Ok, look. I just want to let everyone here to know how much I
appreciate your aid in my struggle to become a full time bike
commuter. You are all now officially my friends. My best friend (a
flesh and blood one) is actually a far right winger and one of the
nicest people I know, if just wrong about life. We try not to talk
politics because we end up angry.
That said, Kerry really won. I think people really should read this
because nothing is more important.
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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 [censored] 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 states 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.
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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.