- This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State,
told his State Senate President, "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, but boasting of an opportunity
to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most
voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because
their votes won't be counted.
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- The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry
in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes:
"spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots.
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- OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN
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- American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical
presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage,
marked "spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster
reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful county-by-county,
precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights
Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast
by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide,
the number of Black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile
is approximately one million. The other million in the no-count pit come
mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly
Democratic demographic.
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- Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the
Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules,
doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high
as the White House.
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- Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes"
-- too many punches in the cards -- and "undervotes." Here we
find the hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old,
dysfunctional punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the
hole doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we
humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading these
cards ... if 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."
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- Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal
investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often
than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found
those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty
to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face
of a lawsuit by the ACLU.
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- Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found.
The civil rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed
insistence on forcing 73% 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
... sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the
state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed
the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election.
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- Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio
simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan
did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally.
If not, they would have gotten another card.
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- Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading
machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly
Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000
votes.
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- JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT
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- Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted
votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would
have turned Democrat blue.
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- But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional
ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal
law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters
of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights
of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled
swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.
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- Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only
by the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio,
that gives a virtually ballot veto to Secretary of State Blackwell.
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- Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion
of provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory,
the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong"
precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President.
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- Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class
ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than
3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican
strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on
election day.
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- This is the first time in four decades that a political
party has systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds
of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating
for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential
"caging" lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and
addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext.
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- We found that every single 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.
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- Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not
bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying
minor technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year,
Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with
a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act.
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- But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally
questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty
tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists
were copied directly to the Republican National Committee's chief of research
and to the director of a state campaign.
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- 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.
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- You don't have to guess the preferences registered on
the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while
Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote.
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- Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid"
provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct
rule, 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 which will never be counted. For example,
a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's
plenty in that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot
even though they are wrongly identified.
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- KERRY BLACKS OUT
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- It was heartening that, during his campaign, 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."
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- But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate
in history to break a campaign promise after losing an election. The Senator
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.
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- 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 would also, as one state attorney general pointed
out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot
in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to
testify to their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with
a holster full of regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook.
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- Given the odds and the cost to his political career,
Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the will to power of
the Ohio Republican machine.
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- We have yet to total here 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. But why dwell on
these things? Our betters in the political and media elite have told us
to get over it, move on.
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- To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war.
As Ohio's politically ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own website,
"Last time I checked, Blackwell said, "Katherine Harris wasn't
in a soup line, she's in Congress."
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- NEW MEXICO GOES KERRY - BUT WHO'S COUNTING?
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- Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where
ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate
five times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional
ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to
Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic Church's
get-out-the-vote drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the
votes ... but that won't happen.
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- Investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of The Best
Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2004).
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- Oliver Shykles and Matthew Pascarella of GregPalast.com
contributed to this article.
-
- View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family
Fortunes," now available on DVD, at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm
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- To receive Greg's investigative reports go to: http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm
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