Joanna
Doug Henwood wrote:
> [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.
>
>
>
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