Jeb bush flawless victory12/13/2023 While there will no longer be an electronic list used to keep former felons from voting, the recent events have led to disturbing new questions. Only in July, when flaws were again revealed by journalists-flaws that would once more favor Republicans-did the state throw out the list. In May, the local elections supervisors learned that there was a new list. Surely, the embarrassment would prevent the state from attempting another high-tech felon hunt in 2004. In Florida, some 90 percent of blacks vote Democratic. Roughly 54 percent of those on the list were black, while blacks make up just under 15 percent of the statewide population. It turned out, though, that the list had been swollen with an estimated 20,000 names of possible innocents, wrongly included. For the 2000 election, a notorious ex-felon list, composed of more than 50,000 names, was compiled and the appropriate sections were sent by the state to the elections supervisors of Florida’s 67 counties, along with a directive to purge those confirmed as felons from the rolls. The state has been equally disingenuous in its attempt to bar ex-felons from voting. The company that sewed up most of the key counties with raw political clout has installed machines that have confounded poll workers and voters alike and led to problems that the state, in its embarrassment, has tried to minimize again and again. In Florida, however, the story is more disturbing than in most states. Touch-screens have been plagued around the country by serious questions about their security and their accuracy in registering votes. Yet unlike A.T.M.’s, touch-screens provide no paper receipt-no proof at all that a vote has been cast as the voter intended. The D.R.E.’s look and work reassuringly like A.T.M.’s. There was just no way, Justice Stephen Breyer remarked over the holiday, that the Court would ever get involved. A law professor at the University of Miami pegged Bush’s chances before the tribunal at “between slim and none, and a lot closer to none.” As Thanksgiving 2000 approached, the justices and their clerks planned their vacations and scattered, leaving a skeletal staff-generally only one of the three or four clerks assigned to each chamber-behind in case the impossible happened. The New York Times predicted that the Court would never enter the Florida thicket. “It was just inconceivable to us that the Court would want to lose its credibility in such a patently political way,” one of the clerks recalls. To top it off, the Court rarely took cases before they were ripe, and the political process in Florida was still unfolding. Moreover, the very jurists who’d normally side with Bush were the ones most solicitous of states’ rights, most deferential to state courts, most devoted to the Constitution’s “original intent”-and the Founding Fathers had specifically provided that the Congress, not the judiciary, would resolve close elections. A majority of the justices were conservatives, but they weren’t partisan mindful of the Court’s fragile authority, the justices had always steered clear of messy political spats. Sure, friends and relatives predicted that the case would eventually land in their laps, but that was ignorant, naïve talk-typical of people without sophisticated legal backgrounds. Bush in the White House? The two just laughed. Wouldn’t it be funny, one mused, if the matter landed before them? And how, if it did, the Court would split five to four, as it so often did in big cases, with the conservative majority installing George W. Shortly after the presidential vote in November 2000, two law clerks at the United States Supreme Court were joking about the photo finish in Florida.
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