An Election Spoiled Rotten

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Just good o'le down home christian liars, thieves and con men.

 

 

TomPaine.com

 

Monday, November 1, 2004

 

It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already

down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states like

Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed

from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked-overwhelmingly in

minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters

have a 500 percent greater chance of their vote being " spoiled. "

Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the

election.

 

 

An Election Spoiled Rotten

by Greg Palast

 

John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one

ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and

Ohio:

and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled until

Tuesday night.

 

Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling-ethnic cleansing of

voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that " spoil " votes-John

Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one

million

votes.

 

 

---The Urge To Purge---

 

Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed

several

thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as barred

from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike like

Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar

ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their

rights.

 

There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally

from

the big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights of

innocents, federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a presidential

election to allow a voter to challenge their loss of civil rights.

 

To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared an

" emergency. " However, the only " emergency " in Colorado seems to be

President

Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.

 

Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law

enforcement is

Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney general of Texas. This

is what the former spokeswoman for the Lone Star state's attorney general

says of Mr. Durham: He is, " unfit for public office... a man with a

history

of racism and ideological zealotry. " Sounds just right for a purge that

affects, in the majority, non-white voters.

 

>From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is

unlikely that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.

 

But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about this,

but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served

time for

felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's

Republican secretary of state knows that.

 

 

---Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls---

 

We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls without a

stop in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears to be

running to

replace Katherine Harris.

 

In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught Registering

While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in Southern

states by

the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black voters are three

times as likely as white voters to have their registration requests

" returned " (i.e., subject to rejection).

 

And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the

first time

since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass

challenges of

voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block 35,000 voters in

Ohio ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so, in Florida, what

appear

to be similar plans had been kept under wraps until the discovery of

documents called " caging " lists. The voters on the " caging " lists,

disclosed

last week by BBC Television London, are, almost exclusively, residents of

African-American neighborhoods.

 

Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the

Voting

Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal judges have

persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party in

pledging not

to distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.

 

 

---Absentee Ballots Go AWOL---

 

It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about

computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot

requests

are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes-up to 15

million-will be counted is zip.

 

Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your

trust is

used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections

Supervisor

Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839 absentee

votes. But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had been

received. When this loaves-and-fishes miracle was disclosed, she was

forced

to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138.

 

Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes instead

of adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to figure out the

fix (or was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration forms are protected

by federal law. Local government must acknowledge receiving your

registration and must let you know if there's a problem (say, with

signature

or address) that invalidates your registration. But your mail-in vote

is an

unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if your ballot was received? Was it

tossed behind a file cabinet-or tossed out because you did not include

your

middle initial? In many counties, you won't know.

 

And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported

that

Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots.

What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections

supervisor

is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor took the

unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who

happened be a Democrat.

 

 

---A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can---

 

" If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County, "

a New

Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10

votes simply weren't counted-chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting

biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is " spoilage. " Citizens

cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in

the last go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president-or, at

least,

none showed up on the machines.

 

Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I

asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of

Hamilton College to run a " regression " analysis of the Hispanic ballot

spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500

percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And

It's

worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian

reservations.

 

Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down to

the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals,

they get the crap voting machines.

 

It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box

holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that,

typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections,

registering

no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights

Commission

and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those

ballots are cast by African Americans. One million black votes

vanished˜phffft!

 

There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way;

suppression of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to

blame, on Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio

Arriba, Democrats have an eight-to-one registration edge over Republicans.

Among African Americanvoters...well, you can do the arithmetic yourself.

 

The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so

large, you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news

media.

The one million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus the

hundreds of thousands flushed from voter registries, is our nation's dark

secret: an apartheid democracy in which wealthy white votes almost

always count, but minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not

recorded. In effect, Kerry is down by a million votes before one lever is

pulled, card punched or touch-screen touched.

 

 

 

------

View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, " Bush Family Fortunes, " available

this week on DVD in an updated edition from The Disinformation Company at

http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

 

To receive Greg?s investigative reports

http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm

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