Democracy... Florida Style, Bitch!

The New York Times reports that the newly unsealed potential purged voter list is has almost no republican leaning hispanics (Cubans) but plenty of democratic leaning blacks. Check it out:

Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up with a listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls, state officials acknowledged yesterday. As a result, voters identifying themselves as Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list.

Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list, only 61 are Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000 are African-American.

About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic, and about 11 percent as black.

In a presidential-election battleground state that decided the 2000 race by giving George W. Bush a margin of only 537 votes, the effect could be significant: black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, while Hispanics in Florida tend to vote Republican.

And:

Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000 voters in Florida. But more than 90 percent of the approximately one million registered blacks there are Democrats. The exclusion of Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of 28,025 Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.

Jeb's mouthpiece has this to say:

Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for Governor Bush, said: "The governor is complying with the law and complying with the settlement. Recognizing now that there is a discrepancy, the Department of State is looking into the options."

I don't know what the hell that means, especially since I'm sure one of the options that they're looking into is not doing a damn thing. I think this guy is pretty much on the right track:

Democrats said yesterday that the latest disclosure should be the last straw. "Either this administration is acting incompetently in regard to voters' rights,'' said Scott Maddox, the Democratic state chairman, "or they have ill will toward a certain class of voters. Either way, it's unacceptable.''

"The honorable thing to do,'' Mr. Maddox added, ''is throw the list out and not purge people erroneously on the eve of election."