posted November 03, 2004 01:13 PM            

It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is
already down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important
states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been
systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been
overlooked—overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New
Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of their
vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the
trashing of the election.
John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not
one ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and
Ohio; and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled until
Tuesday night.
Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling—ethnic cleansing of
voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes—John
Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million
votes.

The Urge To Purge
Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed
several thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as
barred from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike
like Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar
ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their
rights.
There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally
from the big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights of
innocents, federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a presidential
election to allow a voter to challenge their loss of civil rights.
To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared
an "emergency." However, the only "emergency" in Colorado seems to be
President Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.
Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law enforcement
is Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney general of Texas.
This is what the Lone Star State's current attorney general says of Mr.
Durham: He is, "unfit for public office... a man with a history of racism
and ideological zealotry." Sounds just right for a purge that affects, in
the majority, non-white voters.
From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is
unlikely that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.
But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about this
but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served time
for felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's
Republican secretary of state knows that.
Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls
We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls without
a stop in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears to be running
to replace Katherine Harris.
In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught
Registering While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in
Southern states by the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black
voters are three times as likely as white voters to have their registration
requests "returned" (i.e., subject to rejection).
And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the first
time since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass
challenges of voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block 35
000 voters in Ohio ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so, in
Florida, what appear to be similar plans had been kept under wraps until the
discovery of documents called "caging" lists. The voters on the “caging”
lists, disclosed last week by BBC Television London, are, almost exclusively
residents of African-American neighborhoods.
Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the
Voting Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal judges
have persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party in pledging
not to distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.

Absentee Ballots Go AWOL
It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about
computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot requests
are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes—up to 15
million—will be counted is zip.
Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your trust
is used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections
Supervisor Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839
absentee votes. But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had
been received. When this loaves-and-fishes miracle was disclosed, she was
forced to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138.
Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes
instead of adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to figure
out the fix (or was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration forms are
protected by federal law. Local government must acknowledge receiving your
registration and must let you know if there's a problem (say, with signature
or address) that invalidates your registration. But your mail-in vote is an
unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if your ballot was received? Was it
tossed behind a file cabinet—or tossed out because you did not include your
middle initial? In many counties, you won't know.
And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported
that Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots
What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections
supervisor is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor
took the unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who
happened be a Democrat.

A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can
"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a
New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10
votes simply weren't counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting
biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens
cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in
the last go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president—or, at least,
none showed up on the machines.
Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I
asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of
Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot
spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500
percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's
worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian
reservations.

Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down
to the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals
they get the crap voting machines.
It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box
holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that,
typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering
no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission
and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those
ballots are cast by African Americans. One million black votes
vanished—phffft!
There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way;
suppression of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to blame
on Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio Arriba,
Democrats have an eight-to-one registration edge over Republicans. Among
African American voters...well, you can do the arithmetic yourself.
The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so
large, you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news media.
The one million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus the
hundreds of thousands flushed from voter registries, is our nation's dark
secret: an apartheid democracy in which wealthy white votes almost always
count, but minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not recorded.
In effect, Kerry is down by a million votes before one lever is pulled, card
punched or touch-screen touched.

posted November 03, 2004 10:45 PM              

I just cant wait for this to start happening to women....given the potential this Admin will have with the Supreme Court, we are going to be second class citizens - AGAIN - in a few years (if that long.)