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Kerry Won - Here Are The
Facts
By Greg
Palast
Tom Paine.com
11-5-4
- 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.
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- Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for
Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry
beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit
polls were later combined with-and therefore contaminated by-the
tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual
vote. 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.]
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Whose Votes Are Discarded?
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- 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.)
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- 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 .)
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The Impact Of Challenges
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote
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- 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."
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- How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and
the provisional ballots.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.'
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally
of provisional ballots.
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- "They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque
journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000
were given out. Who got them?
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- 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
provbisional 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.
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- Your Kerry Victory Party
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- So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry-if
we count all the votes.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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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- 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, is now
available on DVD. View a clip at
http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm
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- To receive Greg's investigative reports click here:
http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm
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