Ahhh, Old Guy. Here is where you are a misleader like your hero Bush. You say:

"several news organizations went over and over the Florida ballots and all of then concluded that Bush got more votes than Gore."

In fact, all the links you provide, except one, point to THE SAME STUDY. It was conducted by Miami Herald and USA Today, and they throw Knight Ridder in to make it look more authoritative although since the Miami Herald is part of Knight-Ridder this is meaningless. So we have a single study done by two organizations together. When you say several groups did studies and ALL OF THEM conclude something, you strongly suggest independent confirmation from more than two sources. But alas, there was none.

The other study (sptimes) found that although there might have been more ballots for Bush, this was only because Floridians botched their votes due to the badly-designed ballot. They clearly found that more Floridians intended to vote for Gore. So Gore won Florida, Old Guy!

As for documenting Katherine Harris's crimes, here is an article from Harper's which reveals what they did: They hired a company called DBT, which started with a list of everyone living in the United States who has ever been convicted of a felony. Then, if they found anyone on the Florida voter rolls who had a similar (not necessary to be identical) name, age, race and gender, they eliminated that person. Even if the ex-felon whose name was similar had been pardoned. Even if that ex-felon actually had the right to vote, which is true of most ex-felons (thirty-five states restore their voting rights when they serve their time, and it is unconstitutional for Florida to take the right to vote away from a person whose felony conviction was from another state and who had voting rights restored by that state). Even if there was no evidence that the felon had ever been to Florida, let alone was the same person listed on the Florida voter rolls, the Florida voter was purged. So if there was a convicted felon named "John Smith" anywhere in America, then any John Smith in Florida of a similar age and race would be purged.

There article is here

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1

I'll give you a nice sample. Note the hilarious parts in bold!

Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida's electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. In Harris's elections office files, next to DBT's sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: "DON'T NEED."

Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida's elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race. Harper's found 325 names on the list with conviction dates in the future, a fact that did not escape Department of Elections workers, who, in June 2000 emails headed, "Future Conviction Dates," termed the discovery, "bad news." Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that "blanks would be preferable in these cases." (Harper's counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts. Some counties defied Harris' directives; Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge list after she found her own name on it.

Rev. Willie Dixon (3), seventy, was guilty of a crime in his youth; but one phone call would have told the state that it had already pardoned Dixon and restored his right to vote. On behalf of Dixon and other excluded voters, the NAACP in January 2001 sued Florida and Harris, after finding that African-Americans--who account for 13 percent of Florida's electorate and 46 percent of U.S. felony convictions--were four times as likely as whites to be incorrectly singled out under the state's methodology. After the election, Harris and her elections chief Clay Roberts, testified under oath that verifying the lists was solely the work of county supervisors. But the Florida-DBT contract (marked "Secret" and "Confidential") holds DBT responsible for "manual verification using telephone calls." in fact, with the state's blessing, DBT did not call a single felon. When I asked [Harris's Aide] Roberts about the contract during an interview for BBC television, Roberts ripped off his microphone, ran into his office, locked the door, and called in state troopers to remove us.

Johnny Jackson Jr. (4), thirty-two, has never been to Texas, and his mother swears he never had the middle name "Fitzgerald." Neither is there evidence that John Fitzgerald Jackson, felon of Texas, has ever left the Lone Star State. But even if they were the same man, removing him from Florida's voter rolls is an unconstitutional act. Texas is among the thirty five states where ex-felons are permitted to vote, and the "full faith and credit" clause of the U.S. Constitution forbids states to revoke any civil rights that a citizen has been granted by another state; in fact, the Florida Supreme Court had twice ordered the state not to do so, just nine months before the voter purge. Nevertheless, at least 2,873 voters were wrongly removed, a purge authorized by a September 18, 2000 letter to counties from Governor Bush's clemency office. On February 23, 2001, days after the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights began investigating the matters, Bush's office issued a new letter allowing these persons to vote; no copies of the earlier letter could be found in the clemency office or on its computers.

After this article, Harris wrote an angry letter to Harpers. But as the original author Palast pointed out in his response to the letter:

"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."

He also points out this doozy:

" 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."

So take your pick, Old Guy. Either Katherine Harris (now a congresswoman, then State Supervisor of elections, Florida secretary of state, and Bush campaign chair) lied and cheated and broke the law to get people off the voter rolls because Jeb Bush told her to, or because it was her own idea. Either she or Jeb is lying about it.

By the way, if you want to keep claiming that Gore-Lieberman are the only plaintiffs in any of the lawsuits about voting rights, you've missed the most important one, outlined on the ACLU website:

http://www.aclufl.org/legislature_courts/legal_department/briefs_complaints/naacp_v__harris.cfm

It's a huge class-action suit spearheaded by the NAACP.

Finally, if you didn't see any thuggish people around harrassing black people when you voted it's probably because you don't vote where there a lot of black people. I'm just guessing here. For over 10 years I lived in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia and I saw them during all three presidential elections I voted in there. Now I live in a mostly white neighborhood, and funnily enough they don't bother to come here. But I'm going out to another neighborhood as a volunteer to protect the rights of minorities to vote!