To introduce some uncertainty, it's time for electoral spoilage!

What does this election prove? What does it suggest we are destined for? What does it signify about the people of this nation?

I don't think the answers are positive ones. I have some lingering questions about the legitimacy of this one, although we are meant to believe that the results were clear and obvious. Yet I must ask, is it possible that they could have made 11,000 votes for Kerry in New Mexico disappear? A hundred thousand in Ohio?

Adding to the uncertainty, journalist Greg Palast, whose book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy summed up all the electoral fraud in Florida last time, now hypothesizes that Kerry actually won, if the exit polls are to be believed:

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. [To read about the skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here .] 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.
[.....]
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.
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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.

This rests rather heavily on the idea that the exit polls will be accurate within just a few points. However, it would help explain why the chattering heads on Fox News couldn't stop their disdain for exit polls. Exit polls are in fact the only real way we have to detect electoral fraud, and I'm alarmed at the idea that they would no longer be used. We find widespread discrepancies between the exit polls and election results in Ohio and Florida, and this ought to be explained, yet probably won't be.

Dan Schwartz wrote the following email that rounds up the various rumors and incongruities.

The Democrats have already conceded the presidential election, magnanimously declaring that victory is impossible and that we should therefore spare the nation the excruciating pain of a full vote count. The major media agrees. Pre-election voter disenfranchisement, though widely reported and thoroughly documented (see http://vote2004.eriposte.com/ for this), has completely dropped out of the spotlight; the possibility of an imperfect election seems to be headed the same way.

There is a growing pile of evidence, though, that clearly points to the possibility of outright fraud on election day. The AP and AFP (Agence France-Presse) are both carrying stories now that detail instances where 'software glitches' resulted in Bush winning more votes in a county than are possible- more than the total number of registered voters. These stories come from Ohio and Florida, obviously the 2 most crucial and contentious states in the entire election.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/05/politics1149EST0515.DTL

http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local

This graph shows wild discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote tallies, suggesting the possibility of fraud. The servile mass media relies on these same polls to make their coverage bearable on election night, so you'd better believe they work hard to make sure they're reliable.

Check it out: http://img103.exs.cx/img103/4526/exit_poll.gif

Other counties have made projections based on voter registrations, then found that the election result was massively different. Take Baker County, FL as an example:

Registered Voters
REP: 24.3% DEM: 69.3%

Actual Votes
REP: 7,738 DEM: 2,180

Change from Expected Results REP: 220.4% DEM: -68.4%
(data from http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00000893.htm)

Here's a story from Warren County, Ohio: "Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns."

The Miami Herald has reported an instance where officials in Broward County were forced to change a previously announced result on a gambling referendum after discovering a 'computer glitch' that caused the vote tabulation system to begin counting BACKWARDS after hitting a ceiling (chosen by the software programmer) of 32,000 votes. the machine did this for every vote it counted for every race. officials there have apparantly known about the 'bug' for 2 years now but never had it fixed. "Florida's election chief, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, downplayed the significance of a miscount she blamed on 'inadvertent human error' in the Broward elections office. Hood stressed that double-checking procedures had caught what she described as an isolated error. Hood maintained that the incident shows the system worked. 'It's not a problem. . . . They made the correction.'"

Even if you don't think this is conclusive proof of fraud, it is certainly enough to justify demanding a recount. Remember, Kerry's concession is not legally binding in any way. It was a political decision, taken to save face and preserve everyone's perceptions that the system is not corrupt. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CALL YOUR CONGRESSPEOPLE, CALL EVERYONE YOU KNOW, AND FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU HAVE EVER MET.

dan [Schwartz]

So then, do I conclude that the Republicans stole their second presidential election in four years? That's a tall order to fill, and I don't really believe it that much. However, I will say that our election system does not work perfectly, and provides plenty of opportunities for electoral fraud all around.

I even talked with someone (though I forget who, Your Honor) who planned to vote in both a swing state and Minnesota. I also heard about some foreigner getting into the polls here. This stuff happens, and we cannot ignore that. The question is whether the people on top are gaming the system as much as the random folks I've run across.

Campaign 2004 might be over, thank God, but it was not clean nor honest.