- Jimmy Carter, the former US president, has said Florida
lacks "some basic international requirements for a fair election"
and that a repeat of the 2000 election fiasco "seems likely".
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- He said reforms recommended after the recount in Florida
had still not been implemented "because of inadequate funding or political
disputes".
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- Mr Carter, who runs an election and human rights centre
in Atlanta, accused election officials working for Florida's governor,
Jeb Bush, the president's brother, of being "highly partisan".
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- They were "brazenly violating a basic need for an
unbiased and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the
electoral process".
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- "The disturbing fact is that a repetition of the
problems of 2000 now seems likely, even as many other nations are conducting
elections that are internationally certified to be transparent, honest
and fair," Mr Carter writes in a commentary reprinted in today's Guardian.
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- Busy with the fourth hurricane to hit Florida in six
weeks, the governor's office did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.
But Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, rejected Democratic
criticism of the state's election preparations.
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- "They're alleging somehow we're a third-world nation
in our ability to handle ballots," he told CNN. "There is no
way the supervisors of elections in 67 counties can't handle the proper
job of tabulating ballots."
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- During the 2000 recount, the Florida state government
was accused of trying to orchestrate George Bush's victory by certifying
doubtful results and by disenfranchising thousands of mainly black voters
with the use of flawed criminal records.
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- Under Florida's laws, former convicts who have completed
their sentence remain ineligible to vote for life, unless they receive
a specific act of clemency. It is a racially charged issue as 58% of Florida's
600,000 former felons are African-Ameri cans, most convicted of drug offences
for which they are more frequently charged than whites.
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- In May, Florida's secretary of state, Glenda Hood (a
Bush family partisan), distributed a secret list of 48,000 alleged former
felons and instructed county election supervisors to remove them from the
voter rolls. When a court ordered the list be published, it was found that
more than 20,000 people on the list were black (black Floridians vote Democratic
by more than nine to one) and only 61 were Hispanics (who are much more
likely to vote Republican). The Miami Herald newspaper found at least 2,000
people should not have been on the list, having regained their voting rights.
-
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- In his commentary, Mr Carter called the distribution
of the list a "fumbling attempt" to disenfranchise black people.
It was dropped after it became public, but by then 14 counties had sent
letters to the residents named, informing them they would be ineligible
to vote.
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- It is not easy for the state's former felons to regain
the right to vote. According to the Florida Justice Institute, a civil
rights organisation, it requires a hearing by the state's clemency board,
chaired by Governor Bush, which meets only four times a year and reviews
only 50 cases each time. The all-Republican board can turn down requests
without giving reasons.
-
- Randall Berg, the head of the institute, said the number
of former convicts who win back their right to vote each year was "a
drop in the bucket".
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- Another source of controversy in the 2000 election was
the use, in some counties, of punch-card ballot papers which sometimes
could not be read by machines because of loose fragments of cardboard (chads)
that stuck to them.
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- Mr Carter was a member of a commission that recommended
modernising the state's voting equipment, but he says those reforms have
been patchy. There are no statewide regulations on keeping a paper record
of the vote in the event of another recount.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1314205,00.html
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