[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Greg Palast article--please post and forward

[Susan Parenti]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "david johnson" <unionyes at ameritech.net>
> Date: November 4, 2004 6:00:54 PM CST
> To: <@ameritech.net;>
> Subject: Fw: Greg Palast article--please post and forward
>
>  
> ----- Original Message -----
>  From: Wpdanny at aol.com
> To: undisclosed-recipients:
> Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 12:31 PM
> Subject: Greg Palast article--please post and forward
>
>
>  
>   
>  Please post, link, forward and distribute as widely as you can to any 
> press sources you can think of--especially international ones. The US 
> press sure as hell isn't going to cover it. In peace and struggle, 
> Danny
>  
> http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php
>  
> This isn't sour grapes. This is a system rotten to its core, so it 
> must be
>  more like a bad apple. 
>
>       Kerry Won
>       Greg Palast
>       November 04, 2004
>
>
>       Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, 
> about
> 3 percent of votes cast are voided-known as "spoilage" in election
> jargon-because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast's 
> investigation
> suggests that if Ohio's discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would 
> have won
> the state. Today the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports  there are a total 
> of
> 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded 
> votes
> plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.
>
>       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 .
>
>       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.
>
>
>  
> __________
> Sincerely,
>
> Daniel P. Welch
> For interesting commentary in 20 languages visit
> danielpwelch.com
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