Where is the 2000 election post?

I was going to put up something about the 2000 election, but I've decided to hold off until I have a chance to read Steal this Vote by Andrew Gumbel. I skimmed the introductory section of it today and realized that I am grossly uninformed about the election process and its history. Gumbel points out that anyone who is familiar with the subject would know that rather than being a deviation from the norm, the voting fraud and irregularities of the 2000 election were just more of the same.

Gumbel also notes that both Democrats and Republicans are more than willing to cheat elections, its just that being that Republicans have been in power for the last 15 years they tend to do more of the cheating. This might explain why Democrats (with few notable exceptions like John Conyers) have not been more forthright in speaking out against election fraud; they're afraid that if they tell on Republicans, Republicans will tell on them.

But in the meantime, I will leave the reader with this tidbit from exiled* investigative journalist Greg Palast on vote purging in the 2000 Florida election.

Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida's elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race. Harper's found 325 names on the list with conviction dates in the future, a fact that did not escape Department of Elections workers, who, in June 2000 emails headed, "Future Conviction Dates," termed the discovery, "bad news." Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that "blanks would be preferable in these cases." (Harper's counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts. Some counties defied Harris' directives; Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge list after she found her own name on it.

*Greg is an American journalist who moved to England since he found it difficult to get his investigative pieces published here in America. You can read more from Greg at his website.