"Kerry Won?" Greg Palast's Causing Trouble Again

Greg Palast, who broke the voter fraud story in Florida in 2000, has been monitoring the elections this time and he's about the break his story this time. His verdict? Kerry won. Now let's see if he's right and, if so, whether the Democrats have the guts to do anything about it.

Update: Here's the full story.

Update #2: Ok, I wanted to write more about this earlier, but didn't have time. Palast makes the claim that "Kerry won" based on two points. The first is "spoilage":

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 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.

---snip--

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.

Palast's second point is basically this: Republicans are thugs...and thugs who win.

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.

"Nice Guys Finish Last," right? Or, to use the logical corollary to this Michael Albert likes to remind us of, "garbage rises". That's basically what happens here. Republicans play dirty and they win as a result. Democrats play nice, send in their lawyers after it's too late and then ask for "healing."

In other words, Democrats start off each election with a size-able handicap. Because Democratic voters tend to live in poorer, more crowded urban areas, long lines and inadequate polling machinery automatically presents problems that wealthier suburban districts, for example, don't have to deal with. And in case that ain't enough, Republicans are there to enforce Jim Crow era laws to intimidate voters of color and suppress the Democratic vote.

So what would help? How about equal voting equipment (with a verifiable paper trail) and equal funding for running elections throughout the country? That would be a start.