[Vision2020] Disenfranchising Kerry Voters

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

> Kerry Won 
>     By Greg Palast 
>     TomPaine.com 
> 
>     Thursday 04 November 2004 
> 
>     Kerry won. Here's the facts. 
> 
>     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. CNN's exit poll 
> showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. 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. 
> 
>     And not all vote 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). 
> 
>     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 provisional 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, has been released this month on DVD. 
    
V2020 Post by Ted Moffett
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