Kerry Won
By Greg Palast
TomPaine.com
Thursday 04 November 2004
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.
And not all vote 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).
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. |
