A liberal investigative reporter: Kerry won

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.

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.

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."

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.

"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.

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, 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 .

Do they really want to go this route and stand a chance of losing Rendell and Richardson for fraud post a thorough investigation by the Justice Department. I still believe that the Justice Dept needs to go after ACORN, ACT, NAACP, etc. for voter fraud to send a message.

I don't have time to reread the article but it seems the author is saying that the spoiled ballots were intentionally 'spoiled' by Republican overseers based on the precinct being predominantly Black or Hispanic.

Is this what everyone else is reading here? It was a bit confusing without a second careful read...

Whoa - hold it right there. Michael Barone, Brit Hume and others have written that the exit polling data was a badly drawn sample. It was way off from the actual results that came in. Contra Palast, there was no organized conspiracy to steal OH from Kerry. The actual votes that came in came in the way they did and the exit polls were completely off the mark. Its too bad Palast can't bring himself to acknowledge the obvious: Bush won the Buckeye State's 20 electoral votes fair and square.

The percentages of spoiled ballots for punch cards may be correct.

While I was voting at a polling station with about 10 stations, a spoiled ballot was created by a voter. Arizona uses a great system where the ballots are checked while the voter is still present. While I was filling out my ballot I heard the official inform a voter that his ballot was "over-voted". He was given the option of filling out a new ballot or voting the rest of the races with that particular race ignored. He chose to accept the second option.

In the case of the old punch card systems, they usually don't check the ballot before the voter leaves. There would be no way to decide how to remedy the situation.

The assumption that spoiled ballots are the result of political purposeful partisan action is something that should be substantiated more strongly before it is suggested in a publication.

They should name names of specific people who were forced to take provisional ballots. Of course, if they did, then the Republicans would be able to point out the specific problem which resulted in the action. It's kind of hard to dispute nonspecific charges. This article is, on the face, unfair.

The validity of an exit poll depends a lot on where the pollster is standing. If they perform all the polling in predominantly Democrat districts, then breakdowns by gender are meaningless. Unlike pre-election polls, we typically are not given the "internals" of the poll to allow the reader to verify proper weighting.

We couldn't come through with Mt. St. Helens. A few kinks to be worked out.

Excuse me, but that's a problem with Ashcroft's geological manipulator.

Rove's weather machine has been performing flawlessly.

Not only that, when I saw the exit pollers as I approached my polling place, my first reaction was "who are these people -- they look like Dems!" from 30 feet away. (Don't ask me why I had that predjudice!) So exiting they asked me to participate in the exit poll, and, I'll tell you what, when I looked down at the box the questionaires were going in & saw that this was for AP, CNN, etc., I just about blew it off. But, then, even though it was the afternoon, I thought about how I felt when I'd heard those early exit poll results and figured I'd darn well better put in my 2 cents worth. Now, how much "unconscious" (or even conscious) selection of who to ask may have been done by the exit pollers, AND, how many Repubs would be repelled by a poll done by the MSM? Huh? Huh? Huh!

Two other points: I marked "morality" as the most important issue, but I was thinking "integrity and honor", not "abortion" or anything "religious right" when I marked "morality". Also, I noticed a fascinating question: "Do you think Barack Obama would make a good President?" Sheez - does that tell you where the pollsters are coming from, or what? (And, good grief, the guy's never been more than a State Senator. Ask me again in 12 years... )

NUTCASES UNITE!!!

Greg Palast, reporting
A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals

Oh, here we go again, with the 2000 election, and the chads.

I voted Michigan absentee ballot for 20 years while doing my Air Force time. It was a punch card. You take the stylus, which is about like a paper clip wire, and punch it through the number on the punch card, which was backed by a styrofoam sheet. The simple instructions told you to punch all the way through, and then to check to make sure the chad was completely detached.

There are no "dimpled", "pregnant", or "hanging" chads, unless you are illiterate and incompetent, in which case you have no idea what you are voting for anyway, so you're an idiot who will vote for whatever self-destructive crap that comes down the pike. You should be barred from voting, just as a two-year-old should be barred from handling a sharp knife. That whole recount was complete Nonsense, for the umpteenth time, and it's time for you Moveon.org types to get over it and move on. Being stupid is not something you should proclaim to the world, yet you trumpet it to the highest heavens. "I'm stupid! I'm stupid!"

It seems the author is saying that Minority precincts are targeted. He is saying that election officials, consciously trying to supress Democratic vote, arbitrarily throw out more ballots in these precincts. The amount of collusion in all of these precincts would be practically impossible to garner. Besides which, what accounts for Bush clear victories where the punch cards are not used (Bush won by 400K votes even before absentee votes were counted in Florida - the author said this was one of the disenfranchised states in 200) and this 'cheating' cannot occur. Was there a different form of cheating there?

I can appreciate a good argument and an honest one, no matter whose side it benefits but this argument has alot of holes and alot of assumptions. One of the biggest and glaring assumptions (besides the assertion that Republicans control and consciously promote racism in their oversight of all precincts in swing states) is that the Exit Polls are pure as the driven snow and not impeachable whilst the actual vote is not.

Is there a link to this article? I would like to challenge, using my last post, Palast's thesis. He needs to defend this to everyone not just his cheerleaders. These are serious charges and the MSM will eventually come out of hiding in a few days/weeks and start trumpeting this line of thinking...

Funny, the Left says we are all ignorant right-wingers, and yet for their base they largely depend on people they say are too stupid to vote with a punch card!

G'nite, folks -- one more stop over at the SwiftVet site & then I'm hittin' the sack!

And this from the same party that, in last minute desperation in 2000, hired a telemarketing company in Wichita Falls, TX to call Democrat voters in select precincts in Palm Beach County and inform them they may've voted for Bush by mistake. Exit polls are as scientific as online polls.

One DU poster has just suggested that the discovery of fraud would be grounds for impeachment! Remember, Clinton was impeached for what he HIMSELF did, not what his supporters may've done. A President must himself commit the impeachable act.

He is really flat out stating that the minority Democrat base is too stupid to know how to use a simple voting mechanism. That is really the only conclusion to draw from his ridiculous, fantastical ravings. What a racist!

And at the same time they keep saying that they are the ones with the high IQs.

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