ELECTION CONTROVERSY 2000: MEDIA COVERAGE OF VOTER PURGES IN FLORIDA

Abstract

While most Americans learned all about butterfly ballots and hanging chads following the 2000 election, very few have heard the story of large numbers of voters wrongly purged from the voter rolls. The story is particularly important both because the wrongly purged voters could have swung the election several times over and because the purge disproportionately disenfranchised African American voters. The purge went largely unreported in the United States. Why didn’t the media bring this issue to the attention of the American people? In this article, I explore the media’s (in)actions through the lens of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s media filtration theories.