KERRY WON: Here are the Facts / Election Stolen in Ohio

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Fri, 5 Nov 2004 04:57:35 -0500

Subject:KERRY WON: Here are the Facts / Election Stolen in Ohio

 

 

KERRY WON: Here are the Facts / Election Stolen in Ohio

 

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, )

 

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, )

 

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.