On stealing elections

Ari Berman’s recent op-ed piece in Perspective does not mention one election that I believe pretty clearly was stolen. Berman’s point was to debunk Donald Trump’s poisonous claims that the coming election would be rigged, and he shows how difficult it would be to steal an election by voter fraud. It is very possible, however, to steal an election.

Berman has documented elsewhere the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Bush’s campaign manager, purged some 50,000 supposed felons from the voter rolls just prior to the election. About 12,000 were not felons, but had a name that partially matched that of a real felon. Most, of course, were black. Doing the numbers, it appears the number of suppressed Gore voters was about 20 times Bush’s margin of victory. The counsel for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that investigated wrote that voter suppression was “outcomedeterminative.”

Sound familiar? The Arkansas secretary of state recently sent county registrars the names of felons to remove from the voting rolls. In Pulaski County, apparently about 20 percent of those to be purged were either not felons or were people whose voting rights had been restored.

Voter ID fraud, as Berman shows, is a nonexistent problem. To steal an election it seems you have to be running it, and disenfranchising voters who are likely to vote against you is the most effective technique.

Of course, it is unlikely that another stolen election could have the horrific consequences of the 2000 election. Oh, wait! ROGER A. WEBB

Little Rock