In some countries, fixing a presidential election is a dangerous thing. People don't accept it when the loser seizes power. They take to the streets by the thousands, industrial production grinds to a halt, and there's pandemonium until either the people's choice is safely in office or too many people have died trying to put him there.
When that same thing happens in America, we watch a movie.
As did more than 350 people on Sept. 21, when they packed the University of Tampa's Falk Theater to view the documentary Unprecedented: the 2000 Presidential Election. Filmmakers Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler, along with recently repatriated American journalist Greg Palast, were at the event, sponsored by WMNF-88.5 FM, to tell the audience what the crowd already knew: The man in the White House posing as president of the United States is a fraud, a fake, a pretender to the Oval Office.
This trio has proof.
While the mainstream American press was busy naming Al Gore — then George W. Bush, then Gore, then Bush — the winner of the election, Palast picked up the phone in London, where he was based at the time, and got to work.
What he found was that the fix was in and that Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had been working for months to ensure that the governor's big brother wouldn't lose in his state. Perez and Sekler interviewed hundreds of people for the film, purchased hours of footage and relied heavily on information provided by Palast for their film.
"What you're about to see is 55 minutes," Sekler told the Falk crowd, "and it will make you mad."
Judging by the jeers from the crowd whenever Harris or either Bush brother appeared on the screen, the crowd wasn't becoming angry so much as reacquainting themselves with anger that they already had.
The film showed testimony from a NAACP fact-finding mission. Black voters explained how they were told that they needed more than a voter registration card in order to vote. Or worse, no matter what identification they produced, they couldn't vote because their names were simply not on the rolls.
Voters in Palm Beach County, that laughingstock of the nation in 2000, demonstrated that they were not idiots. The ballot they were given was confusing enough to cause a Mensa member to vote for Pat Buchanan.
The film showed the frenzy that ensued over the recount efforts and explained that mysterious post-election phenomenon known as the Republican "protester." The filmmakers froze frames to highlight the faces of various aides to Republican politicians who were shipped down to Florida recount sites to disrupt the process.
But the most compelling evidence came from Palast, who was also on hand to answer questions and sign his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Palast was the first journalist to uncover the widespread disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida and to document the clear signs that it was done by design.
He held up a letter written by Gov. Bush on Sept. 18, 2000, informing Harris that convicted felons who had served their sentences and had their rights restored in other states had to apply and ask him to have their rights restored in Florida. Later, Bush tried to cover his ass by writing another letter taking it back.
"Jeb Bush acted against a law we had in effect at the time called the Constitution," Palast quipped. So far, there haven't been any repercussions.
Palast's reports hit the press while the recount was actually still going on, but very few people saw them. "The story of the theft of the American election ran everywhere except in America," he told the audience.
Palast works for the British newspaper the Observer as well as for the BBC. As he began uncovering proof that laws had been broken during the election, he tried to interest the American media in his stories. They weren't interested, he said.
Instead, the American media were largely content to report the excuses of Harris and the governor while the real story played out in newspapers around the world.
It wasn't that Palast had access to information that American journalists didn't have. After seeing black voters on the news telling reporters how they were denied the opportunity to vote or were intimidated at the polls, Palast said his first call was to Tampa to Chuck Smith, an aide to Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Pam Iorio.
When Palast asked the race of those voters purged from the rolls as convicted felons, he told the audience that Smith wasn't surprised. "I've been waiting for someone to ask me that," Palast recalled Smith saying.
Iorio, who was in the Falk audience, is featured both in the film and in Palast's book as one of the few Florida officials who had the common sense not to take Harris' directives at face value.
Iorio wrote to Harris' office questioning the validity of the felon purge list she was sent. She noted that when the names of voters were compared to the names of convicted felons, vital match criteria were left out. Her list contained at least 300 voters whose names were so far from the names on the felon list that she refused to delete them or take any action at all.
Iorio sent out letters to rest of the "felons" on her list early enough for errors to be corrected in time for the general election.
The numerous errors on the felon list have become common knowledge since 2000. What is less commonly known was some of the other evidence of voter disenfranchisement uncovered by Palast. It received little U.S. press attention.
"This was a Jim Crow election," Palast told the audience.
In Leon County, the optical-scan voting machines ensured that all of the votes in the predominantly white county would be counted by automatically kicking back voting cards that contained an error, said Palast. Voters who had their cards spit back out at them were told that they had made a mistake and given another card so that they could try again.
In nearby Gadsden County, which is predominantly black and Democrat, the same voting machines accepted voting cards that contained mistakes. The votes on those cards were then thrown out as unreadable.
The only difference between the two machines was a button that set them to either accept or decline votes that couldn't be counted.
ABC newsman Ted Koppel had also gone to Gadsden to get the story of the uncounted votes, Palast said, but his report was much different. Koppel interviewed a professor who told him that the reason that more of Gadsden's votes had been thrown out was that blacks were inexperienced voters, Palast said. Read: dumb.
"It ain't that blacks are too dumb to vote," Palast said. "It's that white reporters are too dumb to ask [the right questions]."
Palast's irreverent tone flows throughout his book, which contains reports not just on the 2000 election but also on issues such as corporate globalization. He is highly critical of the American press and the newsroom culture that puts profits above the duty to keep the people informed.
The void created by profit chasing is what brought him to journalism, Palast told Weekly Planet during a phone interview.
After studying economics at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, the father of Reaganomics, Palast worked as an investigator. He worked for unions, environmental groups and Native Alaskan groups, but he principally worked as a federal racketeering investigator.
None of the information he dug up was reaching the public. "I got sick of reporters not covering the stories I was working on or getting it wrong," he said.
Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and was surprised to read reports that the site had returned to normal a scant year after the accident. "They were saying nature has cleaned it up and it's all beautiful," he said. "But you could stick your hand in the water and come up with 10-40."
So Palast became an investigative reporter, writing for papers in London and working for the BBC because he couldn't get his work published in his native land.
Palast points to Venezuela to highlight the differences in international news here and the rest of the world. In the U.S. press, the overthrow of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was seen as the will of the people with 100,000 marching in the streets, demanding his head, said Palast. Missing were the 500,000 protestors who had put Chavez into office and wanted him back.
The coverage lacked context. "Of course, the rich were rising up against him," Palast said. "He was giving some of their money to poor people."
Also missing was the fact that Chavez was the president of OPEC. If Bush wants to be successful in his quest against Iraq, he's got to control OPEC. "Chavez is not controllable," said Palast.
Neither is Palast.
The journalist moved back to the United States this year because he wants his children to grow up here and he wants to lobby to have his work published domestically.
As for the 2000 election debacle, Palast doesn't see that anything short of a general strike and strong leadership will make for real change. Although Harris has admitted that thousands were dropped from voter rolls in error — the majority black and Democratic — Palast estimates that over 90,000 of those names still haven't been put back.
"Katherine Harris says, "Get over it.' I don't want to get over democracy. I don't like what we get when we've gotten over it," said Palast. "My advice is to stay angry."
Contact Staff Writer Rochelle Renford at 813-248-8888, ext. 163, or rochelle.renford@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2002.