[kj] Fwd: [ff-l] Kerry Won
Graeme Rowland
crackedmachine at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Nov 5 09:55:07 EST 2004
--- Blood Face <sonitus7 at hotmail.com> wrote:
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> From: "Blood Face" <sonitus7 at hotmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 16:17:55 -0600
> Subject: [ff-l] Kerry Won
>
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> http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php
>
>
>
> There are more links within the article below at the
> website above...
>
>
>
> Kerry Won
>
> Greg Palast
>
> November 04, 2004
>
>
>
>
>
> Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the
> United States, about 3
> percent of votes cast are voided-known as "spoilage"
> in election
> jargon-because the ballots cast are inconclusive.
> Palast's investigation
> suggests that if Ohio's discarded ballots were
> counted, Kerry would have won
> the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer
> reports there are a total of
> 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the
> 92,672 discarded votes
> plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.
>
>
>
> 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 .
>
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
> -MSG
>
>
>
> "Free election of masters does not abolish the
> masters or the slaves."
>
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>
> Please ignore any advertisements below!
>
> FREEDOM FROM POBOX 582391 MPLS MN 55458 USA
> http://freedom-from.com sonitus7 at freedom-from.com
>
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=====
Cracked Machine irregular cyberzine
http://www.webinfo.co.uk/crackedmachine
"What one thinks of as extremes seldom are" :: BC Gilbert
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