And here's another cut-n-paste to match.


Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:31:38 -0400
Subject:FW: Voting and Counting - Krugman on Palast investigation


VOTING AND COUNTING
by Paul Krugman
from the New York Times

October 22, 2004 - If the election were held today and the votes were
counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't
be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may
determine the outcome.

... Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000 election,
reported
recently in Harper's, which conclusively shows that Florida was thrown to
Mr. Bush by a combination of factors that disenfranchised black voters.
These included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck thousands of
people from the voter rolls, and defective voting machines, which
disproportionately failed to record votes in poor, black districts.

One might have expected Florida's government to fix these problems during
the intervening four years. But most of those wrongly denied voting rights
in 2000 still haven't had those rights restored - and the replacement of
punch-card machines has created new problems.

After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush
recommended
that the state adopt a robust voting technology that would greatly reduce
the number of spoiled ballots and provide a paper trail for recounts:
paper
ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters to problems. This
system
is in use in some affluent, mainly white Florida counties.

But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he ignored state
officials who urged him to "pull the plug" on a new felon list - which was
quickly discredited once a judge forced the state to make it public - just
days before he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much of the
state
will vote using touch-screen machines that are unreliable and subject to
hacking, and leave no paper trail. Mr. Palast estimates that this will
disenfranchise 27,000 voters - disproportionately poor and black.

A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win convincingly. But we
must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by refusing to acknowledge the
possibility that a narrow Bush win, especially if it depends on Florida,
rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters. And the
media
must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of skewed reporting that
has consistently overstated Mr. Bush's popular support.


Excerpted from the New York Times. See Palast's entire report in this
month's Harper's Magazine. Greg Palast, author of the New York Times
bestseller, the Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is investigating the vote in
Florida for BBC Television Newsnight and Harper's. Palast's
documentary of
his BBC investigations, "Bush Family Fortunes," has just been released in
DVD. For more information on the film or the voting investigation,
go to
http://www.GregPalast.com