KERRY WON- EXIT POLLS WERE RIGHT- AND NOW DEMOCRACY IS EXITING OUR COUNTRY
by GREG PALAST
opEdNews.com
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 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.]
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.)
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).
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.
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