The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held Hostage

By Martin Merzer, Miami Herald Staff, the Staff of The Miami Herald

DESCRIPTION: The Complete Investigation of the 2000 Presidential Election Including Results of the Independent RecountThe Miami Herald presents an in-depth study of Florida's 2000 presidential election, drawing on the independent vote review conducted by the accounting firm of B.D.O. Seidman, and answering the question that millions of Americans are still asking:If the Supreme Court hadn't halted the Florida recount, who would be the 43rd President?Americans woke up on November 8, 2000 unsure who their next president would be.A population accustomed to knowing the outcome of electoral contests before the polls closed-and often much earlier than that-would endure another thirty six days of high-stakes political and legal maneuvering before the U.S. Supreme Court stopped recounts in the State of Florida, effectively sealing the race for Texas Governor George W. Bush.It was one of the closest elections in U.S. history.The loser, Al Gore, had actually won the popular vote.The winner, Bush, had taken the election with only one more electoral vote than was needed.Meanwhile, the attention of the American people shifted to Florida, the fourth most populous state in the Union, and one of the most diverse, divided, and fastest growing.Florida's 25 electoral votes would have put either candidate over the top and into the White House.But for those thirty-seven days, partisans from the Democratic and Republican Parties remained divided over the result of the Florida election, the outcome of the Presidential Race, and the future of America.Now, in The Miami Herald Report, one of the nation's most trusted newspapers investigates the organizational, technological, and institutional shortcomings that plagued the Florida election and resulted in one of the most bitterly contested transfers of power in American history.The Miami Herald, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Miami's corrupt 1997 mayoral elections, delves into the deeply flawed 2000 contest, revealing:* That Florida election officials had known for decades that the state's obsolete punch-card ballots constituted a serious problem-yet 24 of the state's 67 counties still used them in 2000. * That not only were the motives of some public officials-entrusted with the fair outcome of the race-called into question, but also that Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, revealed in an email obtained by The Herald that she saw herself in Biblical terms as a defender of the unborn. * That votes were uncounted in disproportionate numbers in poor and minority voting districts-and that many registered American voters were prevented from voting altogether while droves of unregistered citizens, convicted felons, and non-citizens cast illegal ballots in the presidential contest.Including the complete B.D.O Seidman survey, The Miami Herald Report finally provides the answers that Americans have been demanding since the night of November 7, 2000.It also reveals that the shortcomings in the Florida electoral process turned up in dozens of other states, and that these shortcomings will need to be addressed-and soon-if Americans' faith in the fair outcome of their elections is going to be restored.AUTHORBIO: Martin Merzer is a veteran journalist with 28 years of experience.He and a team of more than two dozen reporters and editors researched this book.The Miami Herald's 1997 investigation of Miami's tarnished mayoral elections won the Pulitzer Prize for the newspaper and resulted in the overturn of the race's outcome.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312284527
• ISBN13: 9780312284527
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.6" x 1.1" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

REQUIRED READING FOR EVERY AMERICAN OVER AGE 18

Historians will use this book as the chief reference book in documenting the death of democracy. The example after example of immoral and illegal actions that occurred in the 2000 Presidential election should be the rallying cry for reform of the election process for decades to come.

Balanced, a bit dry but easy to understand...

"A recently released University of Minnesota studyestimates that, for example, 93 percent of felons of all races favored Bill Clinton in 1996"Uh--New York reader-reviewer..is this because they like to vote for one of their own?I enjoyed this book and felt it showed both sides of the battle. The liberals will always think they had the election stolen from them and the conservatives will always feel the right man won.I would LOVE to see a book written that discusses ALL the goings-on that happened with the elections, past and 2000. The vote-buying in Chicago, the Haitians being helped to vote a straight Dem ticket, the exchange of votes for liquor or cigarettes. But this book answered a lot of my questions and I will recommend it to others.

Excellent unbiased account of Election 2000

Although I expected the book to lean more towards bashing Bush and the Republicans, Martin Merzer is very fair in his accounts of the problems that allowed this situation to happen. Very well-written and a good read.

When Democracy in America Died - Voter Registration Purge

Democracy in America died when tens of thousands of legally eligible voters who had registerd, were turned away from the polls because Jeb Bush & Karl Rove conspired to remove them from the Florida registration lists, or had them blocked from being entered on those lists. This is the true tragedy of Florida, not butterfly ballots and chads. Until Jeb & Karl are in Jail, and W removed from his ill-gotten office, there is no democracy. In Latin America they might have called them votantes desaparecidos, "disappeared voters." On November 7 tens of thousands of eligible Florida voters were wrongly prevented from casting their ballots--some purged from the voter registries and others blocked from registering in the first instance. Nearly all were Democrats, nearly half of them African-American. The systematic program that disfranchised these legal voters, directed by the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was so quiet, subtle and intricate that if not for George W. Bush's 500-vote eyelash margin of victory, certified by Harris, the chance of the purge's discovery would have been vanishingly small. The group prevented from voting has few defenders in either party: felons. It has been well reported that Florida denies its nearly half a million former convicts the right to vote. However, the media have completely missed the fact that Florida's own courts have repeatedly told the Governor he may not take away the civil rights of Florida citizens who committed crimes in other states, served their time and had their rights restored by those states. People from other states who have arrived in Florida with a felony conviction in their past number "clearly over 50,000 and likely over 100,000," says criminal demographics expert Jeffrey Manza of Northwestern University. Manza estimates that 80 percent arrive with voting rights intact, which they do not forfeit by relocating to Florida. Nevertheless, agencies controlled by Harris and Bush ordered county officials to reject attempts by these eligible voters to register, while, publicly, the governor's office states that it adheres to court rulings not to obstruct these ex-offenders in the exercise of their civil rights. Further, with the aid of a Republican-tied database firm, Harris's office used sophisticated computer programs to hunt those felons eligible to vote and ordered them thrown off the voter registries. After reviewing The Nation's findings, voter demographics authority David Bositis concluded that the purge-and-block program was "a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters." Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC, notes that based on nationwide conviction rates, African-Americans would account for 46 percent of the ex-felon group wrongly disfranchised. Corroborating Bositis's estimate, the Hillsborough County elections supervisor found that 54 percent of the