Spoilage and Kerry's Win

Greg Palast, well-known investigative reporter and contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. He is here to tell us something we really don't want to hear. He makes the case that John Kerry most likely won Ohio and New Mexico. If this were correct, John Kerry would now be our president-elect.

Palast gives us the compelling facts in his article on TomPaine.common sense. Click on the blog title to read the entire article.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." In the US, about 3% of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, according to every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. Palast reminds us that we saw this in Florida in 2000. Secretary of State Katherine Harris excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. Most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely or was punched extra times. 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black Americans. Florida is very typical. The majority of ballots thrown out will have been cast by black Americans and other minority citizens. (There will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election.)

Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards- the ones with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes"). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.

Before the election, Ohio's Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell said that the punch-card machines invite problems. But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has decided to stick with these machines inspite of their habit of eating Democratic votes.

Palast also discusses the voting-preventing topic of 'challenges.' This refers to the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. The GOP made plans for poll workers to ambush citizens in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, allowing party-designated poll watchers to target individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. Our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door. Many of these voters ended up with provisional ballots which may or may not be counted. Blackwell says there were 175,000 of these. Democrats say there were 250,000. In any case, these voters were overwhelmingly Democratic. So if you add the provisional ballots and the spoiled punch cards to the counted votes, you get a total very close to the exit polls. Since Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio, this means Kerry may very well have won if the votes cast had been counted.

Palast then goes to New Mexico where he says a Kerry plurality is more obvious still (if all votes were counted). The problem: spoilage and the provisional ballots. In New Mexico, hispanic voters, for example, are 5 times as likely to have their votes spoil as a white voter.

Of course, all votes will not be counted, not even this time. Why? The Democratic Party gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. They know that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots would require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State Blackwell. It is he who would decide which uncounted ballots would get tallied. It is unlikely, according to Palast, that Blackwell would allow a full count. And it is almost a foregone conclusion that the media would punish the Democrats for making an issue of the uncounted votes.

My personal opinion: We should insist on a full accounting of all discarded ballots regardless of the consequences. However, I don't suppose Kerry wanted to have weeks and weeks of chaos.

I was a poll observer on November 2nd in Virginia Beach. Punch card voting machines were used. I did not see any spoilage. None. I only saw some voters who had to void a ballot and start over because of overvoting. So I don't quite understand how so many ballots could be ruined. There is no excuse for it. And, by the way, Palast says that the spoiled punch cards are easy to tally with the human eye in a recount.

Palast's research is so troubling. It makes it all the more difficult to accept the results of the election. You would have thought that we could have done better this time around after the debacle in Florida in 2000. But not much has been done since then to insure a better result. The only difference this time is that everybody knew what the problems were. It has come as no surprise.

In 2004, the Bush administration can carry out its conniving work in the bright light of day and suffer little or no consequences. Why are we so compliant? Are we not outraged yet?