Katherine went away - to the US Congress....
Harris' hometown paper endorses no one in Republican primary
SARASOTA — Katherine Harris' hometown newspaper refused to endorse her in Tuesday's Republican congressional primary, citing her sudden resignation as Florida secretary of state because she failed to file the proper paperwork when she qualified for the ballot. "Mistakes and misjudgments, which continued right through Harris' confounding resignation as secretary of state, can no longer be dismissed as the products of inexperience," the paper wrote.
9/10/02
Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Congress, District 13
In the Republican primary, we make no recommendation
Four times the Herald-Tribune has
recommended Katherine Harris in an election for public office. The
recommendations were made with reservations, sometimes with
trepidation, but always in the hope that experience would help
Harris harness her extraordinary energy, bring clarity to her
views and teach her to avoid those embarrassing blunders.
That hope has vanished.
Mistakes and misjudgments, which continued right through Harris'
confounding resignation as secretary of state, can no longer be
dismissed as the products of inexperience. Mishaps aren't the
exception but the expectation.
Likewise, the startling lack of clarity when Harris discusses
public policies and her political vision -- without the aid of
scripts or handlers -- can no longer be excused as a byproduct of
a novice's uncontained enthusiasm. Desultory responses to
questions are the standard, regardless of the stage of her career
or the importance of the office sought. ... 9/9/02
Katherine
Harris tops $2 million in campaign contributions SARASOTA -
Republican Katherine Harris has eclipsed the $2 million mark in
contributions in her campaign for Congress. 7/13/02
But can she beat the dog:
Percy didn't make it...
and amazingly Kathryn Harris got the Republican nomination.
Ineptitude, be damned...
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News Clips
updated
04/14/07 (news
clips have not been kept updated - check
archives) Kathryn
Harris official
website Katherine
Harris: No regrets over role in Florida results
SAN ANTONIO - Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris told a small
crowd of Republican loyalists that in her bid for a seat in Congress
she expects to be targeted by the national Democratic Party. ....
She's still serving as secretary of state, but is the Republican
nominee for Congress. ... "We didn't have a constitutional crisis
or a threat to democracy in Florida - we had a close election,"
Harris said. 7/19/02 |
(news clips have not been kept updated - check
archives)
Judge denies motion of Harris challenger
TALLAHASSEE — A day after winning the GOP primary for a southwest Florida congressional district, Katherine Harris got more good news Wednesday when a Tallahassee judge rejected a legal effort by her defeated opponent to remove her from the ballot.
9/12/02
Harris'
bizarre term has bizarre end
Florida's place as the national butt of jokes about its ability to run
normal elections remains secure. Thank you, Katherine Harris. 8/4/02
Voters'
lawsuit headed to trial
Barring any last-minute settlements, the players in a federal lawsuit
alleging voter discrimination in Florida's controversial 2000 election --
including Miami-Dade County and Secretary of State Katherine Harris --
will be heading to trial later this month. 8/2/02
Katherine
Harris resigns to concentrate on congressional run
TALLAHASSEE
— Katherine Harris resigned Thursday as secretary of state,
saying she misunderstood the rules about whether she had to submit a
resignation letter to run for Congress. Gov. Jeb Bush kept her as
acting secretary, however, until he appoints a successor. Under state
law, Harris, the state's top elections official, should have filed a
letter July 15 stating her intent to resign before the next Congress
takes office in January, but didn't. Candidates who don't file the
letter are considered resigned immediately. 8/2/02
Harris
resigns after election-law conflict
TALLAHASSEE -- During the 2000 presidential election controversy,
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris repeatedly said she was
only following state election laws when she accepted some ballots and
discounted others and ultimately named fellow Republican George W.
Bush the winner and next president. -- But Harris, Florida's top
election official who gained international fame for her role in the
2000 election, was forced to resign her position yesterday after she
acknowledged misinterpreting Florida election laws. 8/2/02
One
squirms on hot seat, the other just shrugs -
Katherine Harris, who resigned Thursday as Florida's secretary of
state in typically bizarre fashion, should never have been in
statewide office. ...
.... The motto of her four years in office might as well be: Harris
Could Not Be Reached For Comment. -- The end of her press conference
Thursday was perfect: a flustered Harris, sheltered by aides hustling
her out of the room, knocking over microphones and tape recorders to
get her away from having to explain herself any further..... 8/2/02
Mistake forces Harris to resign -- TALLAHASSEE
-- Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the state's top elections
official, acknowledged Thursday she failed to follow an election law
herself and abruptly resigned.
It was a bizarre end to the controversial tenure of one of the most
visible figures in the 2000 presidential election recount. 8/2/02
Harris
suddenly resigns
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who presided
over Florida's disputed 2000 vote count as the state's chief elections
officer, stepped down abruptly Thursday after admitting she violated
the election law. ... "I was very familiar with the law,"
Harris said, adding she had done "an outstanding job" during
her 31/2years in office. 8/2/02
Harris
resigns to seek office
Secretary of State Katherine Harris announced her resignation
Thursday, admitting that she made a mistake when she didn't submit the
required paperwork in her bid for Congress. 8/2/02
Harris
resigns two weeks late
By S.V. Dáte, Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
The secretary of state resigned Thursday, but said she'd continue as
'de facto' secretary. 8/2/02
Election
Resignation Rule Trips Harris
TALLAHASSEE - It looks like Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris might once again be an inviting target for late-night
comedians. -- Harris revealed Thursday that she didn't resign her
office when she qualified to run for Congress, as required by state
election law. The oversight is embarrassing because the secretary of
state is in charge of elections. 8/2/02
Election
law trips Harris up -- ... But Harris' acknowledgment that
she made a mistake in filling out her elections paperwork may give
some of her opponents the chance to eliminate the front-running
candidate who has amassed a campaign war chest of more than $2
million. --
Candice Brown McElyea, a former TV reporter and one of four Democrats
seeking the same seat, said she would file a lawsuit today in Sarasota
County challenging Harris' place on the Sept. 10 primary ballot.
Harris is squaring off against Republican John Hill in the primary.--
''She always thinks she's above the law,'' Brown McElyea said. ''No
rules or regulations ever apply to her. She's in charge of the
Division of Elections. If anyone would know the law, it should be
her.''---
Other Democrats made similar comments. Jan Schneider, a lawyer seeking
the seat, predicted that if one of them had failed to properly file
their paperwork that ''we'd be out.'' 8/2/02
No
Lapdog to Special Interests
The story should bring a smile and a chuckle to
Florida voters, weary of the usual dead-serious news stories about
candidates, political campaigns and elections. In a Sarasota-area U.S.
House race, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris faces an
unusual write-in opponent -- Percy the dog. 7/21/02
When
good dogs go bad
Tallahassee authorities have made it official: Dogs are ineligible to run
for Congress. The decision came as bad news for Percy, a black-and-white
collie mix, and his keeper, Wayne Genthner of Sarasota, who had hoped to
take on Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris for the House seat
being left open by the retirement of U.S. Rep. Dan Miller, R-Bradenton.
7/18/02
A
four-legged run for Congress
A Sarasota man tries to register his dog to run against Katherine Harris.
That idea won't hunt, officials say. 7/17/02
Ballot
won't be going to the dogs
TALLAHASSEE - Percy barked. Percy wagged his tail. He even got lots of
people in the state elections office to pet him.-- But this blatant
attempt to win over humans just didn't do its job. Florida elections
officials on Tuesday refused to let the black-and-white mixed-breed dog
become a write-in candidate for Congress.-- Percy, sporting a red, white
and blue bow around his neck, was sitting next to his owner, Wayne
Genthner, when he got the bad news: No dogs allowed. That means that
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who oversees the state elections
office, and five other candidates will get to run their race for Florida's
13th Congressional district without a hound on their trail. 7/17/02
House-broken
opponent
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who is running for Congress
in the 13th Congressional District, has a new opponent - a 5-year-old
black-and-while border collie named Percy.7/4/02
A
Political Opponent To Give Katherine Harris Paws
--
...To be sure, all manner of pundits and political insiders have concluded
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris' bid to succeed U.S. Rep. Dan
Miller, R-Bradenton, is more of a certitude than Fidel Castro being
elected to another term....After all, she successfully bought her state
Senate seat and purchased that secretary of state gig, too. She already
has raised enough money to buy the title of Sultaness of Brunei if she
wanted....
So it was that surreal fundraising pace that
ultimately encouraged Percy Genther to throw his bowl in the ring as the
only real conservative alternative to a woman who has staked a claim on
this job as if it were a matter of Manifest Destiny.--
Percy, who is 35 in human years, is a 5-year-old border collie/German
shepherd mix, ...``I wanted her to know you are in a political race, not a
coronation,'' Genther said.
Sarasota
editor resigns after expressing opinion on Harris race
SARASOTA — The managing editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune resigned
Thursday after she expressed her personal views about congressional
candidate Katherine Harris in an e-mail to a reader. Rosemary Armao, who
served as the newspaper's managing editor for nearly three years, told the
reader that she would not vote for Harris, who gained national attention
during the 2000 election recount as Florida's Republican secretary of
state. 6/28/02
Harris
congressional campaign brings her back to political roots
SARASOTA — Katherine Harris is running like she might lose this
election, even in a heavily Republican congressional district, with a deep
financial well and enough celebrity cachet to crowd both big-money
gatherings and neighborhood coffee klatches. The woman at the center of
the 2000 presidential election firestorm is confident, but not wanting to
appear she is simply being anointed to the office some in Congress
casually refer to as "Katherine's seat." 6/9/02
Top
Katherine Harris, Go Away!
A BuzzFlash News Analysis
BuzzFlash thinks Katherine Harris has done enough damage to our democracy and needs to go away, far away, and leave our election process and our country alone.
Voters, especially those in Florida, need only read about Harris' letter in Harper's Magazine to realize that we all suffer when someone like Harris is left in charge of our elections. Unfortunately, Harris was Florida's Secretary of State until last month, which resulted in another round of voting problems there.(1)
Additionally, if you weren't already convinced that Harris was complicit in the theft of the 2000 Presidential election, you would be the minute you read that "Florida's top elections officials and a leading U.S. civil rights group . . . settled a lawsuit that alleged Florida systematically excluded thousands of minority voters from the 2000 presidential election."(2) Greg Palast was right. Again.
Below are some recent stories on Harris and below that is a fundraising email from her campaign. Read through it all and you'll be asking the same questions we ask: Why hasn't Katherine Harris been run out of the country for making a mockery of our election process?
(1) 'It's deja vu all over again' _ Florida's election system criticized for failures
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story
&u=/ap/20020911/ap_to_po/florida_voting_42
(2) NAACP Settles Dispute over 2000 Presidential Vote
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story
&u=/nm/20020904/ts_nm/politics_florida_dc_3
Votes for Katherine Harris Could be Tossed Out
http://www.newscoast.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2002209070342
The Republican Sarasota Herald Tribune Dumps on Katherine Harris: Won't Endorse Her in Primary
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ article?AID=2002209070570
Top
KATHERINE HARRIS SAYS PALAST
'TWISTED AND MANIACAL' - in July Harper's
Harper's Magazine
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Have I upset Kate? Darn. The Florida Secretary of State
has sent me a heartfelt billet-doux in time for my birthday. Twisted and
maniacal? I won't deny it. Most important, she doesn't say I was wrong:
her office sent out lists of 57,700 voters - most of them black, almost
all of them innocent, to remove from the voter rolls. Harris' letter,
despite its berserker tone, is in fact an astonishing confession. Read it
all in this month's Harper's Magazine, along with my reply.
Ms Harris begins:
”Greg Palast's Annotation ["Ex-Con Game," March] distorts and
misrepresents the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election in
Florida in order to support his twisted and maniacally partisan
conclusions. To the chagrin of responsible journalists everywhere,
Palast's effort implodes under the slightest scrutiny, owing to his abject
failure to check the accuracy of his facts.”
Katherine Harris does not deny the central allegations of my Annotation:
that her office ordered 57,700 Florida citizens be removed from the voter
rolls, despite the knowledge that many, if not most, of these citizens
were innocent of all crimes. Rather, she delegates the blame: state law
forced her to hire a private firm that compiled this racially corrosive
hit list. The Florida secretary of state may cite the law to the fourth
decimal, but her interpretation of it-that her office was to provide
county officials a list of "potentially ineligible voters"-is
chilling. The law required that Harris's office provide a list
"identifying" voters who had been convicted of a felony and that
it contract with a private entity only to "meet its obligations"
under the requirement. Maybe by "potentially" ineligible voters
she means thousands like Thomas Cooper, whom her office lists as having
been convicted of a felony in the year 2007.
The documents amusingly labeled "Secret"-thank you, Ms. Harris;
as a reporter I am well versed in the Sunshine Laws-indicate that payment
to her contractor depended specifically on "manual verification using
telephone calls." Despite numerous requests from Harper's Magazine
and the BBC, Harris has never explained why the private firm was paid
millions for this work that was not done. Harris's apocryphal claim that
county officials asked to take over this expensive work counters both the
correspondence in her files and my own conversations with the county
election supervisors.
Even if she wrongly took away the rights of innocent voters, Harris
contends, mistakes on the voter rolls favored Al Gore. This odd defense is
founded on her claim that, according to the Palm Beach Post,
"thousands of felons voted." But the Post's conclusions were
based on data used by Harris, with even sloppier methods of verification
than hers. Because Harris's list was hopelessly flawed, some counties
refused to remove voters from their rolls; therefore, thousands of her
"ex-felons" did vote. After the 2000 election, Florida's
attorney general promised to arrest any ineligible voter who had gone to
the polls, a criminal offense in Florida. So far, the Harris and Post
lists have produced, he says, fewer than half a dozen cases, out of
thousands accused.
The Annotation's most damning accusation, from the view of civil rights
lawyers, is that the state purged ex-convicts who had their right to vote
restored by other states. Rather than deny the charge, Harris claims that
she was required to do so by a letter from Governor Jeb Bush's Office of
Executive Clemency. Oops! Harris has just blown Jeb's alibi. His office,
as I mention in the Annotation, assured me that no such letter exists.
Indeed, Bush's office produced a letter dated February 23, 2001, with a
position opposite Harris's.
Regardless of where Harris seeks to shift the blame, her office clearly
did wrong. The NAACP has filed suit over the voter purges uncovered by our
BBC and Guardian reports. NAACP v Harris goes to trial in August.
Katherine, if you've got an alibi for operating a Jim Crow election
operation, tell it to the judge.
Katherine Harris, cochairwoman of Florida's George W. Bush for President
campaign and now candidate for Congress, accuses this London reporter of
"partisanship." To that, one hardly knows how to respond.
---
Katherine Harris
Florida Secretary of State
Tallahassee, Fla.
A Florida Makeover
Greg Palast's Annotation ["Ex-Con Game," March] distorts and
misrepresents the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election in
Florida in order to support his twisted and maniacally partisan
conclusions. To the chagrin of responsible journalists everywhere,
Palast's effort implodes under the slightest scrutiny, owing to his abject
failure to check the accuracy of his facts.
Palast erroneously claims that my predecessor and I "ordered 57,700
'ex-felons,' who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed
from voter rolls," when in fact the Florida legislature, through
Florida Statute Section 98.0975, mandated that we use a private firm to
provide to Florida's 67 county supervisors of elections a list identifying
potentially ineligible voters whose names remained on the
voter-registration rolls. The legislature, not the Department of State,
required county supervisors to remove the names of these persons from the
voting rolls if they were unable to determine that this information was
incorrect.
Revealingly, Palast provides examples of persons whose names allegedly
appeared on the list in error without mentioning whether these persons had
been permitted, or even had attempted, to vote in the election. He claims
that "Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some
Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all" but neglects to
mention that, according to a study conducted by the Palm Beach Post,
"[t]housands of felons voted in the presidential election . . . [who]
almost certainly influenced the . . . election" in favor of former
vice president Al Gore. According to the Post, this estimated number of
illegal voters far outnumbered the persons who allegedly could not vote
because they were erroneously removed from the voter rolls.
Showing the laughable depths to which he will stoop, Palast ominously
notes that Florida's contract with DBT Online, a private company, was
"marked 'Secret' and 'Confidential,'" neglecting to mention that
1) DBT, not the Department of State, requested this notation in an effort
to prevent other companies from copying and selling the computer software
used to generate the list, and 2) Florida's expansive public-records law
would have prohibited us from making that contract "secret" even
if we had tried to do so.
Further, Palast contends that, "with the state's blessing, DBT did
not call a single felon" without noting that we provided this
"blessing" at the behest of Florida's county supervisors of
elections, who wished to contact the persons on the list themselves,
pursuant to their statutory responsibility.
Palast even misrepresents two rulings of the Florida District Courts of
Appeal as orders of the Florida Supreme Court, while ranting that these
decisions prohibited Florida from removing any names of felons from the
voting rolls whose civil rights had been restored automatically in another
state. Before the 2000 election, the Department of State asked Florida's
Office of Executive Clemency, which answered to Governor Jeb Bush and an
executive cabinet that included Democratic attorney general Bob
Butterworth and Democratic U.S. senator Bill Nelson, for its opinion on
this matter. The Office of Executive Clemency issued a letter advising us
that felons who had not received an order of clemency from another state
must apply to have their civil rights restored in Florida before being
eligible to vote.
Florida's difficult experience in Election 2000 exposed flaws in the
elections process that had festered across America for decades, since the
political will to address these flaws had never existed. I am proud to
have helped Florida become the nationally acclaimed leader in election
reform since that time. Last year, the Florida legislature passed
virtually all of my bills as part of its landmark Election Reform Act.
This legislation placed the burden on the state to prove a person's
ineligibility to vote before removing that person from the rolls,
correcting the problem in the law that led to any erroneous removal of
eligible voters before the 2000 election. In Florida we have moved
aggressively to prevent such concerns from arising ever again. I regret
that Greg Palast's political agenda does not permit him to acknowledge
this simple fact.
http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=167&row=0
At http://www.GregPalast.com
you can read and subscribe to Greg Palast's London Observer columns and
view his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight. Pluto Press has just
released Palast's book, "THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY: An
Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate
Cons and High Finance Fraudsters."
.....jkeel, 6/26/02
Response to Kathryn Harris's letter:
I am one of the names who was taken off the rolls in 2000. Thank you
Cruella. My Grandfather,Father,3 Uncles and Brother fought in this
nations wars and shed blood on the battlefields of this country's
wars. I believe in justice Ms. Harris, and I pray that someday you
are held accountable for what you did to democracy and to me.
.... zeek, 6/27/02
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