Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by
TomPaine.com
Kerry Won
by
Greg Palast Kerry
won. Here's the facts.
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.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for
Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent
to 47 percent. 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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those
votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority
precincts. (To learn more, click
here.)
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 .)
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.
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).
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.”
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.
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.
The Impact Of Challenges
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.
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.
Enchanted
State's Enchanted Vote
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."
How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid;
and the provisional ballots.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally
of provisional ballots.
"They were handing them out like
candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional
ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?
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
provisional 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.
Your
Kerry Victory Party
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John
Kerry—if we count all the votes.
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.
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.
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.
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, has been released this month on DVD .
© 2004 TomPaine.com
Published
on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
by Thom Hartmann
The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous"
exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all - it
was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and
Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not)
be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's
critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private,
for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of
directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their
profitability, to handle our votes?
Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time - and
through the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters - we may
well find out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org
just filed what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in
history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd
discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and
oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses
are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed
bloggers are finding that news organizations
are retroactively altering their exit polls to coincide with what the
machines ultimately said.
But in all the discussion about voting machines, let's never
forget the concept of the commons, because this usurpation is the ultimate
felony committed by conservatives this year.
At the founding of this nation, we decided that there were
important places to invest our tax (then tariff) dollars, and those were the
things that had to do with the overall "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness" of all of us. Over time, these commons - in which we all make
tax investments and for which we all hold ultimate responsibility - have come
to include our police and fire services; our military and defense; our roads
and skyways; our air, waters and national parks; and the safety of our food and
drugs.
But the most important of all the commons in which we've invested
our hard-earned tax dollars is our government itself. It's owned by us, run by
us (through our elected representatives), answerable to us, and most directly
responsible for stewardship of our commons.
And the commons through which we regulate the commons of our
government is our vote.
About two years ago, I wrote a story for these pages,
"If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines,"
that exposed how Senator Chuck Hagel had, before stepping down and running for
the U.S. Senate in Nebraska, been the head of the voting machine company (now
ES&S) that had just computerized Nebraska's vote. The Washington Post
(1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic
governor was the major Republican upset in the November election."
According to Bev Harris, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including
many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel
was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska, nearly
all on unauditable machines he had just sold the state. And in all probability,
Hagel run for President in 2008.
In another, later article
I wrote at the request of MoveOn.org and which they mailed to their millions
of members, I noted that in Georgia - another state that went all-electronic -
"USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, 'In Georgia, an Atlanta
Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44%
lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss. 'Cox News Service, based in Atlanta,
reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, "Pollsters may have
goofed" because 'Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent
Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a
political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that
Chambliss had been ahead in none of them.'" Nearly every vote in the state
was on an electronic machine with no audit trail.
In the years since those first articles appeared, Bev Harris has
published her book on the subject ("Black Box Voting"), including the
revelation of her finding the notorious "Rob Georgia" folder on
Diebold's FTP site just after Cleland's loss there; Lynn Landes has done some
groundbreaking research, particularly her
new investigation of the Associated Press, as have Rebecca Mercuri and David Dill. There's a new video out
on the topic, Votergate, available at www.votergate.tv.
Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill into Congress requiring a
voter-verified paper ballot be produced by all electronic voting machines, and
it's been co-sponsored by a majority of the members of the House of
Representatives. The two-year battle fought by Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay to
keep it from coming to a vote, thus insuring that there will be no possible
audit of the votes of about a third of the 2004 electorate, has fueled the
flames of conspiracy theorists convinced Republican ideologues - now known to
be willing to lie in television advertising - would extend their "ends
justifies the means" morality to stealing the vote "for the better
good of the country" they think single-party Republican rule will bring.
Most important, though, the rallying cry of the emerging
"honest vote" movement must become: Get Corporations Out Of Our Vote!
Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so
sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors
and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively
handle our vote, in a secret and totally invisible way? Particularly a private
corporation founded, in one case, by a family that believes the Bible should
replace the Constitution; in another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans;
and in another case partly owned by Saudi investors?
Of all the violations of the commons - all of the crimes against
We The People and against democracy in our great and historic republic - this
is the greatest. Our vote is too important to outsource to private
corporations.
It's time that the USA - like most of the rest of the world -
returns to paper ballots, counted by hand by civil servants (our employees)
under the watchful eye of the party faithful. Even if it takes two weeks to
count the vote, and we have to just go, until then, with the exit polls of the
news agencies. It worked just fine for nearly 200 years in the USA, and it can
work again.
When I lived in Germany, they took the vote the same way most of
the world does - people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are hand-counted by
civil servants taking a week off from their regular jobs, watched over by
volunteer representatives of the political parties. It's totally clean, and
easily audited. And even though it takes a week or more to count the vote (and
costs nothing more than a bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German
people know the election results the night the polls close because the news
media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a
percent off.
We could have saved billions that have instead been handed over to
ES&S, Diebold, and other private corporations.
Or, if we must have machines, let's have them owned by local
governments, maintained and programmed by civil servants answerable to We The
People, using open-source code and disconnected from modems, that produce a
voter-verified printed ballot, with all results published on a
precinct-by-precinct basis.
As Thomas Paine wrote at this nation's founding, "The right
of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights
are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."
Only when We The People reclaim the commons of our vote can we
again be confident in the integrity of our electoral process in the world's
oldest and most powerful democratic republic.
Thom Hartmann (thom at
thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and
host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent
books are "The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal
Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,"
"We
The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What
Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
COLUMBUS,
Ohio (AP) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush
3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.
Franklin County's unofficial
results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a
precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that
precinct.
Bush actually received 365 votes
in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of
Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.
State and county election
officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for
more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if
repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.
Bush won the state by more than
136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election
on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be
counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)
The Secretary of State's Office
said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the
error.
The Ohio glitch is among a
handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)
In one North Carolina county,
more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a
computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did.
And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts
to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.
In the Ohio precinct in
question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines
at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder
said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.
Damschroder said people who had
seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the
discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for
the election is performed later this month, he said.
The reader also recorded zero
votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.
Workers checked the cartridge
against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people
voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in
the precinct added up to 365 votes.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a
glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice
voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices.
If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second
and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't
eliminated in the first round. (E-vote
goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)
When the San Francisco
Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does
the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the
results, director John Arntz said.
"All the information is
there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed
to."
A technician from the Omaha,
Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc.,
was working to diagnose and fix the problem
FORT
LAUDERDALE, Florida (AP) -- Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with
electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their
intended candidates.
The e-voting glitches reported
to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll
monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on
everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.
But there were also several
dozen voters in six states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- who said the
wrong candidates appeared on their touchscreen machine's checkout screen, the
coalition said.
In many cases, voters said they
intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the
choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush, the group said.
Ralph G. Neas, president of
People for the American Way Foundation, which helped form the coalition, called
the summary screen problem "troubling but anecdotal."
He and other voting rights
advocates said the disproportionate number of Democrats reporting such problems
was probably due to higher awareness of voter protection coalitions.
"Overall, the problems of
outright voter intimidation and suppression have not been as great as in the
past," Neas said.
But the reports did highlight
computer scientists' concerns about touchscreens, which they say are prone to
tampering and unreliable unless they produce paper records for recounts.
Roberta Harvey, 57, of
Clearwater, Florida, said she had tried at least a half dozen times to select
Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church.
After 10 minutes trying to
change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said she called a poll worker
and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she
could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harvey said it took about 10
attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended
selection.
Election officials in several
Florida counties where voters complained about such problems did not return
calls Tuesday night.
A spokesoman for the company
that makes the touchscreen machines used in Pinellas, Palm Beach and two other
Florida counties, Alfie Charles of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., said the
machines' monitors may need to be recalibrated periodically.
The most likely reason the
summary screen showed wrong candidates was because voters pushed the wrong part
of the touch screen in the first place, Charles said.
He said poll workers are trained
to perform the recalibration whenever a voter says the touchscreen isn't
sensitive enough.
"Voters will vote quickly
and they'll notice that they made an error when they get to the review screen.
The review screen is doing exactly what it needs to do -- notifying voters what
selections are about to be recorded," Charles said. "On a paper
ballot, you don't get a second chance to make sure you voted for whom you
intended, and it's a strong point in favor of these machines."
The Election Protection
Coalition received a total of 32 reports of touch-screen voters who selected one candidate only to
have another show up on the summary screen, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a coalition member.
David Dill, a Stanford
University computer scientist whose Verified Voting Foundation also belongs to
the coalition, said he wouldn't "prejudge and say the election is going
smoothly just because we have a small number of incident reports out of the
total population.
"It's not going to be until
the dust clears probably tomorrow that we have even an approximate idea of what
happened," Dill added.
Election 2004: "Sour Grapes" or Voter Fraud -- by Mike
Whitney
If you believe that George Bush
won last nights election "fair and square" then forget about reading
this article. If you know however that tens of thousands of people who lined up
for up to four hours at a time in Ohio and Florida to have their vote counted,
were not standing there to endorse the aggression and suicidal policies of the
current administration then read on.
The unprecedented high turnout
coupled with new registrations (that were overwhelmingly in favor of John
Kerry) suggest that there was foul play at the voting booths. As a result,
consumer investigator and activist Bev Harris (founder of Black Box Voting)
"is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history. On
election night, Black Box Voting blanketed the US with the first in a series of
public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents
from 3,000 individual counties and townships."
If the Bush people are so
confident in their victory let them "put up or shut up."
The fact of the matter is (as
every reasonable person who hasn't been hoodwinked by the pageantry of election
night fraud realizes) that the election was stolen again in full view of the
American public. The Republican owned voting machines prevailed over exit poll
projections and the will of the American people. If that's not the case, then let's investigate the computer logs.
According to Lynn Landis' article "Could the AP rig the Election":
"The Associated Press (AP) will be the sole source of raw vote totals for the
major news broadcasters on Election Night.. They refused to confirm or deny
that the AP will receive direct feed from voting machines and central vote
tabulating computers across the country. But, circumstantial evidence suggests
that is exactly what will happen.
And what can be downloaded can
also be uploaded. Computer experts say
that signals can travel both to and from computerized voting machines through
wireless technology, modems, and even simple electricity." Landis just confirms what is already known
about "sketchy" electronic voting and how it invites vote tampering.
Her connection between election machinery, vote totals and the AP, however, has
not previously been made. She goes on to explain that, "AP spokespeople
would not give out information on who sits on their board, however AP
leadership appears quite conservative."
Landis continues: "Burl
Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, is also publisher emeritus of
the conservative The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W.
Bush in the last election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and
executive editor of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining
AP. Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)'s 7-member
executive committee. The APME "works in partnership with AP to improve the
wire service's performance," according to their website. APME vice
president, Deanna Sands, is managing editor of the ultra conservative Omaha World
Herald newspaper, whose parent company owns the largest voting machine company
in the nation, Election Systems and Software (ES&S)."
It's a cozy relationship
considering that ES&S voting machines count 50% of all the votes in the
country. The second largest company,
Diebold, is also tied to the Republican Party and promised (in a comment by Wally
Diebold that got widespread attention on the internet) to "deliver the
vote" in Ohio to President Bush.
Both Wally and ES&S
apparently succeeded admirably in their task of undermining the election. Many readers are probably wondering what
happened to the "Help America Vote Act" that was passed by Congress
to avoid the problems of Florida 2000? As Landis reports in an earlier article:
"What Congress really did was to throw $2.65 billion at the states, so
that they could lavish it on a handful of private companies that are controlled
by ultra-conservative Republicans, foreigners and felons." (Diebold,
ES&S and Sequoia were among the big winners)
None of the facts related to the presidential election add up.
Voter registration went up from 105 million to 120 million. In Ohio alone it
went up a whopping 17%. Whenever
registration has surged like this in the past, it has always favored the
challenger and precipitated a change in government. Not so, this time, and Republican pollsters are eager to convince
us that the reason for this is a renewed interest among the American public for
"moral values". Is that it or
are the results simply an indication of massive (but well calculated) voter
fraud?
The exit polling was equally
skewed, showing a clear victory for Kerry. Exit polling has traditionally been a
reliable way of determining the outcome of elections. Not so in Bush-world,
where vote totals are invariably higher for Bush in the contentious areas that
ultimately decide the election. Give
strategist Karl Rove his due; he knew what had to be done and did it. The rest,
of course, has been papered over by the pollsters, pimps and pundits in
American press corps.
Do we need to remind ourselves
that representative government can only be established by the power of the vote?
It is the electoral process that confers legitimacy on government. Without a
popular mandate state power can only be vindicated through force of arms. Last night American democracy was skillfully
subverted and replaced with a mutant form of corporatism that operates
independent of the will of the people. It's impossible to know what the long
term affects of this will be, but it is a development that should greatly
concern us all.