NSA and Data Mining used to Purge Voter Roles?

Yeah, I know full well how much the idea seems to be full on tin foil hattery, and tiring it can be for the left to constantly be crying foul everytime they lose an election.

What a bunch of crybabies!

Maybe if they actually had some ideas, people might vote for them.

Yeah, I get that. But hold your disbelief for a moment and read, really read what Greg Palast has to say in the Guardian.

There's something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico's first "clean" election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist.

Just before the 2000 balloting in Florida, I reported in the Guardian that its governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered the removal of tens of thousands of black citizens from the state's voter rolls. He called them "felons", but our investigation discovered their only crime was Voting While Black. And that little scrub of the voter rolls gave the White House to his brother George.Jeb's winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business - in Mexico - at the direction of the Bush government.

This same strategy of purging black voters, who overwhelming vote Democratic, was also used in Ohio 2004 as shown by Robert J. Kennedy Jr's report from Rolling Stone - a cconclusion that is strongly supported by independant research data.

Over 900 provisional ballots may have been wrongfully rejected because of database problems alone. Between 624 and 938 rejected provisional ballots, mostly classified as “not registered”, were apparently mistakenly purged from the registration lists, or involved other clerical errors in searching or entering data. Since this error was detected by only one type of search, which did not detect other voters who reported similar errors, the true number of provisional ballots wrongfully rejected is likely to be higher. We estimate that 2 out of every 5 provisional ballots that were rejected should have been accepted as legitimate. If we combine incorrectly purged provisional votes, projected votes rejected because of initial registration errors, provisional ballots lost through polling place misinformation and innocent errors filling out the provisional application, it appears that over 41% of rejected provisional ballots (or 14% of all provisional votes) may have been unnecessarily rejected. We estimate that simply changing residence exposes voters to a 6% chance of being disenfranchised. Youth, the poor, and minorities are disproportionately affected. In fact, with respect to just provisional ballots, we found a two-fold increase in rejection rate in predominantly African-American compared to predominantly Caucasian precincts.

Now it appears that what occured in Florida and Ohio has been repeated in Mexico - with a little help from Choicepoint.

As we found in Florida in 2000, my investigations team on the ground in Mexico City this week found voters in poor neighbourhoods, the left's turf, complaining that their names were "disappeared" from the voter rolls. ChoicePoint can't know what use the Bush crew makes of its lists. But erased registrations require us to ask, before this vote is certified, was there a purge as there was in Florida?

Notably, ruling party operatives carried registration lists normally in the hands of elections officials only. (In Venezuela in 2004, during the special election to recall President Hugo Chavez, I saw his opponents consulting laptops with voter lists. Were these the purloined FBI files? The Chavez government suspects so but, victorious, won't press the case.)

So here's the real question, as posed by this dkos diary, regarding our own upcoming 2006 and 2008 elections. Exactly what has the U.S. Government been doing with those Data-Mining files involving the phone-call and email contacts of tens of millions of Americans? Have they shared any of that data with any subcontractors - like Choicepoint? It's it possible to use this information to pinpoint leftist agitators and have their names mysteriously dropped from the voting roles in states with tightly contested races? Just as we saw in Florida, Ohio and it seems Mexico?

We already know that thousands of Americans have been investigated by the FBI based on NSA tips which have lead to dead ends. What happens to those big thick FBI files once the investigation is over?

The sad part isn't just that this is perfectly plausible considering the lengths to which the Right-wing has already gone to grab and maintain power - it's that it far more likely to get worse, with opposition growing to renewing the Voting Rights Act, than it is to get better. Is that farfetched? How farfetched is it compared to the Phony Filegate Scandal from the Clinton era?

Vyan