How They Stole The Mid-Term Election
[hmm, we’ll see…]
HOW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION by Greg Palast for The Guardian (UK), Comment Monday November 6, 2006
Here’s how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.
Note the past tense. And I’m not kidding.
And shoot me for saying this, but it won’t be stolen by jerking with
the touch-screen machines (though they’ll do their nasty part). While
progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black
boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults
through entirely different means.
For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment
for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty
of the gaming of US elections. We’ve found that November 7, 2006 is a
day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been
shoplifted. Here’s how they’ll do it, in three easy steps:
Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind.
On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year’s Eve hangovers,
a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9
million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and
Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped
into the 2002 Help America Vote Act — strategically timed to go into
effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new
would-be voters whose identity can’t be verified against a state
verification database.
Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and
you won’t feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to
register or re-register each year. The New York University Law
School’s Brennan Center told me that, under the new law, Republican
Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three
new voters.
How? To begin with, Mr. Bush’s Social Security Administration has
failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts
to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9
million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the
ballot on Tuesday.
But don’t worry: those holding passports from their ski vacations to
Switzerland are doing just fine. And that’s the point. It’s not the
number of voters rejected, it’s their color. For example,
California’s Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured
out how to block 40% of registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare
counter-move, Los Angeles, with a Hispanic mayor, contacted these
citizens, “verified” them and got almost every single one back on the
rolls. But throughout the rest of the West, new Hispanics remain
victims of the “José Crow” treatment.
In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and
the Republican’s candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection
champ — partly by keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.
Theft #2: Turned Away - the ID game
A legion of pimple-faced Republicans with Blackberries loaded with
lists of new voters is assigned to challenge citizens in heavily
Black and Hispanic(i.e. Democratic) precincts to demand photo ID that
perfectly matches registration data.
Sounds benign, but it’s not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID
requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP
squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny
using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are
claiming they are “protecting the integrity of the vote.”
I’ve heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty
confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National
Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets.
They called them “caging lists” — and it wasn’t about zoo feeding
times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and
Jewish voters — a very Democratic demographic — to challenge on
Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first
time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged
on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were
turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a “provisional”
ballot — which was then simply tossed out.
Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-
your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their
300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.
Theft #3: Votes Spoiled Rotten
The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots
are cast in national elections but not counted — 3,600,380 not
counted in 2004 according to US Election Commission stats. These are
votes lost because a punch card didn’t punch (its chad got “hung”), a
stray mark voided a paper ballot and other machinery glitches.
Officials call it “spoilage.” I call it, “inaugurating Republicans.”
Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights
Commission, the chance your vote will “spoil” this way is 900% higher
for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters.
When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes
spoiled or “blank” are cast by voters of color. On balance, this
spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.
That’s where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl Rove
messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses
occur when computers crash, fail to start or simply don’t respond to
your touch. They are the new spoilage machines of choice with,
statistically, the same racial bias as the old vote-snatching lever
machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with in-precinct scanners don’t
go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that’s why Republican Secretaries of
State have installed so few of them.)
So Let’s Add it Up
Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly
rejected or purged registrations.
Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for
“improper ID.”
Then add yet another million for Democratic votes “spoiled” by busted
black boxes and by bad ballots.
And let’s not forget to include the one million “provisional” ballots
which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we
know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to
these baloney ballots.
And there’s one more group of votes that won’t be counted: absentee
ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data
tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.
Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated
challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no
national challenge campaign. That’s morally laudable; electorally
suicidal.
Add it all up — all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred
and spoiled — and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a
4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.
So, what are you going to do about it? May I suggest you … steal back
your vote.
It’s true you can’t win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get
over it. The regime’s sneak attack via vote suppression will only net
them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to
beat that blindfolded. If you can’t get 55%, then you’re just a bunch
of crybaby pussycats who don’t deserve to win back America.