Greg Palast: Most voters
in Ohio chose Kerry; here's how the votes vanished.
By Greg Palast
This past February, Ohio Secretary
of State Ken Blackwell told the president of the State Senate, "The
possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state's primary
voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair
of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican
of disaster; he was boasting of an opportunity to deliver Ohio for Team
Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And this past Election Day most
voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because
their votes won't be counted.
The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio are locked up
in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" and
"provisional."
Ohio spoiled rotten
In a typical presidential election, 2 million ballots are marked
"spoiled" and then chucked in the garbage, uncounted. But a dive
into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes.
In a precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54 percent of spoiled ballots were
cast by African-Americans. Florida is typical. Nationwide, the number of
black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile is about 1
million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic,
Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic
demographic.
Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. "Overvotes" are where there
are too many punches in the cards. And "undervotes" are where
the hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old punch
card machines hang on. Machines can't these kinds of undervotes, but we
humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem ... if we're
allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore: by halting the
hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by
halting a recount.
Federal investigators determined that in the 2000 Florida race black
voters' ballots spoiled 900 percent more often than white voters, mainly
due to punch card error. This year, Ohio was the only one of 50 states to
refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of
a lawsuit by the ACLU.
Apparently, the Ohio Republicans liked what the ACLU found. The civil
rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on
forcing 73 percent of its electorate to use punch card machines had an
overwhelming racial bias, voiding votes mostly in black precincts.
Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery ... after
George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's Attorney
General Jim Petro, a Republican, postponed the trial date of the ACLU case
until after the election.
Fixing the problem is easy. If Ohio had placed a card-reading machine in
each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have ensured
their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten new cards.
Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had
been installed, almost all of the 93,000 spoiled votes (from
overwhelmingly Democratic areas) would have closed the gap on Bush's lead
of 136,000 votes.
Jim Crow's provisional ballot
Add to spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, provisional
ballots, and the White House would have turned Democrat blue. But that
won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted
or, more often, not counted. The provisional ballot, introduced by federal
law in 2002, was proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the
rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls. In
Republican-controlled swing states, however, these were twisted into
back-of-the-bus ballots unlikely to be tallied. These provisional ballots
are counted only at the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections
official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtual ballot veto to Bush-Cheney
campaign co-chair Blackwell.
In Ohio, more than 155,000 voters were shunted to these second-class
ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3
percent of the electorate) was the direct result of the national
Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass
challenges on Election Day.
And Blackwell has a few rules to ensure a large proportion of provisional
ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory, the secretary of
state banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong" precinct,
though all neighborhoods shared the same slate of presidential candidates.
This is the first time in four decades that a political party
systematically barred tens of thousands of black voters.
While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the
Republican Party's confidential "caging lists," their title for
the spreadsheets that list the names and addresses of Ohio voters they
intended to block on any pretext. Every address of the thousands on these
Republican hit lists was located in black-majority precincts. You might
find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.
Before 1965, Jim Crow laws did not bar blacks from voting. Minor technical
voting requirements were applied only to African-Americans. That year,
Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters a criminal
offense under the Voting Rights Act.
But that didn't stop the Republicans of 2004. Their mass challenge to
black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local party
hacks. E-mails show the lists were copied directly to the Republican
National Committee's chief of research and to the director of a state
campaign.
Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging
list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas--African-American
soldiers shipped "over there."
Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional
ballots. However, his rigid regulations are rigged to knock out enough
voters to keep Bush's skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by
Republican officials--late and improbably large purges of voter rolls,
rejection of registrations--maximized the use of provisional ballots that
will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly tagged as an
ineligible felon voter (and there are plenty in that category, mostly
African-Americans), may lose his ballot even though wrongly identified.
Kerry calls the game early
During the campaign it was heartening that John Kerry broke the political
omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color of votes not
counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the strongest democracy on
earth ... a million disenfranchised African-Americans is the best we can
do." The Senator promised the NAACP convention, "This November
... we're going to make sure that every single vote is counted."
But Kerry waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million
Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots
to be counted.
While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the
fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would first have
to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the
Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a "Kate
Harris" by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting,
Kerry's team also would have to litigate each rejected provisional ballot
in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to
testify to their right to the vote as Blackwell challenged each. Given the
odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to the will of
the people, but to the willpower of the Ohio Republican machine.
We have yet to total the votes lost in missing absentee ballots, in
eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal voters from
registries and other games played in swing states. Undoubtedly, Kerry also
took New Mexico. But why dwell on these things? Our betters in the
political and media elite have told us to get over it. Move on.
To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio's politically
ambitious secretary of state brags on his own Web site, "Last time I
checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress."
(c) 2004 In These Times
Reprinted from In These Times:
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