Did Bush beat 250 million-to-1 odds?

On Aug. 5, the South’s largest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote that in the 2000 election: Florida “officials purged about 8,000 names from the voter rolls, saying they were removing ex-felons. ... Most of the names on the list turned out to have been guilty of misdemeanors, which do not affect the right to vote.”

The newspaper seemed perplexed that Democrats would, as it reported, “cry foul” at such a deed.

There are four facts worth noting:

• The press, after the 2000 election, ignored the voter purge in Florida. Newspapers obsessed on the “hanging chad” issue. Only a foreign news service, the BBC, and our group’s Weekly Planet gave serious attention to the purge story.

• The actual number of wrongly deleted voters was in excess of 50,000. Where the Atlanta newspaper got 8,000 is a mystery.

• The misdemeanors were only one problem. Others included people purged for crimes committed in the future, for similarities in names with convicted felons, and the like.

• Even at 8,000, a slight advantage for Democrats would have meant Al Gore would be president. The BBC concluded Gore would have had a net increase of 20,000 votes had the 54,000 wrongly disenfranchised citizens voted.

Democracy has been savaged in Florida and Ohio, giving a group of radicals victories they don’t deserve.

And here’s more: Dennis Loo, a professor at the University of California, recently completed a study that found Bush far exceeded in 2004 the 85 percent of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving as much as 300 percent of registered Republican votes in some counties. Loo also questioned why Kerry won exit polls but lost the election. “It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count,” reports Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored.

University of Pennsylvania statistician Steve Freeman analyzed the exit polls of the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida and concluded that the odds of the exit polls being as far off as they were are 250 million to 1.

Scared yet?

Senior Editor John Sugg’s blog is at www.johnsugg.com. Read more on the Loo’s study at www.projectcensored.org. For stories on the 2000 and 2004 election thefts, see www.legitgov.org/coup_2004.html.