TAPPED also has a post about the campaign of voter intimidation the Reublicans, along with the Ashcroft Justice department, are embarking on. It is clear to me that these repeated examples of Republicans squealing about 'massive vote fraud' episodes which after investigation turn out to be essentially nothing are just the way to cover up the more egregious acts of genuine election fraud that are currently in the works. The electronic voting systems that have been pushed as the solution are easily rigged in a variety of ways, including simply resetting them and not bothering to tally their votes. There is no paper trail and no way to audit the results or 'recount.' Election fraud is nothing new, so we shouldn't be surprised that it happens, but we should be outraged that right now it can happen at historically unseen levels and there is very little that can be done about it.
I'm not sure where TAPPED got their number of 8,000. The true number of "felons" who Katherine Harris ordered to be scrubbed from the voter lists was 57,700. Some of these 'felons', like Thomas Alvin Cooper, were scheduled to be convicted of their crimes at a future date. The majority* of them were either not felons, or had been convicted for their crimes in other states and were therefore not legally ineligible to vote in Florida.
The media gave them a pass on this the first time. It was reported by Greg Palast in the BBC and in the London Observer in November, 2000, but as far as I know was not reported in any mainstream U.S. media outlet until February, 2001 or later, and was buried by CBS specifically. And, now, with the Republicans screaming 'Democrat voter fraud' over nothing across the 50 states the stage is set for another massive criminal disenfrachisement enterprise that our media will ignore again while focusing ridiculous non-stories about things like voter rolls with dead people (After people die, their first act is not to call the local election board).
You know, I've never read the Instapundit-approved book "More Guns, Less Crime," but I can say that the author's analysis of voter discrimination in Florida is the most transparently deliberately fraudulent piece of 'research' I have read in my life. So, I'll just conclude that I don't have to.
UPDATE: still trying to find basis for use of the word 'majority' above, so you may replace with 'at minimum 8,000' which is the number of false matches on names but does not include people scrubbed for felonies committed in other states.