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 .

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 .)

Palast's argument has just gone up in smoke (even if it hadn't before this point) with that sentence. The report that he makes reference to is a bad joke. The Civil Rights Commission is run by a noxious, arrogant, downright evil conservative-hating witch named Mary Frances Berry who is more rabidly partisan than anyone in Washington that I can think of. And the research for that "study" was done by a former consultant for Al Gore.

From a thread I authored based on a June 21, 2001 Washington Times article about the CRC report:

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission´s study that concluded Florida blacks were disenfranchised in last year´s presidential election was conducted by a consultant to former Vice President Al Gore, The Washington Times has learned.
To obtain the raw data from this study, the commission´s two Republican appointees said they have been reduced to submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to their own commission.
They said the group´s Democratic majority has been slow to provide this and other information they need in order to write their dissenting opinion before Senate Democrats begin hearings next week.
The study, which Democrats on the commission leaked to The Washington Post and the New York Times, was conducted by American University history professor Alan Lichtman, who is listed on the school´s Web site as "consultant to Vice President Albert Gore Jr."
"He´s obviously very pro-Gore," said Russell Redenbaugh, one of two conservatives on the eight-member commission. "The Lichtman statistics are arcane and controversial. The statistical methodology used is not at all mainstream and not universally accepted."
Mr. Lichtman yesterday emphasized that he also has done consulting work for Republicans, including Lee Atwater and New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, although he has never worked for President Bush.
"I haven´t been a consultant for Gore for six years," he said. "So it´s really unfair of them to be attacking me personally."
Republican Commissioner Abigail Thernstrom said Mr. Lichtman´s attempts to portray himself as bipartisan were "hilarious."
"The fact is he´s a hired gun for minority plaintiffs in voting rights cases," she said. "He´s very driven by his commitment to finding disenfranchisement and finding violations of the Voting Rights Act. I mean, it´s just blatant in all his work."
Les Gin, staff director for the Democrat-controlled commission, said the staff did not know when they retained Mr. Lichtman that he had been a consultant to Mr. Gore.
"If we had known, would it have made any difference?" he asked rhetorically. "The truth is, it probably would not have."
Mr. Gin said Mr. Lichtman was hired partly because the staff liked his testimony during the commission´s hearings in January in Tallahassee, Fla.
"I think he did a very nice job of presenting as a witness down in Tallahassee," he said. "At that point, I think there was a feeling that Dr. Lichtman was a very good person to finish this project."
But the commission´s Republican appointees cited Mr. Lichtman´s January testimony as proof that his conclusions about black disenfranchisement were a foregone conclusion.
"While I´ve done no study of my own, I´ve handed out to you a New York Times article from Nov. 29, which does show that in fact there are disparate election systems used in the state of Florida," Mr. Lichtman testified at the time.
"Minorities perhaps can go to the polls unimpeded, but their votes are less likely to count because of the disparate technology than are the votes of whites," he added.
After the commission appointed him, Mr. Lichtman conducted a statistical analysis that claimed to confirm that thesis. But Republicans said the study should have been conducted by a statistician, not a historian, and certainly not by someone who once worked for Mr. Gore.
Moreover, the GOP appointees complained that Mr. Lichtman´s study was sprung on them just two days before the commission´s June 8 hearing. Mr. Redenbaugh, who is blind, did not have enough time to arrange for someone to read him the report.
"It´s an [Americans with Disabilities Act] violation, even though he won´t say anything because he hates being in the category of disabled and making a fuss about it," said Mrs. Thernstrom.
"I mean, we´re discussing a report page by page that a commissioner who is blind has not had an opportunity to read," she added. "He had no access to that report, in effect. They treated him as not a commissioner who was entitled to read this document."
Mr. Redenbaugh downplayed his lack of timely access to the report.
He said the important point is that Democratic members of the commission have refused to provide the raw data on which the study is based.
Both Mr. Redenbaugh and Mrs. Thernstrom have filed FOIA requests to obtain this and other information they say is crucial for their dissenting opinion, which is due next week.
"It´s appalling that we have had to submit a FOIA request," Mrs. Thernstrom said. "But we can´t get the data. We´ve got some paper, but we can´t enter all these numbers and make them machine readable. I want his disks because the taxpayers paid for them."
But Mr. Lichtman said he has no computer disks containing statistical databases or models. Besides, he said, he provided paper copies of the raw numbers and listed the Web sites for his source materials.
"It´s all on the Web," he said. "In my report, I point out all the Web sites. I mean, this data has been available for months. There´s no secret data and they got a hard copy of all the data as well. So this is nonsense."
Mr. Gin agreed.
"I´m a little surprised by the fact that they´ve filed FOIA requests, because that´s not the way we do business with commissioners," he said. "Dr. Lichtman does not have that data on a disk; he doesn´t have it in one place. He just took the information off the Internet."
Republicans rejected the idea that they should re-create Mr. Lichtman´s study by trying to duplicate from scratch his collection methods and analysis of data from numerous sources.
They accused the Democrats of deliberately stonewalling so that the dissenting report will not be published before Wednesday, when Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, convenes hearings on the election.
The first two witnesses at the hearing will be Mrs. Thernstrom and the commission´s liberal chairman, Mary Frances Berry. Miss Berry, who has given $19,000 to Democrats since 1992, did not return phone calls for this story.

It's amazing that on one hand, liberals will insist that conservatives fix ballots because blacks are too dumb to figure them out, and on the other hand, those same liberals will say that blacks and other minorities should have lower academic standards to gain admittance to medical and law school.

Let me interject at this point that I am black.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.