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November 04, 2004
Kerry won. Here are the facts.
Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes.
Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known
as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive.
Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast
argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won
the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of
247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus
the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's
hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being
counted.
Kerry won. Here's the facts.
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.
Whose Votes Are Discarded?
And not all votes 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). Nor are they demanding we look at
the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.
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.
The Impact Of Challenges
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.
Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote
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."
How did that happen? It's the
spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.
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.
Now, let's add in the effect on the
New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.
"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.
Your Kerry Victory Party
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico
for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.
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.
Posted by The Editor at November 4,
2004 08:21 PM
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