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If Greg is correct (and there is every reason to believe his facts are correct),
then this nation has joined the long list of those who have had a political coupe—and it happened not with a bang but
a whimper (by us). The Democrats cannot get the FBI to investigate, and the courts are not interested. We are in a situation like Mexico where the PRI party rule for nearly a century. Moreover,
given that 85% of the election funds come from corporate interests, if the Democrats offend their donors, they won’t
get the donations to mount a serious challenge. The neocons support multinational
corporations, and they support them. Even if the Democrats gain control of one
or both chambers of Congress, they won’t be able to rewrite 2002 Help America Vote Act because of the presidential veto--jk.
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.
********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE."
BELOW IS A JUNE ARTICLE COVERING THE LAST ELECTION. WITH EACH ELECTION
THEY GET MORE BRAZEN.
| Peter Breugel 1500s Dutch |
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| Prestages Turner, Constable & other 19th cent. artists |
As critical thinkers concerned with the well being of all Americans,
the California Skeptics have quite a bit to say about our political system. It
has from a high point during
the 40s & 50s sunk to a new low, possible surpassing the pre-civil war days. This
is an introduction, along with the articles on big PHARMA on how low we sunk.
How They Stole Ohio
And the GOP 4-step
Recipe to 'Blackwell' the USA in 2008
Abracadabra: Three million votes vanish
By Greg Palast, June 1, 2006 at www.gregpalast.com
[Heads up! Catch Robert Kennedy
Jr., Mike Papantonio and Greg Palast this Saturday on Air America's 'Ring of Fire' on the shoplifting of the last election
… and the next one.]
By Greg Palast, June 1, 2006 at www.gregpalast.com
[Heads up! Catch Robert Kennedy
Jr., Mike Papantonio and Greg Palast this Saturday on Air America's 'Ring of Fire' on the shoplifting of the last election
… and the next one.]
This is a fact: On November 2, 2004, in the State of
Ohio, 239,127 votes for President of the United States were dumped, rejected,
blocked, lost and left to rot uncounted. And not just anyone's vote. Dive
into the electoral dumpster and these "spoiled" votes have a very dark color indeed.
In another life,
I taught statistics. And these statistics stank: the raw data tells us that if you are a Black voter, the chance
of you losing your vote to technical errors in voting machinery is 900% higher than if you were a white voter. Any guesses
as to whom those African-Americans chose for president on those junked ballots? Check Ohio's racial demographics,
do the numbers, and there it is: Kerry won Ohio. And that, too, is a fact.
A fact that could not get reported in the USA.
But the shoplifting
of those votes in Ohio was just the tip of the theft-berg. November
2, 2004 was a national ballot-box bonfire. In total, over three million votes (3,600,380 to be exact) were cast --
marked, punched, pulled -- YET NEVER COUNTED. I'm not talking about the Ukraine or Uganda. I'm talking
about the United States of America "with liberty and justice for all." Well, not "all." The nine-to-one
Black-to-White ballot spoilage rate is a national statistic -- not just an Ohio trick.
Last year, I flew to New Mexico to investigate the
33,981 cast but not counted ballots of that state in the 2004 race. George Bush "won" New Mexico by 5,988 votes.
Or did he? I calculated that, of the all the ballots rejected and "spoiled," 89% were cast by voters of color.
Who won New Mexico? Kerry won -- or he would have, if they had counted the ballots. But they didn't count them. And that was deliberate. It's in the plan. It's the
program. And the program for 2008 is simple. Two million ballots were cast but not counted in the 2000 race.
(Over half, 54%, were cast by African-American.) In 2004, the GOP kicked it up to THREE million. Get ready, these
guys aim high: "four in '06" and "five in '08" looks to be their game plan.
How will they pile up five
million un-voters in 2008? Let's start with the three million "disappeared" of 2004:
Step 1: "Spoiling" ballots -- 1,389,231 of them. In the
vote-count game, these are called "undervotes" and "overvotes." You can recognize these lost ballots by their hanging chads,
punch cards without punches (an Ohio specialty), paper ballots eaten by scanners, and touch
screens that didn't know you touched them.
Step 2: Rejecting "provisional ballots"-- 1,090,729 in this
pile. Voters finding themselves at the "wrong" precinct, or wrongly "scrubbed" from voter rolls get these back-of-the-bus
ballots first inaugurated in 2002. In '04, provisional ballots were passed out like candy to voters in the poorest precincts.
They handed them out -- then threw them away -- one million dumped in all. In Ohio, Republican Secretary
of State Kenneth Blackwell changed state rules, allowing him to toss out the ballots of legal voters who cast ballots in the
wrong precinct although these citizens were told their vote would count after confirming their registration.
Step
3: Not counting absentee ballots -- 526,420 of them. At least, that's what we figure from official stats.
But it's anyone's guess how many mailed-in votes were dumped. (However, in one case, in Palm Beach, Florida, Jeb Bush's candidate
for Elections Supervisor, Theresa LaPore, counted more absentee votes than absentee ballots mailed in. Not the brightest
bulb in the vote-fix biz, that Theresa.)
Step 4: Scrub'm, Purge'm, Block'm. These are the voters
who never got to vote at all. This group includes those who found their registrations were never entered on the voter
rolls. In Ohio, about one-fourth of those registered by Jesse Jackson's 2004 voter drive,
found their registrations delayed beyond the election date or lost.
Add to this un-voter group, those who were
wrongly "scrubbed" from registries as "felons." For example, there was Bernice Kines, purged in Florida in 2004 because
she was convicted of a felony on July 31, 2009. I repeat: 2009.
There was something especially odd about the Ohio felon purge: ex-cons are ALLOWED to vote
in that state, Mr. Blackwell.
How many lost their chance to vote by scrubbing, purging and blocking? That's
anyone's guess, but one million would not be an unfair estimate -- and that's not included in the 3.6 million tally of ballots
uncounted. Was it deliberate? Oh my God, yes. I'd like you to take
a look at the "caging" lists the Republican National Committee concocted to challenge voters with "suspect" addresses.
It included page after page of African-American soldiers, like one Randall Prausa, shipped overseas. Mission accomplished, Mr.
President?
And there's some new tricks for these old dogs.
For the 2006 and 2008, the GOP is pushing new Voter ID requirements. Your signature won't be good enough anymore. What's wrong with the new ID laws? This: in the 2004 election, 300,000
voters were turned away from the polls for "wrong" ID. For example, in the "Little Texas" counties in New Mexico, if your voter registration
included a middle initial but your driver's license had none, you were kicked out of the polling station. Funny, but
they only seemed to ask Hispanic voters. We should see the number of voters rejected for ID to quintuple by 2008 based
on the new "voting reform" laws recently passed in several states. Also, coming
to a polling station near you: more caging lists, scrub lists, ID challenge lists and more. Exactly why do you
think they are compiling those "War on Terror" and War on Immigration databases? Behind the 2000 felon purge lists and
behind the 2004 caging lists were databases from the same companies that now have those homeland security contracts. Are they
saving us from Osama -- or from Democrats?
I wish I could give you a book on a page, because information is our
weapon: Turn on the lights and the cockroaches scatter. That's why I'm asking you to read RFK's article on the Theft
of Ohio -- and GET ANGRY. Then read, "Armed Madhouse: … The Scheme to Steal '08' -- AND GET READY
GIVEN THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS ISSUE, CALIFORNIA SKEPTICS HAS PUBLISHED
6 ARTICLES ON THIS ISSUE AT
#211 Vote counting fraud
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