Nov. 16, 2004
Greg Palast:
I can live with that. But when Salon disses my report of vote suppression in
Ohio ("Was the Election Stolen?" by Farhad Manjoo), I have to respond. Manjoo
went after my article, "Kerry Won," the latest in my series of investigations
of our manipulated election system first published in America by ... Salon:
"Florida's Flawed 'Voter-Cleansing' Program."
Now, the facts. Most voters in Ohio cast their ballots for John Kerry, which
should, in accordance with Mrs. Gordon's civics lessons from sixth grade, have
given Kerry the Electoral College majority and the White House. Trouble is,
those votes won't be counted.
So where are these uncounted, but winning, votes? When I went to sleep the
night of Nov. 2, Kerry was down in Ohio by 136,000 votes. But over a quarter
million ballots had yet to be counted. Those abandoned ballots, overwhelmingly
Democratic, sit in two piles, one called "spoiled" and the other "provisional."
The ugly, secret shame of American democracy is that 2 million votes are
"spoiled" in presidential elections -- tossed away untallied as "unreadable."
And the nasty part is that roughly half are cast by African-Americans. To learn
of this astonishing Jim Crow thumb on the U.S. electoral scales, you have to
hunt through the appendixes of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission report on the
Florida 2000 race. The government's demographers concluded that of the 179,855
votes "spoiled" in Florida that year, 54 percent were cast by blacks. All other
credible studies tell us that Florida is horribly typical of the nation.
Last Tuesday, in Ohio, Republicans played the spoilage game for all it was
worth. Over 93,000 ballots were chucked on the spoilage pile, almost all of
them generated by those infernal chad-making punch-card machines.
Whose votes were lost in the chad blizzard? According to a recent ACLU analysis
of Ohio's system, votes stolen away by punch-card machine error are
"overwhelmingly" found in African-American -- read "Democratic" -- precincts.
After the swindle of 2000, who would have the nerve to keep these machines in
operation? Answer: the co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, J.
Kenneth Blackwell, who also happens to have the convenient post of Ohio
secretary of state. Blackwell, who makes Katherine Harris look like Thomas
Jefferson, concedes the racially bent effects of punch-card voting; but in
spite of this -- or because of this -- he refused to replace or fix these
machines for the 2004 election.
The result: 93,000 votes spoiled, uncounted. Salon's Manjoo, ignorant of the
ACLU's precinct-by-precinct studies, simply dismisses out of hand the assertion
that most of those were Kerry votes. But given that Ohio's spoiled ballots are
concentrated in black and poor communities, it is hardly a wild leap to discern
which candidate got punched out by the punch cards.
Now, on to the second pile of no-count ballots, the provisionals. And guess who
got these second-class, back-of-the-bus ballots? Once again, Ohio's
African-American voters.
The Republican Party declared the hunting season open for dark-skinned voters
in October, announcing a plan to challenge "fraudulent" voters on a mass basis,
the first such programmatic attack on the franchise since the days of the Night
Riders.
And the tactic was very much the same as that used by the allies of the White
Citizens Councils and Bull Conners in the early '60s: targeted and unequal
application of picayune registration and voting requirements. The Ohio courts
were not amused, slapping down the Republican Party's challenge lists before
Election Day.
However, the party kept secret lists and a secret program in its back pocket to
ambush black voters on Election Day, a scheme outed by BBC television the week
before the election.
Majoo has an answer for that, too. On Oct. 27, Manjoo wrote an entire column
defending the po' widdle Republicans from BBC's mean and unfounded attack,
subtitled, "Investigative reporter Greg Palast discovers a 'secret' voting
list, but the document doesn't necessarily prove Republican wrongdoing." Ace
reporter Manjoo's entire investigation of the matter comes down to three
quotations from a Republican Party flack, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, who --
surprise! -- denied the BBC's findings. I was never contacted nor was a single
one of our experts.
Here's what we discovered at the BBC: several lists of voters, every one of
them in an African-American precinct. Fletcher's official explanation (her
third variant, by the way) was that these were returned undeliverable
fundraising solicitations. Odd, that: Many of the addresses were those of
homeless men's shelters, not where I'd expect a lot of Bush-Cheney donors. And
why were the Republicans sending solicitations only to black voters? Is that
their normal funding group?
More suspicious is that these lists of "undeliverable addresses" were sent, not
to some clerk at a direct-mail house, but to the chief of research for the
Republican National Committee in Washington as well as the executive director
of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida. I guess they handle the clerical
overflow work.
Or maybe, as every expert told us, these were hit lists meant to stop, impede,
intimidate and slow down voters in African-American precincts. The Republicans
have more than embarrassment to motivate them to mislead us about the true
purpose of these lists: Profiling citizens of one race to block their voting,
even if each challenge itself has merit, is a criminal violation of the Voting
Rights Act.
Whatever their ultimate use of these lists, whatever the Republican game plan,
we have the result: In Ohio, an astonishing 155,000 voters were shunted to
provisional ballots, where their votes would be vulnerable to the partisan
predation of GOP Secretary of State Blackwell. And once again, the provisionals
were concentrated in the minority -- that is, Democratic -- areas.
Blackwell wasted no time in jiggering the rules to make sure as few provisional
ballots as possible would be counted. He began by announcing that, for the
first time in Ohio history, provisional ballots would not be counted if cast by
a legal voter in the "wrong" precinct, even though the president remains the
same for voters of all precincts. Furthermore, to increase the number of
provisional ballots subject to challenge, Blackwell and other Republican office
holders in Ohio went on a voter-roll-purging frenzy prior to the election. A
favorite, first practiced in Florida in 2000, is to tag them ineligible "felon"
voters. If a voter is wrongly purged, the registration is restored, yet the
ballot will still be binned.
Add it up and the demographics of the spoiled and provisional ballots -- if
they were all counted -- would overtake George Bush's teeny lead.
Lacking evidence to refute the hard stats and demographics that the uncounted
votes are mostly Kerry's, Manjoo ducks behind this tautological rock: He can
"prove that Kerry couldn't have won in Ohio: He conceded."
Kerry did not concede because he did not have the votes. He conceded because he
could not get them counted. Kerry would have to demand a hand count of the
spoiled punch cards. But the hard fact is that, just as Katherine Harris
stopped the hand count of the punch cards in Florida, Blackwell would
undoubtedly do the same in Ohio. And face it: In a legal showdown, Blackwell
could count on the help of that pus-hole of partisanship, the U.S. Supreme
Court. Been there, done that. Add in the ballot-by-ballot litigation required
to force a count of all the provisional ballots under rules � la Blackwell, and
Kerry, realistically, didn't stand a chance.
Unfortunately, neither did democracy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win."
- -Mahatma Ghandi
"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have
enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to
preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his
neck to any dictatorial government."
- - Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I'd rather be Don Quixote than another statistic." - -Douglas L. Wilson
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are
to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile,
but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
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