[Mb-civic] Greg Palast: "Kerry Won Here's the facts" (+ more on black box voting)

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Interestingly, to me, this article does not even address the problems with 
electronic voting machines...So I am appending another little piece here 
about that...I reckon that we have to come to terms with the fact that, at the 
moment at least, a Democrat presidential candidate needs to get 3 million or 
so more votes than the Republican just to tie...and more to win.  Maybe we 
can change that if we work at it....


http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php
    
Kerry Won  Here's the facts

Greg Palast
November 04, 2004

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 
percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election 
jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation 
suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won 
the state. Today the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports 
(http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/109956
457262001.xml) 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.

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'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.] 
(http://www.tompaine.com/articles/an_election_spoiled_rotten.php )

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, click 
here:http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/electoral_reform/resid
ual_ballot.php .)

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: 
http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2004/elect04.pdf .)

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.
 
--------

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Voting without auditing. (Are we insane?)
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON Nov 3 2004 -- Did the voting 
machines trump exit polls? There™s a way to find out. 
Black Box Voting (.ORG) is conducting the largest Freedom of 
Information action in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box 
Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records 
requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 
3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election 
before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit. 
America: We have permission to say No to unaudited voting. It is our 
right. 
Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting 
systems -- optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal 
records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, 
modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips. 
An earlier FOIA is more sensitive, and has not been disclosed here. 
We will notify you as soon as we can go public with it. 
Such a request filed in King County, Washington on Sept. 15, 
following the primary election six weeks ago, uncovered an internal 
audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; 
œtrouble slips revealing suspicious modem activity; and profound 
problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically 
sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office personnel, 
and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists. 
Black Box Voting is a nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer protection 
group for elections. You may view the first volley of public records 
requests here: Freedom of Information requests here 
Responses from public officials will be posted in the forum, is 
organized by state and county, so that any news organization or 
citizens group has access to the information. Black Box Voting will 
assist in analysis, by providing expertise in evaluating the records. 
Watch for the records online; Black Box Voting will be posting the 
results as they come in. And by the way, these are not free. The more 
donations we get, the more FOIAs we are empowered to do. Time's 
a'wasting. 
We look forward to seeing you participate in this process. Join us in 
evaluating the previously undisclosed inside information about how 
our voting system works. 
Play a part in reclaiming transparency. It™s the only 
way.
# # # # #


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