[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: Kerry Won. Here are the Facts

Sun Nov 7 13:08:30 PST 2004

>
>Kerry Won. Here are the Facts.
>
>TomPaine.com
>Friday, November 5, 2004
>by Greg Palast
><http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=392&row=0>
>
>I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one
>more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a
>journalist examining that messy sausage called American
>democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most
>votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New
>Mexico, it was John Kerry.
>
>Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry.
>At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed
>Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47
>percent. The exit polls were later combined with-and
>therefore contaminated by-the tabulated results,
>ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual
>vote. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters
>51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in
>Ohio, Kerry took the state.
>
>So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are
>accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?"
>Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question,
>"Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
>
>Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most
>voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards,
>thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This
>was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com,
>"An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
>
>Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game
>are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant
>chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
>
>The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but
>by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United
>States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just
>thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on
>the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51
>percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has
>never happened in the United States, because the total
>never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals
>simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
>
>Whose Votes Are Discarded?
>
>And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes,
>say every official report, come from African-American
>and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)
>
>We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore
>with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match
>the official count. That's because the official,
>Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855
>spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these
>votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole
>wasn't punched through completely-leaving a 'hanging
>chad,'-or was punched extra times. Whose cards were
>discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage
>for the government calculated that 54 percent of the
>ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks.
>(To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights
>Commission, click here .)
>
>And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The
>majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2
>million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have
>been cast by African American and other minority
>citizens.
>
>So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because
>unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to
>count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes
>(called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they
>demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent
>may be discerned.
>
>Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use
>the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary
>of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the
>election, 'the possibility of a close election with
>punch cards as the state's primary voting device invites
>a Florida-like calamity.'
>
>But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican,
>has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines
>that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked
>if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris,
>Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a
>seat in Congress.
>
>Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time?
>Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law
>requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last
>time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a
>democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced
>their typical loss-that's 110,000 votes-overwhelmingly
>Democratic.
>
>The Impact Of Challenges
>
>First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the
>Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There
>were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the
>Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan
>technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of
>color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the
>GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under
>arcane laws-almost never used-allowing party-designated
>poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand
>they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified
>and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race
>is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was
>prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth
>door.
>
>In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but
>they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters
>getting these funky "provisional" ballots-a kind of
>voting placebo-which may or may not be counted.
>Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say
>250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed
>at minorities, no one doubts these are, again,
>overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the
>spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in
>a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit
>polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president.
>Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
>
>Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote
>
>Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality-if all
>votes are counted-is more obvious still. Before the
>election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down
>by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one
>ballot has yet been counted."
>
>How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the
>provisional ballots.
>
>CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes.
>Again, the network total added up to that miraculous,
>and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.
>
>New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of
>2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic,
>Native American and poor precincts-Democratic turf. From
>Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we
>can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
>
>Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico.
>Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more
>than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to
>have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these
>uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush
>'plurality.'
>
>Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are
>popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd
>expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by
>Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the
>"Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent
>Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native
>Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31
>percent.
>
>I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the
>election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate
>among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply
>can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for
>president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the
>desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.
>
>Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of
>provisional ballots.
>
>"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque
>journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots.
>About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?
>
>Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship"
>program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told
>me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified
>as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy
>provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provbisional
>ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost
>religiously," he said, at polling stations when there
>was the least question about a voter's identification.
>Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.
>
>Your Kerry Victory Party
>
>So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry-if we
>count all the votes.
>
>But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's
>pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial
>disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the
>Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled
>and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of
>Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately
>decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get
>tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris'
>political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to
>a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn
>well the media would punish the party for demanding a
>full count.
>
>What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But
>make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal
>to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.
>
>I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in
>London. Several friends have asked me if I will again
>leave the country. In light of the failure-a second
>time-to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My
>country has left me.
>
>Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine,
>investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC
>Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family
>Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The
>Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is now available on DVD.
>View a clip at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm
>
>_______________________________________________________
>
>portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
>discussion and debate service of the Committees of
>Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to
>provide varied material of interest to people on the
>left.
>
>For answers to frequently asked questions:
><http://www.portside.org/faq>
>
>To subscribe, unsubscribe or change settings:
><http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside>
>
>To submit material, paste into an email and send to:
><moderator at portside.org> (postings are moderated)
>
>For assistance with your account:
><support at portside.org>
>
>To search the portside archive:
><http://people-link5.inch.com/pipermail/portside/>


-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand