SIVACRACY.NET: Frightening (if you're a Democrat) story about Florida

Seeing Red in Florida, by Farhad Manjoo
Available at Salon.com, here's an excerpt:

"It wasn't supposed to happen again. This is the refrain you hear up and down the state this year, from elections officials, voting-rights advocates, civil rights experts and ordinary voters fed up with the reputation for electoral clumsiness that Florida has held since 2000. Or, more precisely, the chant goes, It wasn't supposed to happen again -- but it is. Like meteorologists nervously surveying the Gulf Coast during hurricane season, elections experts who've studied procedures in Florida now see a slow-motion disaster approaching the state. The weather here isn't pleasant: You've got partisan and/or incompetent officials, new and controversial voting technology, extremely litigious candidates, a flood of new voters, and an unbearably close race, with 27 electoral votes -- and the presidency -- hanging in the balance."

"At the eye of the storm is Glenda Hood, Florida's secretary of state and the chief official responsible for running elections. Hood, a Republican who was mayor of Orlando in the 1990s and whom Gov. Jeb Bush appointed in 2003, has been criticized not only by Democrats but also by independent observers for her exceedingly partisan approach to managing elections. Her critics note that politically, Hood is firmly in George W. Bush's camp; she was a Bush-Cheney elector in 2000. Jimmy Carter has urged Jeb Bush to replace her. The New York Times has called her Katherine Harris II. Hood's critics point to a string of decisions that favor Republicans or, at the very least, undermine voters' confidence in the fairness of Florida elections. Even though Florida law requires a manual recount of ballots in close elections, Hood has issued election rules barring such a count for electronic machines. After a judge ruled in early September that Ralph Nader's name should not appear on the Florida ballot, Hood ordered local officials to add him to absentee ballots anyway (the courts later reinstated Nader)."

"In matters small and large, on questions over registration procedures or voter identification or interpretations of Florida's abstruse election code, Hood has ruled according to a consistent pattern, her opponents charge -- she's attempted at every turn to keeps voters off the rolls and away from the polls, a gambit that clearly benefits Republicans. Nowhere was this more clear than in her design, this spring, of a list of ex-felons to be "purged" from Florida's voting rolls. Hood, whose office did not respond to numerous inquiries from Salon, initially tried to keep the felon list secret; only after media organizations sued for access to the list and discovered that it was riddled with errors and included a large number of African-Americans and only a handful of Hispanic (read: Republican) felons was she forced to scrap the list."

""I believe that what is occurring in Florida is purposeful," says Rep. Robert Wexler, a Democrat whose district includes Palm Beach and Broward counties, areas hardest hit by the 2000 fiasco. Hood's maneuvers in the state are not a matter of mere ineptitude, Wexler says. "This isn't one incompetent error -- it's five or six. It's impossible to believe that Jeb Bush is that incompetent. This is a purposeful strategy.""

"Bobbie Brinegar, president of the Miami-Dade chapter of the League of Women Voters and a fiercely nonpartisan advocate for election reform, is even more blunt. "There's very little chance we'll have a fair election in Florida," she says. "Very little chance.""