[Mb-civic] [Mb-hair] THIS IS THE REAL STORY IN OHIO --Bush won byspoilage ballots

Sun Nov 7 15:25:47 PST 2004

which is why we need to do an anti bush piece
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: SharmagneS at aol.com 
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  Sent: Sunday, November 07, 2004 2:48 PM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] [Mb-hair] THIS IS THE REAL STORY IN OHIO --Bush won byspoilage ballots

  THE WISDOM FUND News & Views
  MORE AT http://www.twf.org/

  November 04, 2004
  TomPaine.com

  KERRY WON . . .
  by Greg Palast

  Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3
  percent of votes cast are voidedknown as "spoilage" in election
  jargonbecause 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'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'tyou 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 completelyleaving 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."

  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
  lossthat's 110,000 votesoverwhelmingly 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 lawsalmost never usedallowing
  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" ballotsa kind of voting placebowhich 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 pluralityif all votes are countedis
  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
  precinctsDemocratic 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 Kerryif 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 failurea
  second timeto count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has
  left me.

  http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php 

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