Jeb Bush Lied. He Knew of Flaws in Felon Voter List: Ignored Requests to Dump it
Saturday, October 16, 2004 at 05:21AM
TheSpook
E-mail shows that Bush was
responsible for the creation of a flawed list that could help his
brother win the presidential election.
50% of the List is Black
Several days before the state's felon voter list was sent to county
elections offices across Florida, state officials expressed doubts
about its reliability. The doubts were serious enough that Gov. Jeb
Bush was advised to "pull the plug" on the entire project, according to
an e-mail written by a state computer expert and obtained by the
Herald-Tribune. Bush refused the request, the e-mail said, and told the
Department of State to proceed with the purge of nearly 48,000 voters.
Two months later, after flaws in the list were exposed in the press,
the state abandoned the effort to purge voters on the list. Those flaws
were revealed after Secretary of State Glenda Hood lost a court battle
to keep the list hidden from the public. Bush said Friday that he was
never warned about any problems before the list was released. But his
denial contradicts a May 4, 2004, e-mail in which Florida Department of
Law Enforcement computer expert Jeff Long describes how election
officials told Bush the list needed to be abandoned. "Paul Craft called
today and told me that yesterday they recommended to the Gov that they
'pull the plug,'" on the voter database, Long wrote in an e-mail to his
boss, Donna Uzzell. Long added that state election officials "weren't
comfortable with the felon matching program they've got." "The Gov
rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're 'going live'
with it this weekend," Long wrote. [more ]
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