De Amerikaanse presidentsverkiezingen 2004

Nog tot de presidentsverkiezingen van 2008


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donderdag, oktober 30, 2003
Bush bashing: the continuing story…
Als je Bush-aanhangers echt pissig wil krijgen moet je blijven terugkomen op de nasleep van de verkiezingen van 2000 in Florida. Vooral blijven roepen dat de verkiezingen door Bush zijn gestolen. Mocht u Frans Verhagen (van www.amerika.nl) boos willen krijgen, dan is dit haast een verplicht gespreksonderwerp. Niet te vaak op een avond over beginnen. Dat is slecht voor zijn gezondheid.
Er zijn tientallen boeken verschenen over dit prachtige stukje Amerikaanse verkiezingsgeschiedenis. Eentje die op mijn verlanglijst staat en niet alleen Florida maar alles rond het presidentschap van Bush behandelt, is The best democracy money can buy, van Greg Palast. Op zijn eigen site (www.gregpalast.com) vindt u wat hij allemaal ontdekt heeft:

What really happened in Florida?

Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. […] If you’re not on the list, you don’t get to vote.
[…]
My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime – except for being African American. We didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race.

When I questioned Harris’ office about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, “Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.”


Is this the only way votes were stolen?

No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. […]

The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black rural counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state, thousands of votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots which are read by an optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark were considered “spoiled“ and not counted. The buttons used to fill out the ballots were set up – with approval from Bush and Harris – to make votes appear unclear to the machine. One in eight ballots in Gadsden was voided by the state.

The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white. There only one in 100 votes was “spoiled.” What made the difference? In Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the black counties, the votes were trucked off immediately. There were no machines on site. Voters weren’t told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly weren’t permitted to re-vote.

Bush-fans vinden dat we niet zo moeten zeuren over die vorige verkiezingen. Bush zit er nu en is beëdigd als president. Punt uit. Daarover verschillen de meningen. En dat zal altijd wel zo blijven.




© Marc van Gestel 2003 - 2004