by TChris

Florida is up to its old tricks, trying to assure that potential voters in Democratic counties are disenfranchised, lest they vote for someone other than the Governor's brother.

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood has now told county supervisors that 47,000 more names are likely to be purged from the voter rolls this year, and election watchdogs fear that Florida is poised to repeat the mistakes of 2000 on a much larger scale.

Hood claims that procedures are in place to assure that voters aren't mistakenly removed from the rolls, as they were in 2000, but "the state is using the same flawed database that misidentified so many voters in 2000 and has done little to improve its accuracy."

Hood staunchly denies that politics is at play, but her critics point out that almost a third of those listed reside in the heavily Democratic South Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. Polls show that Democratic contender John Kerry and President Bush are running neck and neck in the state, where the President's brother Jeb is Governor.