Only Moment Alone

Throughout this entire election cycle, I’ve had two concerns in the back of my mind throughout the good and bad and the ups and downs.  The first fear is that some crazy person would try to assassinate Barack Obama, of which we have seen three threats so far, but thankfully nothing catastrophic has happened.  My second concern was that even in this historic election year and despite Obama leading in the polls, he would have to win by huge margins in order to prevent the GOP from stealing the election.

If you are thinking “Oh, great.  He’s going to spin some crazy conspiracy stories about “STEALING” elections.”  Then go ahead and stop reading, but know that you are uninformed and that everything I am about to write about has been documented and is not conspiracy-lunacy.

It is pretty sad to me that many Americans simply don’t know about many of these sordid details from the past two elections, but let me give a brief overview (and let me give a lot of credit to Greg Palast, whose amazing investigative work opened many peoples eyes, including mine.)

2000

2000… you remember that election right?  The Supreme Court halted the recount in Florida and then handed the Whitehouse to George Bush as a result of it’s ruling on Bush v. Gore after weeks of turmoil.  So Bush was handed the 27 electoral votes he needed to win the Presidency after “winning” the state of Florida by 537 votes.  Florida’s Governor was Jeb Bush and the Secretary of State was Katherine Harris, who also *happened* to be Bush’s Florida campaign co-chair.  What we now know is that Katherine Harris working with private company Database Technologies (a division of ChoicePoint) provided multiple error-filled lists of “ex-felons” to be knocked from the voter rolls in Florida.  The first list contained the names of 8,000 Florida residents, and was found to be completely erroneous.  A second list was then provided which contained the names of 58,000 Florida voters.  According to Palast,

Our 10-county review suggests a minimum 15 per cent misidentification rate. That makes another 7,000 innocent people accused of crimes and stripped of their citizenship rights in the run-up to the presidential race. And not just any 7,000 people. Hillsborough (Tampa) county statisticians found that 54 per cent of the names on the scrub list belonged to African-Americans, who voted 93 per cent for Gore.

In an election won by just 537 votes, I think you can see where this is headed.  Palast later concluded,

Vice-President Al Gore would have strolled to victory in Florida if the state hadn’t kicked up to 56,000 citizens off the voters’ registers five month ago as former felons.

In fact, only a fraction were ex-cons and when all was said and done the number was closer to 93,000.  Most were simply guilty of being African-American.

He later wrote,

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.  Also, expert statisticians investigating spoilage in the 2000 election for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks.

Read these two articles for the full story:

“Florida’s flawed “voter-cleansing” program“
and
“A Blacklist Burning for Bush“

2004

Bush Jr. was running for re-election against Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.  If you thought that the 2000 election was sketchy, the 2004 election “was trashed” and blows it away by comparison.

Even before the election, Greg Palast wrote that it was “An Election Spoiled Rotten” and pointed to voter intimidation and suppression, voter-roll manipulation, voter challenges that were brewing and happening in many swing-states.

Despite shady activity happening on a large scale in many states, lets focus on Ohio and New Mexico for brevity and also because Ohio the most glaring spot of election fraud and it alone would have swung the election to Kerry.  In Ohio, exit polls said that Kerry won among women by 53% to 47% and among men by 51% to 49%.  Yet Bush won the state, and the exit polls were later changed to match the “official” (read: bogus) count and then they were hidden away.  How did this happen?   Well, just like Florida in 2000, the recipe starts with an extremely partisan Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was also serving as co-chair of Ohio’s Bush-Cheney reelection campaign.  Pretty convenient, right?  A guy who is the co-chair trying to get Bush re-elected in Ohio is in charge of counting the votes.  Anyway, Greg Palast wrote about the Ohio results in an article titled, “Apartheid Ballot Counting in America,”

93,000 votes were tossed on the floor, never counted. We’re not talking ‘re-count’ here, we’re talking NEVER count. These 93,000 votes are called, “spoiled” in Ohio. Another 155,000 votes are called provisional. More absentee ballots were tossed. Yet, supposedly George Bush won by 119,000. Folks, now what’s going on here? Whose votes were not counted that were twice the Bush margin of victory?

Were the votes ’spoiled’ randomly? Well, not exactly. Overwhelmingly the votes not counted — NOT COUNTED –were cast in African American precincts. These are very Black votes. I use the term ‘overwhelmingly,’ those votes cast into the machines but not counted for technical reasons. When I say ‘overwhelmingly Black votes,’ that is not my phrase. That’s from Dr. Mark Salling of Cleveland State University who’s been investigating this for the ACLU. The statisticians and demographers say it’s overwhelmingly Black votes which are not counted.

You’ve heard a lot about the dangers of ‘blackbox’ computer voting. I want to talk to you about good old-fashioned punch card voting. 93,000 votes tossed in the garbage out of Black precincts. How? Just as Black neighborhoods get the bad schools, they get the bad hospitals, they also get the bum voting machines? And so their votes go in the garbage.  It goes back to dimpled chads, pregnant chads, hanging chade. Because Ohio is the last state in America to use the old punch card system for 75% of the vote.

And they know it, the powers that be. You’re thinking, it should be against the law. And, in fact, it is. The ACLU sued the State of Ohio for having a racist ballot counting system. They sued five states — BEFORE the election. And before the election, four states said, ‘Well, gee, we’re kind of embarrassed. Yeah, we’re losing thousands of Black votes.’ And they all agreed to fix the machines before the election, all but one state: Ohio. The Secretary of State of Ohio J Kenneth Blackwell said, “Yes, I know that the machines we use in Ohio eliminate tens of thousands of Black votes on bad machines.” We’ll fix them, he said, after the inauguration.

Blackwell also oversaw a voter-roll purge ala Florida of 2000, and also was the person who decided that for the first time in Ohio history, provisional ballots would not be counted if cast by a legal voter in the “wrong” precinct.  All of this sketchy activity led to crazy statistics coming out of the state, like an evangelical-dominated precinct in Miami county reporting 98 percent turnout while an inner-city Cleveland precinct reported an impossible seven percent turnout.

In New Mexico, the stories were also appalling.  Greg Palast describes the situation in his article, “Recipe for a cooked election,”

In November 2004 during early voting in Precinct 13, Taos, New Mexico, John Kerry took 73 votes. George Bush got three. On election day, 216 in that precinct voted Kerry. Bush got 25 votes, and came in third.
Third? Taking second place in the precinct, with 40 votes, was no one at all.

Or, at least, that’s what the machines said.
Precinct 13 is better known as the Taos Pueblo. Every single voter there is an American Native or married to one.

Precinct 13 wasn’t unique. On Navajo lands, indecision struck on an epidemic scale. They walked in, they didn’t vote. In nine precincts in McKinley County, New Mexico, which is 74.7 percent Navajo, fewer than one in ten voters picked a president. Those who voted on paper ballots early or absentee knew who they wanted (Kerry, overwhelmingly), but the machine-counted vote said Indians simply couldn’t make up their minds or just plain didn’t care.

On average, across the state, the machine printouts say that 7.3 percent — one in twelve voters — in majority Native precincts didn’t vote for president.  Nationally, one out of every 12 ballots cast by Native Americans did not contain a vote for President. Indians by the thousands drove to the voting station, walked into the booth, said, “Who cares?” and walked out without voting for president.

In New Mexico, there was a total of 33,981 cast but not counted ballots of that state in the 2004 race. George Bush “won” New Mexico by 5,988 votes. Or did he? I calculated that, of the all the ballots rejected and “spoiled,” 89% were cast by voters of color. Who won New Mexico? Kerry won—or he would have, if they had counted the ballots.

Not only that, but:

New Mexico’s Secretary of State, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, seemed curiously uncurious about Hispanic and Native precincts where nearly one in ten voters couldn’t be bothered to choose a president.

Vigil-Giron, along with Governor Bill Richardson, not only stopped any attempt at a recount directly following the election, but demanded that all the machines be wiped clean. This not only concealed evidence of potential fraud but destroyed it. In 2006, New Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled the Secretary of State’s machine-cleaning job illegal — too late to change the outcome of the election, of course.

All in all, the 2004 election was illegitimate.  These are the four basic strategies for vote fraud and the 2004 statistics:

SPOILED BALLOTS –1,389,231 in 2004.  These are from those stupid arcane machines (the “Ohio specialty”), or touch screen errors, or ballots getting shredded, etc.

REJECTING PROVISIONAL BALLOTS — 1,090,729 in 2004.  Voting at the wrong precinct or wrongly “scrubbed off the voter rolls.  These ballots are passed out most often in the poorest precincts.

NOT COUNTING ABSENTEE BALLOTS — 526,420 in 2004.  This doesn’t even count the documented cases where the ballots were not even mailed out in time or just not mailed at all.

BLOCKED FROM THE POLLS — These are voters who had registrations that got “lost” or never entered to the rolls.  Those that are intimidated or challenged.

According to documented research:

Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad³ never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.

All in all 3,600,380 votes were cast—marked, punched, pulled—YET NEVER COUNTED!

This is the U.S.A.  Not some third world country.  How is that not unacceptable?

2008

And that is why I worry, no matter what the polls say.  I agree wholeheartedly with Greg Palast when he says,

“If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.”