Text 4336, 174 rader
Skriven 2004-11-02 15:01:12 av Alan Hess
Ärende: spoiled election
========================
With the existence of corrupt election officials and partisan groups looking to
intimidate opposing voters, and insecure voting machines that may not always
properly record the vote and don't have paper backup, plus are subject to
hacking (they run on Windows, for crying out loud - why not the much more
secure Mac OS?  Even OS/2 would be a more secure platform.), can we trust the
election results, no matter who wins?

The below discusses the effect on the Kerry campaign, but there undoubtedly are
similar shenanigans afoot that negatively impact prospective Bush voters.  It's
sad such crap goes on in this country - it sounds like what you see in some
third world country.
***********

 
An Election Spoiled Rotten
Greg Palast
November 01, 2004

It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down
by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states like Ohio,
Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the
rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked-overwhelmingly in minority
areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500
percent greater chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist
Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the election.

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 .

John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one
ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and Ohio;
and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled until Tuesday
night.

Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling-ethnic cleansing of voter
rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes-John Kerry
begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes.

The Urge To Purge

Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed several
thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as barred from
voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike like Florida
and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar ex-cons from
voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their rights.

There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally from the
big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights of innocents,
federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a presidential election to allow
a voter to challenge their loss of civil rights.

To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared an
"emergency." However, the only "emergency" in Colorado seems to be President
Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.

Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law enforcement is
Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney general of Texas. This is
what the Lone Star State's current attorney general says of Mr. Durham: He is,
"unfit for public office... a man with a history of racism and ideological
zealotry." Sounds just right for a purge that affects, in the majority,
non-white voters.

From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is unlikely
that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.

But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about this, but
studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served time for
felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's
Republican secretary of state knows that.

Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls

We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls without a stop
in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears to be running to replace
Katherine Harris.

In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught Registering
While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in Southern states by
the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black voters are three times
as likely as white voters to have their registration requests "returned" (i.e.,
subject to rejection).

And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the first time
since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass challenges of
voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block 35,000 voters in Ohio
ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so, in Florida, what appear to be
similar plans had been kept under wraps until the discovery of documents called
"caging" lists. The voters on the "caging" lists, disclosed last week by BBC
Television London, are, almost exclusively, residents of African-American
neighborhoods.

Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the Voting
Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal judges have
persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party in pledging not to
distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.

Absentee Ballots Go AWOL

It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about
computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot requests
are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes-up to 15 million-will
be counted is zip.

Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your trust is
used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections Supervisor
Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839 absentee votes.
But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had been received. When
this loaves-and-fishes miracle was disclosed, she was forced to recount,
cutting the tally to 31,138.

Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes instead of
adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to figure out the fix (or
was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration forms are protected by federal
law. Local government must acknowledge receiving your registration and must let
you know if there's a problem (say, with signature or address) that invalidates
your registration. But your mail-in vote is an unprotected crapshoot. How do
you know if your ballot was received? Was it tossed behind a file cabinet-or
tossed out because you did not include your middle initial? In many counties,
you won't know.

And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported that
Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots. What
has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections supervisor is a
Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor took the
unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who happened be a
Democrat.

A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can  

"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a New
Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes
simply weren't counted-chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the
technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens cast ballots,
but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last
go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president-or, at least, none showed
up on the machines.

Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked
nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College
to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted
State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have
their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's worse for Native Americans.
Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.

Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down to the
machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals, they get
the crap voting machines.

It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box holocaust.
An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that, typically, two
million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering no vote or
invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the
Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those ballots are
cast by African Americans. One million black votes vanished-phffft!

There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way; suppression
of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to blame, on Tuesday,
the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio Arriba, Democrats have an
eight-to-one registration edge over Republicans. Among African American
voters...well, you can do the arithmetic yourself.

The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so large,
you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news media. The one
million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus the hundreds of
thousands flushed from voter registries, is our nation's dark secret: an
apartheid democracy in which wealthy white votes almost always count, but
minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not recorded. In effect,
Kerry is down by a million votes before one lever is pulled, card punched or
touch-screen touched.

--- Msged/2 6.0.1
 * Origin: tncbbs.no-ip.com - Home of the POL_DISORDER echo. (1:261/1000)