights of innocent voters, Harris contends, mistakes on the voter rolls favored Al Gore. This odd defense is founded on her claim that, according to the Palm Beach Post, "thousands of felons voted." But the Post's conclusions were based on data used by Harris, with even sloppier methods of verification than hers. Because Harris's list was hopelessly flawed, some counties refused to remove voters from their rolls; therefore, thousands of her "ex-felons" did vote. After the 2000 election, Florida's attorney general promised to arrest any ineligible voter who had gone to the polls, a criminal offense in Florida. So far, the Harris and Post lists have produced, he says, fewer than half a dozen cases, out of thousands accused.

The Annotation's most damning accusation, from the view of civil rights lawyers, is that the state purged ex-convicts who had their right to vote restored by other states. Rather than deny the charge, Harris claims that she was required to do so by a letter from Governor Jeb Bush's Office of Executive Clemency. Oops! Harris has just blown Jeb's alibi. His office, as I mention in the Annotation, assured me that no such letter exists. Indeed, Bush's office produced a letter dated February 23, 2001, with a position opposite Harris's.

Regardless of where Harris seeks to shift the blame, her office clearly did wrong. The NAACP has filed suit over the voter purges uncovered by our BBC and Guardian reports. NAACP v Harris goes to trial in August. Katherine, if you've got an alibi for operating a Jim Crow election operation, tell it to the judge.

Katherine Harris, cochairwoman of Florida's George W. Bush for President campaign and now candidate for Congress, accuses this London reporter of "partisanship." To that, one hardly knows how to respond.

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Katherine Harris
Florida Secretary of State
Tallahassee, Fla.

A Florida Makeover

Greg Palast's Annotation ["Ex-Con Game," March] distorts and misrepresents the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election in Florida in order to support his twisted and maniacally partisan conclusions. To the chagrin of responsible journalists everywhere, Palast's effort implodes under the slightest scrutiny, owing to his abject failure to check the accuracy of his facts.

Palast erroneously claims that my predecessor and I "ordered 57,700 'ex-felons,' who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls," when in fact the Florida legislature, through Florida Statute Section 98.0975, mandated that we use a private firm to provide to Florida's 67 county supervisors of elections a list identifying potentially ineligible voters whose names remained on the voter-registration rolls. The legislature, not the Department of State, required county supervisors to remove the names of these persons from the voting rolls if they were unable to determine that this information was incorrect.

Revealingly, Palast provides examples of persons whose names allegedly appeared on the list in error without mentioning whether these persons had been permitted, or even had attempted, to vote in the election. He claims that "Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all" but neglects to mention that, according to a study conducted by the Palm Beach Post, "[t]housands of felons voted in the presidential election . . . [who] almost certainly influenced the . . . election" in favor of former vice president Al Gore. According to the Post, this estimated number of illegal voters far outnumbered the persons who allegedly could not vote because they were erroneously removed from the voter rolls.

Showing the laughable depths to which he will stoop, Palast ominously notes that Florida's contract with DBT Online, a private company, was "marked 'Secret' and 'Confidential,'" neglecting to mention that 1) DBT, not the Department of State, requested this notation in an effort to prevent other companies from copying and selling the computer software used to generate the list, and 2) Florida's expansive public-records law would have prohibited us from making that contract "secret" even if we had tried to do so.

Further, Palast contends that, "with the state's blessing, DBT did not call a single felon" without noting that we provided this "blessing" at the behest of Florida's county supervisors of elections, who wished to contact the persons on the list themselves, pursuant to their statutory responsibility.

Palast even misrepresents two rulings of the Florida District Courts of Appeal as orders of the Florida Supreme Court, while ranting that these decisions prohibited Florida from removing any names of felons from the voting rolls whose civil rights had been restored automatically in another state. Before the 2000 election, the Department of State asked Florida's Office of Executive Clemency, which answered to Governor Jeb Bush and an executive cabinet that included Democratic attorney general Bob Butterworth and Democratic U.S. senator Bill Nelson, for its opinion on this matter. The Office of Executive Clemency issued a letter advising us that felons who had not received an order of clemency from another state must apply to have their civil rights restored in Florida before being eligible to vote.

Florida's difficult experience in Election 2000 exposed flaws in the elections process that had festered across America for decades, since the political will to address these flaws had never existed. I am proud to have helped Florida become the nationally acclaimed leader in election reform since that time. Last year, the Florida legislature passed virtually all of my bills as part of its landmark Election Reform Act. This legislation placed the burden on the state to prove a person's ineligibility to vote before removing that person from the rolls, correcting the problem in the law that led to any erroneous removal of eligible voters before the 2000 election. In Florida we have moved aggressively to prevent such concerns from arising ever again. I regret that Greg Palast's political agenda does not permit him to acknowledge this simple fact.

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At http://www.GregPalast.com you can read and subscribe to Greg Palast's London Observer columns and view his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight. Pluto Press has just released Palast's book, "THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons and High Finance Fraudsters."