[Peace-discuss] "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Recount"

[Ricky Baldwin]

Great piece from Greg Plalast on the Mexican elections
- lessons for us in the US ...

> Subject: "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Recount"
> 
> 
> "WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' RECOUNT"
> Mexico's Lesson In The Dangers Of The Paper Ballot
> 
> By Greg Palast
> for The Guardian, Comment is Free
> Monday August 7, 2006
> 
> In the six years since I first began investigating
> the burglary ring we call "elections" in America, a
> new Voting Reform industry has grown up. That's
> good. What's worrisome is that most of the effort is
> focused on preventing the installation of computer
> voting machines. Paper ballots, we're told, will
> save our democracy.
> 
> Well, forget it. Over the weekend, Mexico's ruling
> party showed how you can rustle an election even
> with the entire population using the world's easiest
> paper ballot.
> 
> On Saturday, Mexico's electoral tribunal, known as
> the "TRIFE" (say "tree-fay") ordered a re-count of
> the ballots from the suspect July 2 vote for
> president. Well, not quite a recount as in "count
> all the ballots" -- but a review of just 9% of the
> nation's 130,000 precincts.
> 
> The "9% solution" was the TRIFE's ham-fisted attempt
> to chill out the several hundred thousand protesting
> supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who had
> gathered in the capital and blocked its main Avenue.
> Lopez Obrador, the Leftist challenger known by his
> initials AMLO, supposedly lost the presidential vote
> by just one half of one percent of the vote.
> 
> I say "supposedly" lost because, while George Bush
> congratulated his buddy Felipe Calderon on his
> victory, the evidence I saw on the ground in Mexico
> City fairly shrieks that the real winner was
> challenger AMLO.
> 
> President Bush should consider some inconvenient
> truths about the Mexican vote count:
> 
> First: The exit poll of 80,000 voters by the
> Instituto de Mercadotecnia y Opinion showed that
> AMLO bested Calderon by 35.1% to 34.0%.
> 
> Second: The precinct-by-precinct returns were quite
> otherworldly. I used to teach statistics and what I
> saw in Mexico would have stumped my brightest
> students.
> 
> Here's the conundrum: The nation's tens of thousands
> of polling stations report to the capital in random
> order after the polls close. Therefore,
> statistically, you'd expect the results to remain
> roughly unchanged as vote totals come in. As
> expected, AMLO was ahead of the right-wing candidate
> Calderon all night by an unchanging margin -- until
> after midnight. Suddenly, precincts began reporting
> wins for Calderon of five to one, the ten to one,
> then as polling nearly ended, of one-hundred to one.
> 
> How odd. I checked my concerns with Professor Victor
> Romero of Mexico's National University who concluded
> that the reported results must have been a
> "miracle." As he put it, a "religious event," but a
> statistical impossibility. There were two
> explanations, said the professor: either the Lord
> was fixing the outcome or operatives of the ruling
> party were cranking in a massive number of ballots
> when they realized their man was about to lose.
> 
> How could they do it? "Easy pea-sy," as my kids
> would say. In Mexico, the choices for president are
> on their own ballot with no other offices listed.
> Those who don't want to vote for President just
> discard the ballot. There is no real ballot
> security. In areas without reliable opposition
> observers (about a third of the nation), anyone can
> stuff ballots into the loosely-guarded cardboard
> boxes. (AMLO showed a tape of one of these
> ballot-stuffing operations caught in the act.)
> 
> It's also absurdly easy to remove paper ballots,
> disqualify them or simply mark them "nulo" ("null,"
> unreadable).
> 
> The TRIFE, the official electoral centurions,
> rejected AMLO's request to review those precincts
> that reported the miracle numbers. Nor would the
> tribunal open and count the nearly one million
> "null" votes -- allegedly "uncountable" votes which
> totaled four times Calderon's putative plurality.
> 
> Mexico's paper ballot, I would note, is the model of
> clarity -- with large images of each party which
> need only be crossed through. The ruling party would
> have us believe that a million voters waited in
> line, took a ballot, made no mark, then deliberately
> folded the ballot and placed it in the ballot box,
> pretending they'd voted. Maybe, as in Florida in
> 2000, those "unreadable" ballots were quite
> readable. Indeed, the few boxes re-counted showed
> the "null" ballots marked for AMLO. The Tribunal
> chose to check no further.
> 
> The only precincts the TRIFE ordered re-counted are
> those where the tally sheets literally don't tally
> -- precincts in which the arithmetic is off. They
> refuse even to investigate those precincts where
> ballot boxes were found in city dumps.
> 
> There are other "miracles" which the TRIFE chose to
> ignore: a weirdly low turnout of only 44% in the
> state where Lopez Obrador is most popular, Guerrero
> (Acapulco), compared to turnouts of over 60%
> elsewhere. The votes didn't vanish, the ruling party
> explained, rather the challenger's supporters,
> confident of victory, did not bother to vote.
> Confident ... in Mexico?
> 
> In other words, despite the right to paper ballots,
> the election was fiddled, finagled and fixed.
> 
> Does this mean US activists should give up on the
> fight for paper ballots and give in to robo-voting,
> computerized democracy in a box. Hell, no! Lopez
> Obrador has put hundreds of thousands in the street
> week after week demanding, "vota por vota" --
> recount every vote. But AMLO's supporters can only
> demand a re-count because the paper ballot makes a
> recount possible. Were Mexico's elections held on a
> Diebold special, there would be no way to recount
> the electrons floating in cyberspace.
> 
> Paper ballots make democracy possible, but hardly
> guarantee it. "Null" votes, not voters, have chosen
> Mexico's president. The only other nation I know of
> with such a poisonously high percentage of "null"
> votes is the "Estados Unidos," the USA.
> 
> And just as in Mexico, the "null" vote, the trashed,
> spoiled, rejected ballots, overrode the voters'
> choice, so it was north of the Rio Grande in 2000
> and 2004. Ballot spoilage, not computer
> manipulation, stole Ohio and Florida in those
> elections -- and will steal Colorado and New Mexico
> in the 2008 election.
> 
> In other words, my fellow gringo activists, we'd
> better stop fixating on laptop legerdemain and
> pledge our lives and fortunes to stopping the games
> played with registration rolls, provisional ballots,
> absentee ballots, voter ID demands and the less
> glamorous, yet horribly effective, methods used to
> suppress, invalidate and otherwise ambush the vote.
> 
> *****
> 
> Greg Palast is the author of the just-released New
> York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid
> of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme
> to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other
> Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War."
> Go to www.GregPalast.com.
> See Palast's July 12 investigation of the Mexican
> election on Democracy Now! 
> 
>

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