How McCain Could Win (from Greg Palast)
Nov. 3rd, 2008 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistGreg Palast, one of the few remaining investigative journalists has been investigating voter fraud for years. And his 2004 scenario came to pass. Let's just hope that tomorrow the margin is so large that even all of this won't be enough.
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
It's November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the "Bradley effect": Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats' Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
That's the nightmare. Here's the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still "disappeared" from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here's an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don't count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: "spoiled," unreadable and blank ballots; "provisional" ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That's what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation's vote registries. And that's just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn't matter. But it's not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter's ballot will "spoil" or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter's.
Does that mean the election's stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot (there's a link at the end).
read the rest here:
www.truthout.org/110308A
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
It's November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the "Bradley effect": Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats' Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
That's the nightmare. Here's the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still "disappeared" from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here's an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don't count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: "spoiled," unreadable and blank ballots; "provisional" ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That's what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation's vote registries. And that's just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn't matter. But it's not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter's ballot will "spoil" or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter's.
Does that mean the election's stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot (there's a link at the end).
read the rest here:
www.truthout.org/110308A
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-03 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-03 09:29 pm (UTC)Thanks for bringing it.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-03 10:07 pm (UTC)I was astounded actually that neither at the primary nor at the early voting booth was I asked to produce an ID. They just took my word for it.
But I hadn't thought about people without valid IDs. Even if a license is expired, can't they identify the nun? For goodness' sake. I heard about this happening in Ohio specifically, and the possibility of kicking a ruling up beyond the state supreme court on whether these votes could be counted.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-03 10:12 pm (UTC)o god for once I hope Palast is wrong.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-03 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-03 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-04 12:48 am (UTC)I read Palast last year -- the weekend my uncle died and I couldn't sleep -- and it's why I haven't gotten my hopes up, until this week when I've heard about entire African American churches taking multiple buses to polls to vote early.
I don't have a lot of hope for New Mexico. Or Colorado.
Tomorrow.
I really think it begins and ends here with the early voting.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-04 03:23 pm (UTC)DN transcript: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/3/on_eve_of_election_day_is
DN audio:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/democracynow/dn2008-1103-1.mp3
PBS video:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10172008/watch3.html
PBS transcript:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10172008/transcript3.html
off into the ether
Date: 2008-11-04 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-05 04:23 am (UTC)but he has not. let the war crime prosecutions begin on jan. 23rd.