Posted by pinotfan on 5/20/2015 5:59:00 PM (view original):
I love how people (not you, ojo; you are relating what you heard/read; I always read your posts and respect your opinions) claim "oh, I was intimidated" or "oh, my rights were violated" AFTER the fact. Go to the media by all means! We have laws that address voter intimidation and other election-related issues; go to the authorities, follow the law, and if you're right the election may be challenged.
As for purging the voter rolls, that goes on all the time. People without the right to vote should not vote (just ask Richard Nixon about Chicago in 1960). Those who culled went through the rolls; identified people who had issues with voting rights; the incidents were investigated; and those who were ineligible were removed from the voter rolls. As in any human endeavor, I'm sure there were few - very, very few - errors, far fewer than those who were legitimately removed.
Bush won the election fair and square; nobody 'gave' it to him - not the Supreme Court, not Jeb, nobody (except maybe the Gore campaign for running such a bad race). Now please, don't ask me to defend everything that happened during the Bush administration ...
You say Bush won "fair and square", yet he won FL by 537 votes. That, when 88% of the purge list were African Americans. Same African Americans that make up 11% of the electorate in FL.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File
They even went so far as to include in the purge people who had their voting rights restored in their home states. Federal courts had ruled in '98 that you can't subsequently deny someone the right to vote once their rights had been restored (in the state in which their crime had occurred).
This was all a brazen middle finger to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which became necessary because of how the south routinely made it hard for blacks to vote.
All in all, at least 1100 voters were denied the right to vote at the polling stations. The #s who were disenfranchised? Far higher.
There's zero chance Bush wins the Presidency had FL actually behaved like it was bound by law to do.
Lastly, I'd scream bloody murder too if my right to vote was being denied. But I'm not black. I don't understand being black. I therefore won't place my own values upon that situation. I will say though, there was a reason the Voters Rights Act came about and passed in 1965. It was to stop the BS that FL so brazenly pulled.
Oh, and now we have ISIS to thank for that. (drops mic)