Kerry Won. . .by Greg Palast......the spoilage votes

[Guest guest]

Kerry Won. . .

Greg Palast

November 04, 2004

 

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. In the United States, about 3 percent of

votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage†in election jargon—because the

ballots

cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of

elections past, Palast argues 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. So far there's no

indication

that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are

being counted.

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 are 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. At 1:05 a.m.

Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by

53

percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore

contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the

apparent actual vote. [To read about the skewing of exit polls to conform to

official results, click here .] 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.

Whose Votes Are Discarded?

And not all votes 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). Nor are they

demanding we

look at the " overvotes " where voter intent may be discerned.

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.â€

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.