Excerpt: Conned

By Sasha Abramsky, AlterNet. Posted April 25, 2006.

In this excerpt from his new book, Sasha Abramsky reveals what really happened during the 2000 Election voter 'purge.'

A few months before Election 2000, disturbing stories began surfacing in the Florida media about the electoral rolls being "scrubbed," or "purged."

Hundreds of thousands of Floridians were technically not allowed to vote because they had been convicted of a felony at some time in the past; yet the state was worried that several thousand of these men and women (though still less than 10 percent of the state's total number of felons) might have registered to vote anyway and that county officials might have failed to notice that these people were ineligible to vote. And so state officials decided to clean up the rolls.