Random Michael Moore Deceits [#40]

disenfranchised voters [Fahrenheit 9/11]

Moore then says that a further element in "getting away" with "it" was to have the state of Florida "hire a company that's gonna knock voters off the rolls who aren't likely to vote for you. You can usually tell them by the color of their skin." This is a reference to the fact that following the fiasco of the 1998 mayoral election in Miami, which had to be decided by state courts after it became clear that convicted felons had been allowed to vote, in violation of Florida law- the state of Florida had hired a firm called Data Base Technologies (whose office Moore shows on the screen) to systematically remove convicted felons from the voter rolls. This process met with difficulties from the start, including issues relating to the fact that in some other states some convicted felons are allowed to vote, and Florida was not allowed to remove those people from its own voter rolls if they had moved to Florida after being released in another state. Florida's counties were aware of difficulties in this process, and so at least 20 of the counties simply ignored the Data Base Technologies lists of felons to purge from their lists, which meant that felons were removed in some counties but not others. It is true that when they vote, convicted felons vote for Democrats more often than for Republicans (http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article708.html) but it is also clear from an analysis by members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/final_dissent.pdf) that too many, not too few, convicted felons voted in the 2000 elections in Florida-that is, about 6,500 felons who were not legally allowed to vote did so anyway. So the result was likely many more (not fewer) votes for Gore. Finally, there is no evidence that any of this at any point had anything to do with race, despite Moore's implication. An investigation by the Palm Beach Post (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0527-03.htm) showed that the process used by Data Base Technologies at no point brought the race of individual convicted felons into the picture. Moore's charge is baseless and false."

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