Former FL GOP Chair Testifies That Party Discussed How to ‘Keep Blacks From Voting’ in 2009

Deposition recalls FL Republican whistleblower Clint Curtis' 2004 affidavit on 'reducing black vote' before 2000 election...

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Well, this sounds familiar, and for good reason…

In a 630-page deposition, released to the press yesterday, former Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer described a systemic effort by Republicans to suppress the black vote. Referring to a 2009 meeting with party officials, Greer said “I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting.” He also said party officials discussed how “minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party.” Florida is currently embroiled in a controversy surrounding Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) voter purge program, which disproportionately affects voters of color. Fifty-eight percent of Scott’s original list of voters who were supposedly ineligible to voter were Hispanic while Hispanics make up only 13 percent of Florida’s eligible voters. Greer and the GOP cut ties in 2010, and he is currently facing felony corruption charges.

The summary above comes from ThinkProgress’ Alex Brown who offer a hat-tip to Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald who opens his report this way:

In the debate over new laws meant to curb voter fraud in places like Florida, Democrats always charge that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote of liberal voting blocs like blacks and young people, while Republicans just laugh at such ludicrous and offensive accusations.

The entire matter echoes back to our initial 2004 exclusive on then Republican software programmer turned whistleblower Clint Curtis who had filed a sworn affidavit charging Florida Republican Tom Feeney had asked his company, Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), to create a vote-rigging software prototype in 2000.

At the time of his alleged meetings with Feeney, Curtis says the Congressman — who had been Jeb Bush’s Lt. Governor running mate in 1998 before becoming Speaker of the FL House and one of the most powerful elected officials in the state by 2000 — discussed methods that he said the Republican Party had in place to “reduce the black vote” in the 2000 Presidential election.

According to the December 6, 2004 affidavit [PDF] filed by Curtis, just days before he would testify to a U.S. House Judiciary Committee panel…

10. In my role as a technology advisor at YEI, I was present at subsequent meetings between Mr. Feeney and Mrs. Yang [the company’s owner]. In several of those meetings, prior to the 2000 election, it became clear to me that Mr. Feeney was well aware that by artificially reducing the margin of victory of the opposition party in areas where they were the strongest, the overall outcome would then favor his candidate. As well, he bragged that he had already implemented “exclusion lists” to reduce the “black vote”. He further mentioned that the “proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25%.” I didn’t know at the time, if Mr. Feeney had meant that as a racial joke or actually part of the plan.

In 2001, The Orlando Sentinel described Feeney as “one of Florida’s most powerful elected officials.” In 2000, Time Magazine called him “the only man more influential in Florida than football king Bobby Bowden.”

Curtis’ claims under penalty of perjury in his 2004 affidavit, about Feeney’s statements on minority voter suppression in the Sunshine State before the 2000 race, sound as if they are right in line with former FL GOP Chair Greer’s remarks made in his own sworn deposition about his time with the party in 2009.

The BRAD BLOG has also been covering FL Gov. Rick Scott’s recently failed attempt at purging some 182,000 registered voters he had identified as “potential non-citizens” in advance of the 2012 election. Earlier this week, we filed a special investigative report detailing how, of the thousands of registered voters Scott and his hand-picked Sec. of State Ken Detzner believed to be “non-citizens”, just 9 of them — out of 11.2 million registered voters in FL — have so far been confirmed as “non-citizens”. Of those 9, none appear to have cast a vote in any election.

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“¢ Our index page listing of the most notable stories in our many years of coverage of the Clint Curtis/Tom Feeney vote-rigging scandal is right here.
“¢ Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story, the award-winning documentary film on the Curtis/Feeney story and our coverage of it, is right here.
“¢ Video and transcript of of Curtis’ sworn 12/6/2004 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative Judiciary Committee Democrats’ hearing is right here.

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Reader Comments on

Former FL GOP Chair Testifies That Party Discussed How to ‘Keep Blacks From Voting’ in 2009

18 Comments

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18 Responses

  1. 1)
    Adam said on 7/27/2012 @ 7:10pm PT: [Permalink]

    Influential elements of major political parties and pretty much the entire Mainstream Media and have been in cahoots in rigging the voting process myriad blatant ways. The mainstream corporate media’s coverage of the Pimp Hoax as if it were credible really illustrated the real agenda cutting ACORN and voter registration out of the “democratic” (now, more accurately, “fascist”) process. Action speaks louder than words, but ormer Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer did bluntly put it to words as well.

    Adam8 (banned by RawStory’s dear leader Roxanne Cooper due to defending myself from slander caused erroneous software they use and hypocritical entity RawStory’s idiotic faith in it)

  2. 2)
    Adam said on 7/27/2012 @ 7:19pm PT: [Permalink]

    Please excuse my typos. My two-year-old was tugging on my arm and laughing as I was typing. OK, I was laughing too, I admit. Anyway, it is people like my toddler whose future depends on such voices for integrity as BradBlog.com, propublica.org, commondreams.org fighting the agenda of Monsanto, Koch Bros, and other evil democracy-hating, earth-destroying multinational corporations and their mouthpieces known as “The Mainstream Media.”

  3. 5)
    Arias said on 7/28/2012 @ 7:54am PT: [Permalink]

    Brad,

    The prolific stat giant Nate Silver who blogs for the NY Times has identified seven crucial of what he calls “tipping ground” states that includes the probability that each might cast the deciding electoral votes for the election, sort of like Florida in 2000. What would be really useful is knowing which of these states uses e-voting machines. Maybe you could put up a similar map that identifies which states are in jeopardy of compromise from electronic vote rigging in national elections?

  4. 7)
    Soul Rebel said on 7/28/2012 @ 10:49pm PT: [Permalink]

    You would think that there might be some semblance of ‘Oh my, that’s really crossing the line. I maybe should rethink my affiliations’ among the moderate Republican rank and file. But there isn’t. Not a shred.

    What I get is “Well what about the New Black Panthers threatening to Mau Mau white voters in Chicago? Why didn’t anyone care about that?”

    Only the facts of it are of no interest, but somebody did care and something was done about it. Like immediately.

    Purging voters how many times for political gain? A psychopathic pattern of behavior. In this supposedly enlightened age, people readily accept this.

  5. 8)
    Adam said on 7/28/2012 @ 11:53pm PT: [Permalink]

    … Arias said on 7/28/2012 @ 7:54 am PT…
    [quote]Maybe you could put up a similar map that identifies which states are in jeopardy of compromise from electronic vote rigging in national elections?[/quote]

    Arias, that is a great idea. It would be interesting to see how many of those statistically improbable razor thin victories occur in electronically tabulated voting areas. How many corporate whores win in such districts vs those in hand-counted districts.

    Adam8 (banned by RawStory’s dear leader Roxanne Cooper due to defending myself from slander caused erroneous software they use and hypocritical entity RawStory’s idiotic faith in it)

  6. 10)
    Ancient said on 7/29/2012 @ 7:34am PT: [Permalink]

    “Give em enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.” It’s great to see all the loose ends coming together, and all the great citizen reporting!

  7. 11)
    Ancient said on 7/29/2012 @ 8:29am PT: [Permalink]

    Ya know, it always blew me away that after hearing Clint’s testimony congress laided the big ole goose egg and did nothing. Just like we can’t get them to give us publicly funded elections instead of the corporate over-master’s citizens united. Also, its just ridiculous that with the technology that exists today a computor program which can stay neutral is not used to draw district lines instead of the gerrymandering. Add in getting rid of electronic voting machines and we are on on way back to a true democracy! Oh but wait, we’ll never hear any of this on our corporate owned airwaves, will we?

  8. 13)
    David Lasagna said on 7/29/2012 @ 11:23am PT: [Permalink]

    re: GWN’s map link @ 9–

    I think, especially for the uninitiated, that map may be misleading. There are all these states listed on it as voting with paper ballots. Unless I’m very much mistaken, what that really means is almost all of the paper ballots will be tallied by the error-prone, easy to hack, and used with no citizen oversight op-scan machines. That’s a far cry from paper ballots that are hand-counted which is what we need and democracy requires.

  9. 14)
    GWN said on 7/29/2012 @ 11:59am PT: [Permalink]

    Thanks, you are right David. I did debate putting it up as I thought that is way too much green.

    blackboxvoting.org has one but I think it might be a little outdated.

  10. 15)
    Connie said on 7/30/2012 @ 11:10am PT: [Permalink]

    I wish there was some way we could get Brad (if you would be so kind) to appear on Rachel Maddow’s show, or Lawrence O’Donnell’s, or perhaps the new Sunday UP with Chris Hayes, to fully explain the whole election fraud scam that has been going on since 2000. Brad, you are the expert here, along with Bev Harris. When I think about how can we get the info out in a compelling and thoroughly clear and factual way, you are the spokesperson who always comes to mind. I just don’t know any better people to inform all those still in the dark about the history of election fraud and it’s looming danger in the coming election.

  11. 16)
    David Lasagna said on 7/30/2012 @ 1:07pm PT: [Permalink]

    I’m with you, Connie. I went to a recent Chris Hayes book tour event in Boston. Judging by his response to my question he is pretty clueless about how our voting machines are incompatible with democracy. When I had his attention for a second minute in the book signing line I gave him a copy of “Murder, Spies, and Voting Lies” and told him if he ever had a panel on election integrity issues there were two guys in the film, Brad and Clint Curtis, I thought he’d really like.

    So please feel free to contact him yourself and mention Brad’s name. If he or Rachel hear it from enough sides maybe they’ll be motivated to act.

    The next thing I’m gonna do is send Rachel, Chris, and the Warren campaign a copy of Jonathan Simon’s excellent piece on the funny numbers in the 2010 Mass Special Election. http://electiondefensealliance....ontpage?page=2

  12. 17)
    Connie said on 7/30/2012 @ 1:50pm PT: [Permalink]

    Your post inspires me David to really follow through, contact as many outlets as possible, and see if I can recruit family and friends to do the same. How lucky you got to meet C. Hayes in Boston. My family and many friends are still there so I will alert them of possibility of another book signing. Let’s get this election fraud exposed and fixed this time. We owe it to Brad and Bev. and most of all to America to right this wrong.

  13. Avatar photo
    18)
    Brad Friedman said on 7/31/2012 @ 11:12am PT: [Permalink]

    Connie & David Lasagna:

    We owe it to Brad and Bev. and most of all to America to right this wrong.

    Thank you both. For all. Your work out there means more than you know, and more than I have the time to recognize here. So hopefully this quick thanks and encouragement to keep going suffices!

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