The Purloined Election of 2004 Has Already Begun

And where else but on Florida?



Perhaps Jebbie's announcement yesterday that as of now, he's not intending to run for the Bush Family Throne in 2008 is because he doesn't expect his reputation to survive Florida's election shenanigans this year?



They're starting already, folks. Via Daily Kos:

Problems were being reported at nine of 14 early voting sites in Broward County on Monday morning.



Gisela Salas, of the Broward Elections Office, said workers were having problems with a live database connection that is used to verify that a voter is properly registered.



The sites, Salas said, that were unaffected were at satellite offices in Deerfield Beach, Hollywood, Lauderhill, Pembroke Pines and Plantation.

Somehow I think all those areas are predominantly white.

All the branch offices were reported having problems with the database connection. Many of the sites had voters lined up to cast their ballots.



Voters at several sites said poll workers told them the problems started 20 minutes to 30 minutes after the early polling stations opened at 8:30 a.m. The stations close at 6 p.m.



At the Tamarac branch public library, where voting stopped after the computer glitch, Sally Zwanger, a poll watcher for the Kerry campaign, claimed the problems reflected on the inability of Gov. Jeb Bush's administration to fix voting problems left over from the 2000 election.



"The worst thing to hear was, 'I support Kerry, but I can't wait in this line,'" she said.

And that's exactly what they want.



Meanwhile, Jebbie knew damn well that the so-called "felon list" was disenfranchising legitimate voters:

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice to throw out a flawed felon voter list before it went out to county election offices despite warnings from state officials, according to a published report Saturday.



In a May 4 e-mail obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer expert Jeff Long told his boss that a Department of State computer expert had told him "that yesterday they recommended to the Gov that they 'pull the plug'" on the voter database.



The e-mail said state election officials "weren't comfortable with the felon matching program they've got," but added, "The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're 'going live' with it this weekend."



Long, who was responsible for giving elections officials his department's felon database, confirmed the contents of the e-mail Friday to the Herald-Tribune. He said he didn't remember the specifics, but that Paul Craft, the Department of State's top computer expert, had told him about the meeting with Bush.



A software program matched data on felons with voter registration rolls to create the list of 48,000 names. Secretary of State Glenda Hood junked the database in July after acknowledging that 2,500 ex-felons on the list had had their voting rights restored.



Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error.



Bush's spokeswoman, Jill Bratina, denied allegations that the governor ignored warnings about the list.



"It's also irrelevant because the list isn't being used," Bratina said Saturday.



Bush told the Herald-Tribune that Craft didn't call him, and he denied that any meeting took place May 3 with Craft or other election officials.