Kerry Won Ohio: Votes American Style

Investigative reporter Greg Palast, author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," and the person who uncovered the 2000 election debacle in Florida, is remaining resolute.

Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry.

The ballots of thousands of Ohio voters will not be counted. These ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio- and in New Mexico as well- are "locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: 'spoiled' ballots and 'provisional' ballots."

Most of us forget, or never knew, that, in a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply thrown in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted. This is racism alive and well in America. Why? Because 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. (Mind you, this information was not compiled by MoveOn.org. It was done by a federal agency.) Palast says that, sadly, Florida is typical. Some two million votes end up in the no-count pit: votes cast by African-Americans, Hispanic, Native-American, and poor white precincts.

In the 2000 Florida election, Katherine "Cruella deVille" Harris defeated Al Gore by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards, not by halting a "recount." And for those of us who assume that spoiled punch cards are hard to read by humans, they are not. As Palast says, "We humans know a hole when we see one." Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters. Ohio Republicans found these racial odds quite attractive.

Ohio was the only state to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

As a matter of fact, like Herod, who listened with interest as the Magi told him of the birth of Jesus and slyly asked about Jesus' whereabouts so that "he might go and worship him," the Ohio Republicans rather liked what the ACLU had found, and used the group's well-informed expert testimony to devise a foolproof plan to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004. Since the ACLU dutifully pointed out the problems with the punch card machines, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts, Ohio planned to fix the machinery sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. And the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, decided to postpone the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election. How convenient.

Now with all these theatrics, we might assume that somehow fixing (repairing, that is!) a punch card machine is complicated and costly. It is not. It is cheap and easy. Michigan placed a card-reading machine in each polling station this year. All voters could immediately have their punch cards checked to make sure they were good and not headed for the garbage bin. If there was a problem, such as overvote or undervote, it was instantly detected. A voter would simple be issued another ballot. I observed this procedure in my precinct in Virginia Beach, VA. It was easy and took hardly any time. Most importantly, it insured that every vote was countable. (It would not, however, insure that each vote would be counted.) Ohio did NOT have these card-reading machines. Ohio Secretary of State, Republican Kenneth Blackwell, who also, coincidentally was co-chair of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, knew about the card-reading machines and knew that, if he had used them in Ohio, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes.

Add to the spoiled votes the 'provisional' ballots and- voila!- the White House would have turned Democratic blue.

This will not happen. Why? Because the provisional ballots are counted in a peculiar way, or more often, not counted at all. In 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls. However, in 2004, this procedure was used to advantage by Republican-controlled swing states by insuring that thousands of ballots would not be counted- ballots that would more than likely be cast for Kerry/Edwards. How is this possible? Simple. The gatekeeper of ballots is Kenneth Blackwell. He has the power to decide which provisional ballots will be counted. He can stipulate just about any criteria, and these criteria can be as ridiculous as he wishes. Remember, this was the man who tried to disqualify some voter registration forms because they were printed on the wrong weight of paper.

More than 155,000 Ohio voters were forced to use these provisional ballots, all of which are subject to Mr. Blackwell's scrutiny. And this was not just a state issue.

No, the national Republican strategy targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.

The Republican Party systematically barred hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. Greg Palast and his staff obtained three dozen Republican confidential "caging" lists, proof that they intended to block voters. In every single case, these hit lists contained addresses in Black-majority precincts.

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act made it a criminal act to profile and/or impede minority voters, even with legal pretext.

This did not stop the Republicans of 2004. E-mails were obtained showing that the lists were copied directly to the RNC's chief of research and to the director of a state campaign. In some cases, a change of address, which supposedly flagged a voter as possibly disqualified, occurred because a soldier had been sent overseas to put his or her life on the line in Bush's war.

Blackwell says he will count all "valid" provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's numbers high enough to win.

We might wonder why John Kerry conceded in less than twenty-four hours. But the truth is, to count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers first have to demand a hand reading of punch cards. This could be halted by Blackwell. Even more daunting, the Kerry team would have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. A hundred thousand voters would have to tesify to their right to vote. Blackwell would be right there to challenge each person with a barrage of regulations which he so skillfully has put in place for just such an occasion. Given the odds and the cost to his political career, says Palast, Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the power of the Ohio Republican machine.

Kenneth Blackwell brags on his own website:

Last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress.

Charming- and this from an African-American.

Well, that's my report for today. Is it not discouraging? Do we not hope and pray that these conniving, politically ambitious, unscrupulous people will get their well-deserved comeuppances and that we will still be alive to enjoy the moment?

[Read Greg Palast's complete article as it appeared in "In These Times."]