Blogswarm - Online Political News Magazine

by Greg Palast


Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.


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.


Whose Votes Are Discarded?

And not all votes 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). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.

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, is out on DVD .

first thoughts
by kid oakland
Thu Nov 4th, 2004 at 18:09:19 PST

I'd like to use this diary as a chance to lay down some of thoughts generated by the many conversations I've had in the last couple days.  You'll find it to be as quick a sketch as I can make of what I think the big picture is.  (It's still quite long, like....<warning>....really long.)

That being said, there are a couple points I'd like to make at the outset:

• our fight this year was a worthy fight.  For Kerry, for our  candidates, for all our voters (especially the new ones), and for our principles.  
  
• we knew we had a significant "reform" battle within our party brewing regardless of the outcome of this election
  
• this is a time to remake the Democratic Party, not to tear it down.

All that being said....

i.  We lost.

This is a major defeat.  There's no way to paint it otherwise.  Even if Kerry had won an electoral college victory, we would have lost the popular vote by a fair margin and the Senate as well.  As it stands, we are doubly and triply f....d.  The ball game has shifted to working on long term goals while defending from near term disasters.  That's just the truth.

Our party is sitting at the receiving end of the weak point of our Federal system: our support is locked into urban areas and large states:

• aside from the fillibuster and votes that require 2/3rds of the House, we are pretty much out of power in DC despite representing almost half the country.
  
• the GOP has not, since 1994 shown any moderation in how it runs Congress, and won't now.  Their victorious Senate candidates are very conservative.  We are effectively locked out of constructive governance in Washington.
  
• we have a very difficult electoral vote path to regain the Presidency.
  
• we have likely lost the judiciary for a generation, even if we succeed in opposing the worst of the GOP judges.  this is real.

Further, a breakdown of the vote shows critical weaknesses for our party that do not bode well.

• familes with children voted against us.  You cannot govern without the support of families.  Further, these GOP families will not be easy to win over, and they are a strong presence in all of our Blue states.
  
• Bush's support grew from inside his Red zone, and was very loyal and strong despite his clear problems in governance.  Values trumped pragmatism this year, and this trend is deeply troubling.
  
• The GOP red state margins were much higher than ours.  We are much more vulnerable in national elections.

Finally, we lost something huge this time around in one further sense.  2004 will be the last big national election based on rallying to the "liberal" flag, with an old school Democratic ticket.  We knew this was a transitional fight going in, and we knew the stakes were high.  We put up John Kerry as the best candidate of our lot.  We gave our hearts and souls and our last pennies to the Kerry / Edwards ticket.  And we lost.  

The fact is, though, that any of our primary candidates would have lost, John Kerry will join Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and Al Gore as failed warriors for our cause.  This is heartbreaking, yet true.  Good men, all of whom would have made fine Presidents, and whose election might have staved off the straits we are in.

Power begets power.  It did not have to be this way...but now that it is...we are more rather than less f...d.  

ii.  the immediate situation: hybrid tactics

I would like to pitch a strategy for this transitional moment for our party that I'll call, for lack of a better term: hybrid tactics.  The principle is this:

We need to recognize that we are, in essence, fighting two wars at the same time.   Both of these wars promise us some prospects for long term success, and yet, both of which are at a critical moment right now.

• the first war is a war of triage.  It is a war of opposition and parrying of the GOP.  We need to stand and fight.  On judgeships, on policy, and on the inevitable GOP attempts to rig the system permanently against us.
  
• the second war is a war of Party building, and winning back the support of families with children and increasing our support with every demographic wherever we can.  It is a war to win back Congress and build state-based Democratic power.

We need to understand that we are building the ideological and organizational structure of the Democratic party so that we get steadily stronger on a state and national level in each of the years leading through the census of 2010 and its redistricting.  2006, 2008 and 2010 are our new goal years.  This second war is directed at the very core of power in the United States system of government: legislative majorities.

The essence of this hybrid strategy is that we Democrats need to move directly and squarely into guaranteeing that our Party remain strong and relevant to voters wherever we can.  State legislatures and governorships are critically  important in this.  We are "out of power" at the Federal level; the only place we can deliver the goods and offer successful policy alternatives is on the State and municipal level.  

The hallmark of our strategy will have to be, then:  tactical smarts, cooperative flexibility, and an ability to at once stand up for ourselves and all citizens, which we must do, and yet play the game in every locality with a strategic savvy that we have not mustered before.  The first war is critical, the second war is essential; we cannot afford to neglect either.

In essence, we are on the wrong end of a post-New Deal majority.  Further, we are living in a post-Civil Rights, anti-Great Society majority America, and have been for some time, and the sooner we wake up and smell the coffee the better.  

iii.  kitchen table politics

If I have one critique of the campaign John Kerry ran for President it is that he did not take it to the kitchen table.  There was little in his campaign where a voter who might vote for him was given a strong reason to sit down at the kitchen table with their pocket book and calculator and do the math for themselves.  In the absence of this, George Bush ran the table on "values" and "fear".

If we are going to win back the vote of  families in this country, we are going to do it at the kitchen table.  We have to relish this.  This needs to be our fuel.  Local issues.  Bread and butter.  School bonds.  Highway funds.  Health care initiatives.  Municipal elections.  Unless the Democratic Party becomes the party that loves this stuff, we will continue to lose and be frozen out of power.

Right now, in Washington, I can guarantee you that George Bush is looking for ways to take critical components of our coalition to the kitchen table...and they have the legislative muscle to do it.  It you don't think the GOP is planning on sitting down with Latino and Black America, with working families, and making some kitchen table deals, you've got another thing coming.  The stakes are that high.

Since the civil rights era, we've run our campaigns and Party on the fuel of our ideals and moral code.  (I am as much "guilty" of this as anyone.)  But the fact is that, while holding to our principles, principles that are no less potent today than yesterday, we need to run our party on a new fuel.  A hybrid fuel if you will.

And that fuel is derived from a focus on nuts and bolts, on delivering results, on good governance and coalition building.   That fuel comes out of an "I scratch your back you scratch mine" framework that we will only find at the kitchen table.  If we don't get excited about this stuff and do it we will be locked out of legislative majorities for the next generation.  If we don't find a way to translate our ideals into pragmatic political programs that let us win back legislative majorities in this country, our party will be on its way to a wilderness from which it may never return.  That is our task at hand.  

You can be "right" and still so politically wrong.  The penduluum must swing in a new direction.

iv.  national politics and hybrid coalitions

I mentioned that we are in a post-New Deal, post-Civil Rights, post-Great Society majority America.  That much is true.  The new GOP majority is based on two things.

• tax cuts which are directed specifically at disconnecting voters from the sense that their tax dollars fund progams which help all of us.  
  
• a wave of Constitutional Amendments that are directed at denying parts of the population civil rights.

The new GOP majority plays hard ball.  And they have won.  The national conversation is no longer about implementing new federal programs, solving the health care crisis and spending the public purse on the common good.  It is instead about cutting, gutting and privatizing the programs that are already in place in the name of 'ownership' and 'individualism'.  The conversation is no longer about protecting the rights of minorities and ensuring they have a place at the table.  The debate is now framed as one in which our legal system is being used to impose the will of this new 'moral majority' upon the rest of the nation.  These are the "new civil rights":  The right to evangelize, to practice religion in the public sphere.  The right to insist that one's tax dollars never fund or support something that one's religion disallows.

Needless to say, this turns much of the longstanding values that made up the 20th Century Democratic coalition on its head.  It is also, to my mind, against everything the American experiment stands for.  They are wrong on ideals, and wrong on pragmatic policies.  They have gone so far that I suspect that core aspects of the old GOP...namely business people across the nation, who know the value of tolerance, fiscal discipline and social spending...may be open to listening to a Democrat for once.

What to do?  

We need to define our own new majority, and build it step by step.  We need to reach out to fiscally sound, socially moderate independents and Republicans today to this end.  In essence, the "reality based community' is the framework for our new majority.  And our next  successful Presidential candidate will be the one who understands this terrain and assembles that majority.

The GOP has bet the store on conservatism.  It is a big and bold gamble based on core support in the South and the West.  They are vulnerable, however, especially in how they implement policy and in states that don't find a mandate for Christian 'conservatism' appealing.  I suspect that the next Democratic Presidential ticket will target that vulnerability and assemble a new national majority that successfully defends our principles within the framework of a pragmatic and hybrid policy mix that brings people in.

If some of you are smelling a dose of Clintonism here.  You are right.  And I will go the wall on this.  We cannot build a new national majority on the New Deal and the Civil Rights coalition.  It's over, done for, it won't happen.  The GOP is at the kitchen table too and looking to break up our coalition, and they have the muscle to do it. Our new majority must be hybrid, pragmatic, kitchen table based, and must successfully root our ideals in fiscally sound policy and delivering results to the braodest possible coalition of families in this nation, period, end of sentence.

Take my home state.  If we cannot hold California based on "liberal" ideals, we can't make them work anywhere.  As a Californian, let me tell you....if the California Democratic Party does not adopt this "kitchen table" approach to politics and build a new coalition, we will lose this state.  The "Arnold" model is powerful and is making inroads into every segment of our base. The writing is on the wall, just check out the Bush returns from California.  The choice is ours...adapt or lose.  

v.  whither the Left?

That is the question of the moment here.  I think one of the hardest things to do in the face of a tactically rapacious and, at times, malicious Party like the GOP is to stay calm and play the strategic hand.  But that is what we have to do.  We need to practice a politics that is more level-headed than ever before.  In the face of the ideological monster that is the GOP, we need to, paradoxically, be ideologically flexible ourselves.  Is the Left up to it?...I don't know.  That cuts to the core of the matter.

Let me frame it this way.  Across this country today there are folks in all of our cities and communities having discussions and speaking to our despair.  Out of that despair and rage will dawn the realization that while we are "out of power" we are not in the least powerless.  In the hybrid politics I am describing, there is a vital role for us on the left to play...it is up to us to decide for ourselves if that role is one we want take up:

• an emphasis on local and community politics
  
• a targeted drive to get more progressive members of state houses, municipal government and the United States Congress
  
• a goal of building a progressive legislative track record in states we have power in
  
• a commitment to making our ideals real from the inside out...on our block, in our schools and moving outward with flexibility and foresight
  
• a commitment to evolving "how we talk" about politics and present ourselves to our fellow citizens and build these new coalitions
  
• a new savviness and pragmatism in how we pick our  battles

To be real, the DLC bogeyman is a thing of the past.  There's no one "thumbing" us down, and the sooner we realize that, the better for all of us.  We need to get along within our party, and actually have that as one of our priorities.  It is highly likely that our Presidential candidates for the next twelve years will look alot like John Edwards and Barack Obama...if not actually be those two guys themselves.  It is also likely that our Presidential candidates will espouse Bill Clinton style political platforms aimed at drawing a new hybrid coaltion.  In my opinion,  for cultural reasons, it won't be Hillary and it won't be Howard if we want to win and keep our party together.  That is just the bald truth.

The question to ask ourselves then, in that context, is: Can we live with a Democratic Party whose Presidential candidate is in the Edwards/Obama/Clinton mold and espouses hybrid policies?  What expression of our politics can we find within that framework?  Can we be a vital, informed, creative wing of our party with strong representation in our zones of residence?  After 2004, we know that we cannot make this nation look like us, agree with us or even love us.  Knowing that, will we choose to play a part in building a new, broader coalition that accepts us as full and equal members without necessarily embracing all our goals and yet allows us to trade our numbers, dollars and alliegance for results on our agenda?

Let me be utterly frank and take this "moral values" bullshit head on.  Gay men and women and their families...and all of us who support and defend them...need a successful coalition.  In essence, gay families need every likeminded straight family they can get, and some who aren't so likeminded, and vice versa.  We are in this together.  We don't know what we can achieve in this new political environment for any of our agendas.  But I can tell you this, if we don't come together with all the creativity, unity and tactical prowess we can muster, we all will lose.

vii. free speech, comity and the culture of opposition

I am burned out on hating, mistrusting and disliking my fellow citizens.  I am just being honest with you.  I don't think it works...and I don't think it advances the good of the people I love and with whom I share my community and my life.  

At the same time, I recognize that free speech is important....that if we lose the "f... you" spirit, we lose something that is our best defense against the leadership of a political party that is, in my view, a dastardly bunch who've led our nation on a disastrous policy track, at times, with clear-eyed ill intent.

It is critical, in this moment...to insist on free speech and our right to protest and speak for ourselves.   I am convinced that free speech issues will come to the fore during a second Bush term.  But it is imperative, now more than ever, that we understand that how we communicate with our brothers and sisters in this nation is as important of the content of what we are saying.

To be honest, it is high time for us to break down the myths and lies of the GOP and some of the organized religious zealots who prop them up.  People need to know what's really going on here, and oppositional culture is one of the best weapons of the left.  However, as someone deeply committed to that process, I also acknowledge that "comity" and "respect" for our fellow citizens must accompany our efforts and be incorporated in our appeal. The more connected the speaker is to our organized politics, the more this is true.

There are many ways to say..."f... Bush"...and, believe you me, they all will be deployed in the next four years.  But it is critical for us on the left to understand that our opposition to the political leaders of the GOP must not be allowed to descend into the simple communication of raw "hatred" and "contempt" for their supporters.

There are contexts where that is appropriate.  ie. When there is that rare chance to sit down for two way communication.  Where we can trade the hate and get it out.  But when we are engaging in one way communication.  When we are speaking for our cause.  It is critical that we frame our appeal in the context of citizenship, comity and free speech.

As Eminem, who walked that fine line in his video Mosh stated: We beg to differ.  Yes, we need to speak out for ouselves and our cause.  In the coming months, I am sure we will have to more than once.  But, post-2004, we need to consider the fulness of what that speech communicates, about how it affects the coaltion that we are building to defeat their coalition at the polls.

vii. the GOP and the "how" of our opposition

Week by week, we will see what cracks form.

They are tremendously powerful, and yet, tremendously overextended in the direction of the religious right and their Southern base. They have scandals that are brewing and coalitions that are fraying. They  have enormous policy liabilities.  Our job is to fight those policy liabilities week by week with our eyes on our new prize...building a legislative majority.

We Kossacks have been much more "right" about how the GOP is wrong that we have been about what choices our fellow citizens will make at the ballot box.  We need to use this to our advantage.  If we are clever, determined and learn from our mistakes...we can plot out a position that moves us in the only direction that is important: winning back our govenment.

Legislatures are won back when the majority party's failures are made clear. Our job is to define those failures and win a mandate for change.  That is the task at hand.

Stand and fight, yes, but also to build and educate and make the case for change.  In effect, we here at dKos are sitting at the kitchen table with prospective members of our new coalition.  We need to teach them in terms they can respect and understand; we need to educate them about exactly why the GOP is wrong as a first step in winning a new mandate.

Take, for example, judicial appointments.  We have a vital role to play in educating the nation exactly about who George Bush has already appointed...and who he intends to appoint, and how the process he is following is wrong.  We need to make this clear instead of simply raising hell...we need to reach out and educate instead of simply raising our voice.

Fight, yes.  But seek to understand, and educate and persuade...yes more.

ix. conclusion

Too often those of us in the Democratic Party have been overly concerned about simply being morally "right".  There are many ways to be "right" and this is a personal lesson that I am beginning to learn.  If being "right" to us means simply scoring points against cable news hotheads and AM radio hosts...then we have gone astray.  If it means simply standing in the streets and expressing our consciece, in the absence of a path to building a majority coalition in this country...then we will be "right" and powerless at the federal level.

I am 35 years old.  I have watched every national Democratic politician in my lifetime get dragged down and defeated by the GOP.  

I want to say to you now if you share the dream of someday electing a President Obama, then I would implore you to help build the legislative and organizational framework that will be our surest defense against that happening to him in the political or media sphere.

There is a tide that will turn in this nation. I was wrong about when it would turn, and I am ashamed and saddened to admit that. But this election has taught me that we need more than our idealism as our fuel.  It will not be so, just because we believe it can or should be so.  Even our strongest leaders are vulnerable if we don't build the structures to defend them.  And the most powerful structure in that regard is the legislative majority.

As I walked out onto the streets of Oakland today...I breathed easier..and let my heart open out to everyone I met.  Some of them, even here, voted for George Bush.  I know that because I've seen the stickers in the Safeway parking lot.  Personally, I am letting go of the hate and trying to see the nation with clearer eyes.  With those eyes, I can more easily see the strength of those I agree with and the power we have when we work together.  And the limits of that power and how we need to expand it.

We did amazing things this fall, and yet we failed to achieve our goal.  It's not the first, or the last, failure on our road to sitting below that fully grown oak of justice that remains our goal and ideal.  

There is no shame in burning brightly for those ideals.  Just as there is no shame in failure in our fight for them.  But there is a steep and pragmatic price to pay for that loss, and we all know it now.  That price will be all the greater, however, if we don't learn from these experiences and move forward, together.

If you've read this far, I owe you many thanks for considering what's on my mind this day after election day.  Please take it as one kid's opinion, and let me know what you think.

Atrios: Tax Fairness Act or Ending Redstate Welfare

by JamesK
Thu Nov 4th, 2004 at 17:07:57 PST

"Tax Fairness Act of 2005." This Act would mandate that, within some reasonable margin of error, your state should get as much back from the feds as is sent to them in taxes. It's time to end this kind of geographic welfare!

Eschaton

This idea is similar to the thread we had earlier, End Red State Welfare

I think calling it "Tax Fairness" is nice. Of course the idea of just cutting the federal government to the essentials and letting states pick up the slack is how we can do this.

Post-mortem Ohio Ground Report: FRAUD *action alert*
by kingcritical
Thu Nov 4th, 2004 at 12:02:45 PST

What follows is an e-mail message from my father's friend, who is an attorney.  He went to Ohio to monitor the election.  What he describes does not surprise me, but it's amazing how widespread and organized the deception was.  I am posting it here because people need to read it.

--------------------
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 10:37 AM
Subject: Basic report from Columbus

I worked for 3 days, including Election Day, on the statewide voter protection hotline run by the Ohio Democratic Party in Columbus, Ohio.

I am writing this because the media is inexplicably whitewashing what happened in Ohio, and Kerry's concession was likewise inexplicable.

Hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised in Ohio.  People waited on line for as long as 10 hours.  It appears to have only happened in Democratic-leaning precincts, principally (a) precincts where many African Americans lived, and (b) precincts near colleges.

I spoke to a young man who got on line at 11:30 am and voted at 7 pm.  When he left at 7 pm, the line was about 150 voters longer than when he'd arrived, which meant those people were going to wait even longer.  In fact they waited for as much as 10 hours, and their voting was concluded at about 3 am.  The reason this occurred was that they had 1 voting station per 1000 voters, while the adjacent precinct had 1 voting station per 184.  Both precincts were within the same county, and managed by the same county board of elections.  The difference between them is that the privileged polling place was in a rural, solidly republican, area, while the one with long lines was in the college town of Gambier, OH.

Lines of 4 and 5 hours were the order of the day in many African-American neighborhoods.

Touch screen voting machines in Youngstown OH were registering "George W. Bush" when people pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY LONG. This was reported immediately after the polls opened, and reported over and over again throughout the day, and yet the bogus machines were inexplicably kept in use THROUGHOUT THE DAY.

Countless other frauds occurred, such as postcards advising people of incorrect polling places, registered Democrats not receiving absentee ballots, duly registered young voters being forced to file provisional ballots even though their names and signatures appeared in the voting rolls, longtime active voting registered voters being told they weren't registered, bad faith challenges by Republican "challengers" in Democratic precincts, and on and on and on.

I was very proud of the way so many Ohioans fought so valiantly for their right to vote, and would not be turned away. Many, however, could not spend the entire day and were afraid of losing their jobs, due to the severe economic depression hitting Ohio.

I do not understand why Kerry conceded and did not fight to ensure that all Ohioans would have a chance to vote, and for their vote to be counted.
--------------------

Update [2004-11-4 17:13:36 by kingcritical]:: I’ve found a number of suggestions in the comments that might be useful, so I am making this an action alert. Here are resources and suggestions from the comments; I make no claim that the numbers or e-mail addresses are accurate:

"Call Dean, call Kerry, call all those Republican leaders who endorsed Kerry; call Moveon; start a fund drive; develop a massive ad campaign."

"By law in Ohio, five citizens per county, plus a candidate, can call for a recount in their county. E-mail Dennis White, Chair of Ohio Dems: dennis@ohiodems.org"

Citizens of Ohio. Please Petition for a Recount

"Check out this link and study the table."

"And check out the Diebold diary here."

The number for the DNC in Washington, DC: 202-863-8122.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/4/161116/504

Citizens of Ohio. Please Petition for a Recount 
by BrooklynBoy
Thu Nov 4th, 2004 at 13:11:16 PST

I believe this election, for the second time, was stolen by this junta.

In Ohio, by law, five citizens per county, only five, have the right to call for a recount.

 Randy Rhodes, on a screed all afternoon on Wednesday, kept arguing that we, the citizens, are now the only check and balance left. To play that out, citizens should fight this election result. Our leaders won't (and as I said, I can understand why), so why can't we?

Why shouldn't we? Its our election, its our democracy.

Email Ohio Dem Chair Dennis White: dennis@ohiodems.org

and ask the Ohio Dems to organize 5 citizens per county to call for a recount. it is their legal right. and their duty to the disenfranchised.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2004/11/4/184650/560

The Electoral College Did Matter

Posted by DavidNYC

Well, here's something else I was wrong about: The electoral college did wind up mattering. Even if Bush takes Iowa and New Mexico (as it seems he will), his final total will be just 286 electoral votes - 16 over the 270 he needed.

Bush won three states by a margin of 18* or more EVs: Texas, Florida and, of course, Ohio. Had any single one of these states gone to Kerry, we would have won. Obviously, the margin in Texas was enormous - we lost by 23 points. In Florida, though, we lost by just a little over 5 points, and in Ohio, by just 2.5 percent.

In 2000, as we well know, had any single Bush state of any size flipped, Gore would have won. However, the last time there was a single state a) whose outcome directly affected the final results and b) was as close as Ohio was this year, was California all the way back in 1916. So of the three narrowest victories in the past 100 years, we have:

1) Bush in 2000
2) Wilson in 1916
3) Bush in 2004

Bush takes the gold and the bronze. Mandate, my ass.

* Kerry would have needed 18 extra EVs to win. Had Bush's total been reduced by 16, he still would have won with 270. Had it been reduced by 17, he would have had 269 and then won in the House. So Kerry needed to take Bush down to 268 in order to win.

The Kids Did It -- Our Map Is True Blue

Thu Nov 4th, 2004 at 16:33:14 PST

Promoted from the diaries by DemFromCT. The younger generation is more engaged and less homophobic than their elders were at their age. In fact, knowing this is one reason why there's a 'need' to deal with gay marriage by legislation. The other, of course, is that it gets out the vote. Anyway, no reason to blame the kids. They were there for Kerry... and they are the future. Just happens they weren't the only ones to show up.

Just a note to anyone who's been buying the "kids didn't show up" spin. It's bull:

People under the age of 30 turned out at the highest rate in more than 30 years, and we voted for change. In battlegrounds -- where my organization and a host of others did the bulk of their work -- turnout was above 60%, and broke for Kerry by an average of almost 20 points.

Florida? Ours.
Ohio? Ours.
Colorado? Ours.
Virgina? Missouri? Arkansas? Ours.

Our generation did it's part and then some, and most of us will stick with it. If it were up to us, it would be Kerry by a landslide. The future belongs to us, not the moral minority.

Check below the jump for the map. It'll make you happy.

Here's the map. Read it and weep, Karl:

The reality is that Bush won by increasing his support in every age group above 30, adding SEVEN POINTS in the 60+ bracket alone over 2000.

Luckily for America, old people die. If we can maintain our edge with young voters and hold on to those we've got as they get older, the right wing revolution will come to an end four years from now.

The only question is whether or not we can hold the line and keep a country worth fighting for until then.

---

http://www.musicforamerica.com/

 

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php
Kerry Won
Greg Palast, November 4, 2004

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today,  the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports  there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.

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 .

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.

---

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/4/123554/947

Action Alert: Greg Palast Reports Kerry Won 
by landrew

Thu Nov 4th, 2004 at 09:35:54 PST

There are those who say "get over it", and there are those who say "how could Kerry concede"?  But one fact remains, our elections process is clearly broken.

Today, Greg Palast writes the following on TomPaine.com:

"Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided--known as "spoilage" in election jargon--because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast's investigation suggests that if Ohio's discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today,  the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports  there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots."

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php
Update [2004-11-4 17:6:43 by landrew]: Just a bit of levity for a serious situation. My husband just came up with this (ala the original Dragnet show): Dum De Dum Dum. The election you have just seen was stolen. The votes have been changed to protect the Administration.

Tax Fairness Act of 2005