If you want to be worried about the election, forget Nader, try this

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

In early June, Ed Kast, the head of Florida's elections division, resigned

amid reports he was feeling political heat over a push to purge thousands of suspected felons from the state's voter rolls. ...

Kast has told a handful of associates that he was uncomfortable with growing pressure to trim felons from voter rolls in time for the fall election, friends say. ...

[Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho said] "Ed had made a number of comments that the nature and timing of this felons list was not something he was responsible for. I think he felt in good conscience he could no longer be involved in the operations."

That according to the Sun-Sentinel (Florida) for June 8.

He had good cause to feel that way. The state of Florida was sitting on a list of nearly 48,000 names to be purged from voter lists as supposed felons, which it has now sent to county election supervisors. The list is overwhelmingly Democrat and disproportionately (not quite half) minority, reports the Tampa Bay Tribune on July 3, and it comes with a "guilty until proven innocent" tag: Any name on the list which the election supervisor can't verify is not a felon is to be stricken from the voter rolls.

Legally purged voters, meanwhile, won't find out about it until they get a letter from an election supervisor this summer - too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day.

The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic,

noted Tampa Bay Online back on June 7.

And then, of course, there are those who should not have been on the list in the first place but who still may well find themselves unable to vote because there is simply not enough time to fix it. AP had this to say on July 2:

More than 2,100 Floridians who had their voting rights restored were included on a list of purported felons who are potentially ineligible to vote, a newspaper reported Friday. ...

The Miami Herald, after a computer analysis, said at least 2,119 people on the list had received clemency and were eligible to vote. ...

Of the 2,119 people identified by the Herald, 62 percent were registered Democrats, and almost half were black.

What's really outrageous about all this is that this is not a repeat of 2000, it's a continuation of 2000. The notorious purge list of 2000

included voters who had never been convicted of crimes, some whose rights had been restored by other states and others whose names matched those of felons. Nobody knows how many valid voters were disenfranchised.

That was because

[i]n 2000, state officials purposely used loose matching criteria to capture as many names as possible, even knowing it would result in "false positives" - people who didn't actually have felony records, said Emmett Mitchell, former counsel of the Division of Elections.

That is, the state used criteria that it knew would wrongly deny people the right to vote - people likely to be minority, people likely to vote for Democrats. What's more, four years later the "mistakes" still have not been undone and others wait for the grinding wheels of a disinterested if not hostile bureaucracy to resolve their pleas.

Today, as the 2004 election nears:

- More than 43,000 Floridians are on the waiting list to have their rights restored, some of whom first learned in 2000, after voting for years, that they weren't legally entitled to vote. The restoration process can take years, and the list is growing, not shrinking.

- Hundreds of people wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000, who never committed felonies or whose rights had been restored, may not yet have been put back on the rolls.

And thousands of others, again overwhelmingly Democrat, disproportionately minority, are about to join them.

I wonder if the Supreme Court is already rehearsing its arguments.