“The 2000 election brought national attention to the hundreds of thousands of ex-felons in Florida who had lost their right to vote. Before Jeb Bush took office, Florida responded to a 1998 voter fraud scheme in Miami—a rare case of actual voter fraud—by hiring an outside firm to purge the state’s voter rolls of any felons and deceased voters. The list of about 58,000 names the company drew up was deeply flawed. It contained many Floridians with only misdemeanor offenses, and others with no criminal records at all, sometimes because they had names similar to those of felons. It singled out African Americans, who made up 11 percent of registered voters in the state but 44 percent of the purge list. According to Edward Hailes, a lawyer with the US Commission on Civil Rights, the number of African Americans wrongfully expunged from the rolls who would have voted for Al Gore was 4,752—nearly nine times greater than the 537 votes that handed George W. Bush the presidency. The purge was, as Hailes told The Nation, ‘outcome-determinative.'” — Mother Jones (click here for story)
DALLAS, TX – JULY 10: Former President George W. Bush speaks during Naturalization Ceremony at the George W. Bush Presidential Center on July 10, 2013 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Cooper Neill/WireImage)
Throughout his presidency, President Obama has been called “illegitimate” by Republicans despite having won decisively in 2008 by 9.5 million popular votes and more than 2-to-1 in electoral votes, and in 2012 by 5 million popular votes and another triple-digit electoral vote margin.
George W. Bush, by contrast, won the disputed elections of 2000 and 2004 by 1 state each, losing the popular vote in 2000 by half a million votes. In that year, the pivotal state was Florida, where Bush’s margin was 537 votes after the Republican-majority Supreme Court stopped the recounts.
If Republicans won’t recognize Obama as legitimate, then why should Democrats regard George W. Bush and his incompetent and corrupt administration as legitimate?
Photo: George W. Bush, ersatz president