Dirty Tricks in Florida

Leave it to the Brits to break this story. Thanks to my buddy and fellow blogger Rorschach for the tip on this guardian piece detailing some creative dirty election tricks being floated in Florida.

Dirty tricks return to the sunshine state

US election begins with voting in Florida dogged by controversy over faulty machines and disenfranchised voters

Oliver Burkeman in Tallahassee
Tuesday October 19, 2004
The Guardian

Gordon Sasser first got the feeling that something strange was going on when the telephone pierced the silence of a weekday afternoon at his house on the swampy fringes of Tallahassee, northern Florida.

An automated voice had some surprising news: did he know that he could now cast his presidential vote by phone, and could do so right now, using the keypad? Mr Sasser's suspicion that somebody was trying to trick him into thinking he was casting a vote - presumably so that he wouldn't cast a real one - was far from unique.

James Scruggs, another Tallahassee resident, remembers a similar unease about the young woman who phoned him at home, insistently offering to collect his absentee ballot to ensure its safe delivery.

Is there no depth they will plumb, no fetid pile they won't sift, to find sleaze to sling, tactics designed to disenfranchise? No these folks are scum friends, and we have fallen through the looking glass. These guys make the Nixonian Ratfucking team look like small time hustlers.

Then there was the elderly woman who called the local elections office last week to register her husband for an absentee vote. According to office staff, as she hung up she made a point of thanking them: she wouldn't have thought to get in touch about her husband, she said, if it hadn't been for their helpful call the night before, when someone had taken her own details, assuring her that she was now registered and would receive a ballot.

But the elections office makes no such calls.

"It's Alice in Wonderland here now," sighed Ion Sancho, elections supervisor for Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, Florida's capital. "Up is down, and down is up ... My feeling is that someone has essentially conned her into believing that she's going to be voting."

Ion Sancho, Patriot, claims that he has never seen it like this in 16 years on the job. I guess that the banana-republicans in Florida have mastered the art of election theft, it will be nice when they have their asses handed to them. It certainly won't be for a lack of trying though. In Duval county they have cool plan for all the niggers that live there.

The US election officially began in Florida yesterday, as early voting sites opened across the state - though in Duval County, a Republican-run area with a large African-American population, that too is a subject of dispute. Only one early voting site, far from densely populated neighbourhoods, has been made available for the entire county.

"One location for a county of 831 acres - that's the most asinine thing I've ever heard," said the Rev William Bolden, a Jacksonville pastor who is among many to detect a pattern in the controversies.

Cute. I hope the Kerry Campaign is on top of this and is helping voters make the trip to the remote location.