More than 30,000 Florida felons who by law should have been stripped of their right to vote remain registered to cast ballots in this presidential battleground state, a Sun Sentinel investigation has found.

Many are faithful voters, with at least 4,900 turning out in past elections.

Another 5,600 are not likely to vote Nov. 4 — they’re still in prison.

Of the felons who registered with a party, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.
Florida’s elections chief, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, acknowledged his staff has failed to remove thousands of ineligible felons because of a shortage of workers and a crush of new registrations in this critical swing state.

Browning said he was not surprised by the findings. “I’m kind of shocked that the number is as low as it is,” he said.

Asked how many ineligible felons may be on Florida’s rolls, Browning said, “We don’t know.”

The Division of Elections has a backlog of more than 108,000 possible felons who have registered to vote since January 2006 that it hasn’t had the time or staff to verify. Browning estimated that about 10 percent, once checked, would be ineligible.

“This is part of a big mess,” said Jeff Manza, professor of sociology at New York University and author of a book on felon voting. “It’s almost certain there will be challenges if the election is close enough that things hinge on this. Both parties are armed to the teeth with legal talent in all the battleground states.”

Florida’s felon ban originated before the Civil War, and today the state remains one of 10 that restrict some felons from voting even after they’ve served their time. The law requires state and county elections officials to remove felons from voter rolls after conviction and add them only when they’ve won clemency to restore their voting rights.

In 2007, the state eased the restrictions by granting automatic clemency to most nonviolent offenders who have completed their sentences. Others, including people convicted of federal offenses, multiple felonies or crimes such as drug trafficking, murder and sex charges, must still apply for clemency and have their cases reviewed.

The felons the Sun Sentinel identified never received clemency, but their names remain on Florida’s voter rolls. Some are well-known: ex-Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne and ex-Palm Beach County Commissioner Tony Masilotti, for instance, both convicted last year of public corruption.

Browning said the state painstakingly checks all voters before removing them to avoid inadvertently taking off eligible voters as happened in two previous large-scale purge attempts.

“The policy of this department, this state, is that we will err on the side of the voter,” he said.

Florida registers voters largely on an honor system, asking applicants to affirm on a signed form that they are not convicted felons or that their rights have been restored. State law requires the Elections Division to conduct criminal records checks only after voters are added to the rolls, and it takes months or even years to remove those who are ineligible, the Sun Sentinel found.

“It’s scandalous, really,” said Lance deHaven-Smith, professor of public policy at Florida State University. “Why do they have to cull the rolls after they get registered? They shouldn’t get on the rolls in the first place.”

Felons themselves are confused.
Several felon voters interviewed expressed confusion over automatic clemency and said they thought their voting rights had been restored. Some said they merely signed registration forms that were filled out by volunteers.

“If I wasn’t able to vote, they wouldn’t have given me my [voter registration] card,” said John A. Henderson, 55, a Hallandale Beach Democrat. “I voted the last time and the times before that.”

Henderson served about a year in prison in the late 1990s for battery and trafficking in cocaine. He said he was unaware he needed to formally apply to restore his rights when he successfully registered to vote in 2002. Henderson has since cast ballots in at least six elections and received three updated voter ID cards from the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office, records show.

Broward elections officials were unaware of Henderson’s criminal record and did not check it when he registered, said county elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney. Nonetheless, she said he will remain on the rolls “until we are directed otherwise to remove him.”

Maintaining accurate voting rolls is up to the state Division of Elections, which has failed to effectively remove felons for years.

Most recently, in 2006, the Auditor General recommended the division conduct a “comprehensive check” of all registered voters against lists of convicted felons, a step the state still has not taken, Browning acknowledged.

In response to auditors, the division said running the search “would not be a problem,” but it lacked the manpower to verify possible matches. “Staff further stated that they were busy full-time” checking newly registered felons.

Once voters are added to the rolls, the state’s procedure for removing them is tedious and labor-intensive. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement runs daily checks of criminal records against new voters and those who have made changes to their registrations, sending possible matches to the Elections Division.

Elections staff then manually check each one, a process that involves three to five workers reviewing records, comparing driver’s license and prison photos and verifying convictions. Confirmed matches are sent to the counties for removal.

Since January 2006, more than 1.6 million new voters have registered in Florida. FDLE identified more than 124,000 possible felons.

In that time, elections workers removed about 7,200 from voter rolls statewide. Broward County took off just 232 and Palm Beach County 31.

“We do want to make sure … that we have the right voter,” Browning said.

Elections workers are now reviewing more than 3,800 possible felon voters but have more than 108,000 others still to be checked. “We’ve not touched those records yet,” Browning said.

Asked how long it will take to review them all, he said, “I don’t have a clue. I really don’t.”

Recently registered
John Teate, who lives west of Boca Raton, remains on the voter rolls after registering as a Democrat in July despite felony drug and theft convictions dating to the early 1990s. He said someone he thinks was a Democratic supporter signed him up while he waited for a bus at the central terminal in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

“I said, ‘I’m a convicted felon. I can’t vote,’” recalled Teate, 45. “I figured when the paperwork came in, there would be a red flag.”

A spokesman for Barack Obama’s campaign said it is unlikely his volunteers signed up Teate because his name is not in a database of new voters they registered.

Teate hasn’t voted and said he doesn’t plan to.

It’s a third-degree felony for ineligible voters to knowingly cast ballots and for campaign workers and voters to submit false registration forms. Prosecutors and elections officials in South Florida could not recall any prosecutions related to felons registering or voting in recent years.

Henderson, the Hallandale Beach voter, said he does not think his criminal record should keep him from voting.

“I paid my debt,” Henderson said. “Just because I was incarcerated, that means I’m nothing now? I’m still a father. I got two kids I’m raising.”

Evan Snow, a West Palm Beach Republican, agrees. Convicted of burglary, battery and other crimes dating to the 1980s, Snow said he sought clemency several years ago but was discouraged by the lengthy process and gave up.

Snow, 46, registered to vote in June. He said he plans to cast a ballot Nov. 4 but hasn’t decided which presidential candidate to support.

“Everybody is getting interested in politics right now,” he said. “We are all here together. Shouldn’t we all be able to make a decision about who runs the place?”

To civil rights advocates, the troubled system is an argument to change the state’s constitution to automatically restore voting rights to all felons who complete their sentences.

As of mid-September, about 118,000 mostly nonviolent offenders had received automatic clemency under the 2007 change. For more than 9,700 of them, it didn’t matter — their names had never been removed from the voter rolls.

CLEVELAND: ACORN, a voter registration group, is in the sights of Cuyahoga County, Ohio election officials, who voted Monday to investigate whether the ACORN signed up people to vote multiple times.

Election officials in swing state Ohio’s most populous county have asked the prosecutor to investigate alleged voter registration fraud by an advocacy group under fire in other states.

The bipartisan Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland voted unanimously Monday to ask Prosecutor Bill Mason to investigate multiple registrations by four people. They signed forms at the behest of a community organizing group, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform, known as ACORN.

One of the new voters, 19-year-old Freddie Johnson of Cleveland, says he signed 73 voter registration forms over a five-month period. Johnson says he was trying to help paid ACORN solicitors collect signed registrations.

ACORN’s state director, Katy Gall, says ACORN is cooperating with the investigation and would fire anyone soliciting duplicate registrations.

Welcome to my newest venture in the digital realm!

Please use the links on either side of this page to make your way to the various stories and postings

Over the years I’ve spent many hours in website and forum/discussion board design, yet I have never ventured into the Blog world -- until now!

Many of you know me from various game and game strategy forums, some of you have no clue, nor do you care, who I am.

On this site, I will be posting the most relevant articles and news stories as they unfold.
I want to be sure to state up front that most of this content is NOT mine although from time to time I will write my own articles, rather these will be repostings of items I already post or link via email/IM to many of you already with some of my own comments/links/research included.

This format simply provides a central location for them, while also allowing me to simply point someone to archives instead of digging through 1,000’s of emails.

I hope you enjoy your time here, and that you come away from this site with some new information and knowledge if nothing else.

Admittedly, the news stories WILL have a conservative slant on them, as I am fairly conservative, but I will do my best to keep objective and post the good right along with the bad.
As you can likely tell simply from the domain name I chose, I’m in no way happy with our political realm -- Republican or Democrat -- therefore, no “party affiliation” is going to decide for me if a post makes it here or not.

Bear with me as I complete the layout of this site, and if you have any questions at all, please feel free to drop me an email at Shades@time4revolution.net

~Shades~

By John S. McCain III, Lieut. Commander, U.S. Navy

John McCain spent 5½ years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam. His first-person account of that harrowing ordeal was published in U.S. News in May 1973. Shot down in his Skyhawk dive bomber on Oct. 26, 1967, Navy flier McCain was taken prisoner with fractures in his right leg and both arms. He received minimal care and was kept in wretched conditions that he describes vividly in the U.S. News special report

Here, in his own words, based on almost total recall, is Commander McCain’s narrative of 5½ years in the hands of the North Vietnamese.

The date was Oct. 26, 1967. I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up—the sky was full of them—and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber. It went into an inverted, almost straight-down spin.

I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection—the air speed was about 500 knots. I didn’t realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places, and my left arm. I regained consciousness just before I landed by parachute in a lake right in the corner of Hanoi, one they called the Western Lake. My helmet and my oxygen mask had been blown off.

I hit the water and sank to the bottom. I think the lake is about 15 feet deep, maybe 20. I kicked off the bottom. I did not feel any pain at the time, and was able to rise to the surface. I took a breath of air and started sinking again. Of course, I was wearing 50 pounds, at least, of equipment and gear. I went down and managed to kick up to the surface once more. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t use my right leg or my arm. I was in a dazed condition. I went up to the top again and sank back down. This time I couldn’t get back to the surface. I was wearing an inflatable life-preserver-type thing that looked like water wings. I reached down with my mouth and got the toggle between my teeth and inflated the preserver and finally floated to the top.

Some North Vietnamese swam out and pulled me to the side of the lake and immediately started stripping me, which is their standard procedure. Of course, this being in the center of town, a huge crowd of people gathered, and they were all hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.

When they had most of my clothes off, I felt a twinge in my right knee. I sat up and looked at it, and my right foot was resting next to my left knee, just in a 90-degree position. I said, “My God–my leg!” That seemed to enrage them —I don’t know why. One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly. Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.

About this time, a guy came up and started yelling at the crowd to leave me alone. A woman came over and propped me up and held a cup of tea to my lips, and some photographers took some pictures. This quieted the crowd down quite a bit. Pretty soon, they put me on a stretcher, lifted it onto a truck, and took me to Hanoi’s main prison. I was taken into a cell and put on the floor. I was still on the stretcher, dressed only in my skivvies, with a blanket over me.

For the next three or four days, I lapsed from conscious to unconsciousness. During this time, I was taken out to interrogation—which we called a “quiz”—several times. That’s when I was hit with all sorts of war-criminal charges. This started on the first day. I refused to give them anything except my name, rank, serial number and date of birth. They beat me around a little bit. I was in such bad shape that when they hit me it would knock me unconscious. They kept saying, “You will not receive any medical treatment until you talk.”

I didn’t believe this. I thought that if I just held out, that they’d take me to the hospital. I was fed small amounts of food by the guard and also allowed to drink some water. I was able to hold the water down, but I kept vomiting the food.

They wanted military rather than political information at this time. Every time they asked me something, I’d just give my name, rank and serial number and date of birth.

I think it was on the fourth day that two guards came in, instead of one. One of them pulled back the blanket to show the other guard my injury. I looked at my knee. It was about the size, shape and color of a football. I remembered that when I was a flying instructor a fellow had ejected from his plane and broken his thigh. He had gone into shock, the blood had pooled in his leg, and he died, which came as quite a surprise to us—a man dying of a broken leg. Then I realized that a very similar thing was happening to me.

When I saw it, I said to the guard, “O.K., get the officer.” An officer came in after a few minutes. It was the man that we came to know very well as “The Bug.” He was a psychotic torturer, one of the worst fiends that we had to deal with. I said, “O.K., I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.” He left and came back with a doctor, a guy that we called “Zorba,” who was completely incompetent. He squatted down, took my pulse. He did not speak English, but shook his head and jabbered to “The Bug.” I asked, “Are you going to take me to the hospital?” “The Bug” replied, “It’s too late.” I said, “If you take me to the hospital, I’ll get well.”

“Zorba” took my pulse again, and repeated, “It’s too late.” They got up and left, and I lapsed into unconsciousness.

Sometime later, “The Bug” came rushing into the room, shouting, “Your father is a big admiral; now we take you to the hospital.”

I tell the story to make this point: There were hardly any amputees among the prisoners who came back because the North Vietnamese just would not give medical treatment to someone who was badly injured—they weren’t going to waste their time. For one thing, in the transition from the kind of life we lead in America to the filth and dirt and infection, it would be very difficult for a guy to live anyway. In fact, my treatment in the hospital almost killed me.

ARLINGTON, Va: Conceding that his campaign has been slightly down in the polls over the past few weeks, Republican presidential nominee John McCain vowed to ‘whip’ Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s ‘you know what’ in the final televised presidential debate this Wednesday.

In an effort to energize supporters at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., John McCain on Sunday may have also whipped up a little controversy with a remark that he’d “whip” Barack Obama’s “you know what” at the next debate.

The presidential candidates are meeting Wednesday in their final televised debate before the Nov. 4 election.

But McCain’s pledge — coming after two days of racial grievances aired by McCain’s camp over a comparison made by Rep. John Lewis of McCain to the late Gov. George Wallace — has sent shivers down the spines of some Republicans who find the racially charged verb may be used against the candidate.

Addressing several dozen volunteers at his campaign headquarters outside Washington, McCain promised some of his signature “straight talk” about the state of the race, and went on to acknowledge his drop in the polls.

National and many battleground state polls have shown him trailing Obama amid the deepening market crisis.

“We’re a couple points down, OK, nationally, but we’re right in this game,” McCain said to cheers. “The economy has hurt us a little bit in the last week or two, but in the last few days we’ve seen it come back up because they want experience, they want knowledge and they want vision. We’ll give that to America.”

McCain said he and running mate Sarah Palin would continue campaigning hard in the three weeks left before Election Day, in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado. The two planned a joint appearance Monday in Virginia, a Republican stronghold turned battleground this time.

“We’re going to spend a lot of time and after I whip his you-know-what in this debate, we’re going to be going out 24/7,” McCain said.

The two men will debate Wednesday at Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y. CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer will moderate the 90-minute forum.

Still, McCain promised to run a “respectful” campaign in the weeks to come.

“I respect Senator Obama, we will conduct a respectful race and be sure everyone else does too. But there are stark difference between us,” McCain said.

Meanwhile, top advisers say McCain is weighing new economic proposals to help the nation weather the financial crisis. The Arizona senator refused to answer a reporter’s question Sunday about what plans he might be considering

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said McCain was considering policy proposals that would cut taxes on investments.

“I think it goes along the lines of now’s the time to lower tax rates for investors, capital gains tax, dividend tax rates, to make sure that we can get the economy jump-started,” Graham said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “It will be a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes.”

McCain already has laid out proposals to address the crisis, including a $300 billion plan for the federal government to buy distressed mortgages and renegotiate them at a reduced price.

The Arizona senator has said his plan is necessary to get thousands of bad mortgages off the books in order to stabilize home values and open up credit. But critics said the plan would do little more than reward financial institutions that made the bad loans to in the first place.

On Friday, McCain called for legislation that suspends for one year the requirement that investors age 70 1/2 begin to liquidate their retirement accounts. The Arizona senator said it would be unfair to force seniors to sell their stocks when stock prices have tumbled so severely. Obama aides said the Illinois senator favors a similar effort.

Obama also has offered plans to address the fiscal crisis but nothing as sweeping or controversial as McCain’s mortgage proposal. On Friday, the Illinois senator announced a $900 million plan to temporarily extend an expiring tax break that lets small businesses write off investments up to $250,000 immediately, rather than over the course of several years.

Aides said Obama also wants to extend the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program to help small businesses that cannot access other sources of capital, as well as eliminate fees on SBA loan guarantees and increase the size of loans that could be covered. They put the cost at $5 billion.

Both candidates voted for the $700 billion bailout proposal Congress passed and President Bush signed into law earlier this month.

FOX News’ Major Garrett and The Associated Press contributed to this report.