Only much later did someone discover that Database Technologies had scrubbed 57,700 legal voters off the Florida rolls, most of whom would have probably voted for Gore. At least 8,000 of those disenfranchised voters came from a list of Texas felons provided by ChoicePoint Inc., except that those people had actually only committed misdemeanors and not felonies. Thus, they had been improperly barred from casting their ballots. A spokesman for ChoicePoint ultimately admitted, "I guess that's a little bit embarrassing in light of the election." What's more, ChoicePoint had contributed large amounts of money to Republican candidates in 2000, leading to the observation that the company's error coincidentally benefited its partisan leanings. But that hardly surprised anyone.
Bear in mind that Katherine Harris had been the co-chair of George W. Bush's Florida election campaign. She served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. And she took time off from her job to campaign for Bush in New Hampshire. She even hired retired general Norman Schwarzkopf for a state-funded TV commercial encouraging people to vote, despite the fact that he was actively campaigning for Bush in Florida.
No, Does that mean that Democrats are generally more stupid than Republicans, I ask? She doesn't answer.
in 2000, Katharine Harris and Jeb Bush used ChoicePoint to purge the voter rolls of Florida of tens of thousands of African American "felons", and here they are, back in the news again, pay particular scrutiny to the description of their database.
This is new news to me. I swear when you think you've heard about all the scandals, more sneak up.
I have a feeling Harris is more involved in things than originally thought. She's been rewarded with a seat in Congress.
Update- Choicepoint is owned by Derek Smith, a GOP member who ran for congress in Utah in 2000 but lost. This is another interesting article by Greg Palast Derek and Choicepoint
Snippett
And who was going to play Anti-Santa, watching to see when we've been good or bad? A guy named Derek Smith.
And that made September 11, 2001 Derek's lucky day.
Even before the spying work could begin, there were all those pieces of people to collect—tubes marked “DM” (for “Disaster Manhattan”)—from which his company, ChoicePoint Inc, would extract DNA for victim identification, work for which the firm would receive $12 million from New York City’s government.
Maybe Smith, like the rest of us, grieved at the murder of innocent friends and countrymen. As for the 12-million-dollar corpse identification fee, that’s chump change to the $4 billion corporation Smith had founded only four years earlier in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Nevertheless, for Smith's ChoicePoint Inc., Ground Zero would become a profit center lined with gold.
As the towers fell, ChoicePoint's stock rose; and from Ground Zero, contracts gushed forth from War on Terror fever. Why? Because this outfit is holding no less 16 billion records on every living and dying being in the USA. They're the Little Brother with the filing system when Big Brother calls.
ChoicePoint's quick route to no-bid spy contracts was not impeded by the fact that the company did something for George W. Bush that the voters would not: select him as our president.
Here’s how they did it. Before the 2000 election, ChoicePoint unit Database Technologies, held a $4 million no-bid contract under the control of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, to identify felons who had illegally registered to vote. The ChoicePoint outfit altogether fingered 94,000 Florida residents. As it turned out, less than 3,000 had a verifiable criminal record; almost everyone on the list had the right to vote.
The tens of thousands of “purged” citizens had something in common besides their innocence: The list was, in the majority, made up of African Americans and Hispanics, overwhelmingly Democratic voters whose only crime was V.W.B: Voting While Black. And that little ethnic cleansing operation, conducted by Governor Jeb Bush's gang with ChoicePoint's aid, determined the race in which Harris named Bush the winner by 537 votes.
To say that ChoicePoint is in the “data” business is utterly to miss their market concept: These guys are in the Fear Industry. Secret danger lurks everywhere. Al Qaeda’s just the tip of the iceberg. What about the pizza delivery boy? ChoicePoint hunted through a sampling of them and announced that 25 percent had only recently come out of prison. “What pizza do you like?” asks CEO Smith. “At what price? Are you willing to take the risk?…”
War fever opened up a whole new market for the Fear Industry.
And now Mr. Smith wants your blood. ChoicePoint is the biggest supplier of DNA to the FBI's "CODIS" system. And, one company insider whispered to me, "Derek [Smith] told me that it is his hope to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States."
For now, Smith keeps this scheme under wraps, fearing "resistance" from the public. Instead, Smith pushes "ChoicePoint Cares" - taking DNA samples to hunt for those missing kids on milk cartons. It's for, "the mothers of this country who are wrestling with threats" … you know, the pizza guy from Al Queda, the cult kidnappers. In other words, ChoicePoint's real product, like our President's, is panic.
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