How McCain Could Win
http://www.truthout.org/110308A
Two Obama canvassers prepare their pitch before knocking on registered
Republicans' doors in Arvada, Colorado. (Photo: Kevin Moloney / The
New York Times)
It's November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the
"Bradley effect": Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the
voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less
than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so
did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats' Rocky Mountain high
after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a
state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did
Virginia.
That's the nightmare. Here's the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican
secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One
in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's
Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided
voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the
number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite
population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only
5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday,
Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still
"disappeared" from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned
away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had
drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their
licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered
voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are
racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is,
Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID
requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan
Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting
to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass
through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification
applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black),
but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican
secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here's an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don't
count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections
Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: "spoiled,"
unreadable and blank ballots; "provisional" ballots rejected; mail-in
ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That's what I found while traveling the nation over the last year
for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting
rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be
far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million
lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent
of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more
than ten million voters have been purged from the nation's vote
registries. And that's just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn't matter. But it's not
random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a
black voter's ballot will "spoil" or be blank is 900 percent higher
than a white voter's.
Does that mean the election's stolen and you should forget voting
and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote
and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your
ballot (there's a link at the end).
How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
Here's how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator
and add it up.
Step One: The "Dumpster" Vote - Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are
we removing millions from the voter rolls?
The answer is the GOP's secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act,
signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he's going to help
us vote, look out. But Democrats didn't. They signed on to the GOP
bill, believing this "reform" law would prevent "another Florida."
Instead, "Help America Vote" Floridated the entire nation.
Here's how: Help America Vote empowered secretaries of state to
remove fraudulent and suspicious voters from the voter registries. It
was the trick used by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 when she
purged "felon" voters. Except they weren't felons. And now her GOP
confrères are doing it in dozens of states, calling folks felon
voters, "inactive" voters, suspect voters, whatever.
Take Colorado. The GOP didn't exactly trumpet it's erasing 19.4
percent of voters' names. It was, as detectives say, "hidden in plain
sight," buried deep inside a US Elections Assistance Commission
administrative report, among tables of mind-numbing stats through
which I was trawling some months ago. (I used to teach statistics at
Indiana University, so I enjoy reading matrices like others enjoy
novels.)
For BBC TV and Rolling Stone, I asked the current Colorado
Secretary of State Mike Coffman, "Why all the purging?" No answer, not
a word, stonewalled even when I flew into Denver and stood outside his
door. He was, I guess, too busy preparing to count his own votes as
Republican candidate for Congress.
So, where are the Democrats? That's the really scary part. I spoke
with Paul Hultin, appointed by Colorado's Democratic governor to the
state's Election Reform Commission. Hultin's a terrific attorney. He
knows, and says, that Help America Vote was a law "born in
corruption," but he's spent his time on Colorado's voting machines,
which he knows are busted. He's the Democrats' expert, and he didn't
know that a fifth of his state's voters had vanished from the voter
rolls.
Well, don't worry. Hultin's official committee will be holding
hearings on the voting debacle in Colorado ... on November 19.
Then there's New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing.
I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos
Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the
majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially
because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a
suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the
Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico
purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
The company and state choose the purging "algorithms," those
mathematical formulae that, depending on how you tweak them, can go
through a voter roll like a hot knife through cream cheese.
So, what happens to the purged voters? They're told to scram when
they arrive to vote or, if they squawk, they get a "provisional"
ballot on which they can pretend to vote.
Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don't get
counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the
2004 election was that there were more than three million voters
shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never
counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That's what caused Kerry to
lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America
Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of
provisionals will rise, as will rejections.
Whatever keeps you from getting a real ballot - purged name, for
example - keeps you from having the provisional counted as well.
That's because Democrats won the right of every voter to get a
provisional ballot, but not the right to have that ballot counted. And
how many will go uncounted? Double the 1.1 million loss in 2004 - not
just because of the GOP's purge-mania, but because of a vicious little
codicil in Help America Vote that went into effect since the last
election ...
Step Two: "Verification" (and Elimination) of New Voters
For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new
obstacles to voting. When we say "new" voters, let's be clear - we
mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer
Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).
So, the Republican game plan is simple: don't let new voters vote.
There are three steps to this block-and-steal tactic. First, under the
new law, states can deny new voters registration on the grounds their
names can't be verified against government data files. Sounds
reasonable, but it's not, because we don't have Soviet-style
citizenship files in the US. The Social Security Administration is
rejecting nearly half of the names submitted because there is no multi-
state compatible tracking system. Of course, the Republicans know
that.
New voter verification losses are huge. In California, a
Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new
registrations, a trick discovered by his Democratic successor, Debra
Bowen. She told me most of the rejected vote applicants had Hispanic,
Vietnamese, Islamic and other "odd" names - odd, that is, for
Republicans.
It used to be that you filled out a registration card and, bingo,
you were registered. Not any more. That's also what happened in
Florida to the 85,000 new registrants. They were victims of strict
"matching" algorithms. Other states are also playing the "match" game.
The result is voters will find themselves simply missing (or in some
states, required to show extra ID - another horror show we'll discuss
below). But don't worry, a of couple million new voters will get
provisional ballots. That way, they can practice filling out their
ballots for the day when democracy returns to America.
Step Three: New ID Laws
Karl Rove said, "I go to the grocery store and I wanna cash a
check to pay for my groceries I gotta show a little bit of ID. Why
should it not be reasonable ... at the voting place they ought to be
able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID." And so, while
buying his Pampers, Rove came up with a game-winner for the GOP.
Karl, let me answer your question. The reason, according to
several studies by the Bush administration itself, is that lots of
folks don't have government ID. Some are nuns, some are poor, lots are
brown or old. I was on Fox TV with Lady Rothschild a couple of weeks
ago. The lady, a McCain supporter, approved of the ID requirement -
and was truly surprised to find out that some poorer Americans don't
have passports. "Why don't they?" her Fox-mates asked, incredulous.
Well, not every barrio kid has just returned from his estate outside
London.
Rove knows that. He certainly knows that, for example, Professor
Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent
of white voters in Indiana don't have the needed ID. And, for blacks,
it's about double - 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. New ID
laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday
by at least two million - and that's way conservative, assuming the
new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as
Indiana's.
Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn't like your touch. Or,
your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out
your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.
In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out,
"spoiled," because the machines lost them, couldn't read them, mangled
them or simply didn't register them. But it's not random, not by a
long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and
spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts - a sum of uncounted
ballots way over the Republican "victory" margin in that state.
Another study shows that Hispanics' vote choices are six times as
likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper
ballots.
In the primaries and in 2006, the "spoilage" and blank
("undervote") totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe
the "spoilage" total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is,
no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts,
will just vanish. ("Spoilage" is not the same as vote tampering. There
is the concern that "black-box" computers will switch your vote via an
evil software hack job. That's another matter completely - and more
votes lost if it happens, a sum I'm not including here.)
Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
You've mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a
million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to
not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing
in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get
junked.
This time, the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote.
In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will
have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot.
Bet you didn't know that. They're counting on you not knowing that. In
Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the
inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope - Got that? - or your
vote is toast. I've spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for
failing to use the two envelopes - though he only received one. (Have
a mail-in ballot in hand? Then, for God's sake, walk it in to the
polling place or local board of elections. Sign, seal and deliver it
in person.)
You may get it right, but historic data suggest that, when
combining the FTF games with the usual mail-in cock-ups, Obama will
lose another million votes to mail-in disqualifications.
Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems
These millions of uncounted ballots - spoiled ballots, provisional
ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified - fully explain the
difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in
2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit
pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" They never ask, and can't know,
"Did your vote count?"
How would they get away with it? Well, they begin explaining away
how the "pollsters" get it wrong, how pollsters didn't figure the
"Bradley Effect" of lying, racist voters. They'll tell us the new,
young and Black Obamaniacs gave money, went to rallies - but never
bothered to vote. But the real reason will never be whispered: They
cast votes that just weren't counted.
Will the election be stolen on Tuesday? No, it's already been
stolen. That is, several million voters are doomed to lose their
ballots; most won't even know it. Overwhelmingly, they are the poor,
minorities, new voters - Obama voters. Does that mean McCain's got it
in the bag and you're helpless? Not at all.
Don't Steal Your Own Vote
In 2004, I and other investigators wrote, long before Election
Day, "Ohio's stolen." We were deadly right.
It's happening again. For six years, the Democratic Party has been
snoozing through a quiet, brilliantly executed Republican operation to
block, stop and purge voters by the millions. As New Mexico voting
rights attorney John Boyd put it, "I don't think the Democrats get it.
All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle
course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."
Karl Rove once said, "We have elections like those run in
countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored
glasses." He wasn't complaining; he was boasting.
I know that the Obama campaign is not happy that I bring up the
issue of a possible theft of the election. They fear voters will be
"discouraged" by the possibility that the election is fixed.
Well, frankly, if you're too bummed out by this recitation of
facts and statistics to vote, then maybe you don't deserve to vote, or
to drive or to reproduce. Did Martin Luther King say, "I have a
dream ... so I'm going back to sleep"?
Votes can't be saved by "hope" alone. There are simple ways to
protect your own vote, from walking in your "mail-in" to refusing a
provisional ballot. (You can download the list at
StealBackYourVote.org, written with Bobby Kennedy, a professor of
law.)
It comes down to this: Can the margin of trickery, vote
suppression and ballot destruction - three to six million votes - be
overcome? Yes. Because they can't steal all the votes all the time.
Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in
some polls. But these are polls of "likely" voters. They exclude first-
time and many low-income voters.
So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to
happen - for the "unlikely" voters to simply overwhelm the statistical
assumption of their laziness. As I'm sure Mr. Obama, a professor of
constitutional law, could tell you: the best legal response to
systematic vote suppression is to get off yo' ass!
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