[Mb-civic] more on election questions

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

The Unexplained Exit 
Poll Discrepancy
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
11-11-2004 
BuzzFlash was forwarded a copy of a new research paper 
(271k PDF) on the exit polls from the 2004 election. 
In "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Dr. Steven F. 
Freeman says: 
"As much as we can say in social science that something is 
impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between 
predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical 
battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 
2004 election could have been due to chance or random 
error."
The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by 
chance are, according to Freeman, "250,000,000 to one." 
That's 250 MILLION to ONE. 
He concludes the paper with this: 
"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature 
conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll 
discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is 
the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, 
and the public to investigate."

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$100,000 Reward for 
Evidence of Vote Fraud 
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT 
11-12-2004 
Justice Through Music, www.jtmp.org, which strongly supports the 
democratic principles of transparency and honesty in the electoral 
process, is offering at least a $100,000 reward to any person or 
persons who provide conclusive and verifiable evidence that the 
results of the 2004 presidential election were not correctly tabulated 
because of one or more of the following reasons: 
    1) hacking into the voting machines; 
2) software or coding problems with voting or tabulating machines; 
3) multiple counting by machines or humans, 
4) improperly implanted codes in voting machines; 
5) tampering with voting machines, voting cards or final tabulation 
numbers; 
6) officials or machines not counting all the votes or adding votes; 
7) official influence which changed vote totals, or 
8) other problems with vote tabulation not noted here. 
All information and evidence should be submitted to 
reward at jtmp.org. Questions should be submitted to 
questions at jtmp.org. 
In order to receive the reward, the evidence provided must be 
sufficient to affect the outcome of the presidential race, and 
evidence from more than one state can be used for that purpose. If 
a person who provides the information desires confidentiality for any 
reason including a fear of retribution, he or she should indicate that 
in their submission. A board of five persons will determine the 
disbursement of the reward on or before February 1, 2005.
Persons who want to make a tax-deductible contribution to this 
reward fund can do so through the secure PAYPAL donation button 
on the website. We want to provide the strongest incentive possible 
for people to come forward with substantial inside information, so 
make your donations generous. In the event no one meets the 
criteria for the reward, all funds donated to the reward fund shall be 
used to insure that all future votes are verifiable through a countable 
paper trail.
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT 
--------------------
KERRY WON OHIO 
JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE 
BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004

Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished.

By Greg Palast

This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his State
Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as
the state's primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity."
Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning 
his
fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in
Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in
Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because their 
votes
won't be counted.

The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New
Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots
and "provisional" ballots.

OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN
American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential
election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked
"spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster reveals
something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful
county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race,
the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the
spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help 
us,
is typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes "disappeared" into the
spoiled pile is approximately one million. The other million in the
no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white
precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.

Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney
get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly and
systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White
House.

Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes" -- too many
punches in the cards -- and "undervotes." Here we find the hanging,
dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional punch card
machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole doesn't fall out,
but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we humans, who know a hole
when we see one, have no problem reading these cards ... if allowed to.
This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by halting the hand count
of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a
"recount."

Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators
determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white
voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those
racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to
refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of
a lawsuit by the ACLU.

Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil
rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on
forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an
"overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts.
Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery ... sometime
after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's
Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the
trial date of the ACLU case until after the election. 

Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a
card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year,
voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they
would have gotten another card. 

Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had
been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly
Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000
votes.


JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT
Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the
'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned
Democrat blue.

But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are
counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002,
the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color.
Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those
wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing
states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.

Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and
rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a
virtually ballot veto to Secretary of State Blackwell.

Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of
provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory, the
Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong"
precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President. 

Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The
election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the
electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that
targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.

This is the first time in four decades that a political party has
systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of
thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While
investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the
Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for
spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block
on any pretext. 

We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican
hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that
nasty and racist. It may also be a crime. 

Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from
voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor
technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year,
Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with 
a
legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act. 

But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally questionable
mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks
operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were
copied directly to the Republican National Committee's chief of research
and to the director of a state campaign.

Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging
list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas, African-
American
soldiers shipped Over There. 

You don't have to guess the preferences registered on the provisional
ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while Democrats
pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote.

Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional ballots.
However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are
rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's skinny lead alive. Other
pre-election maneuvers by Republican officials -- late and improbably
large purges of voter rolls, rejection of registrations -- maximized the
use of provisional ballots which will never be counted. For example, a
voter wrongly tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's plenty in
that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even
though they are wrongly identified. 


KERRY BLACKS OUT
It was heartening that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the
political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color of
votes not counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the strongest
democracy on earth a million disenfranchised African Americans is the 
best
we can do." The Senator promised the NAACP convention, "This 
November,
we're going to make sure that every single vote is counted." 

But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate in history to
break a campaign promise after losing an election. The Senator waited less
than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio voters still
waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.

While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the
fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have
to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the
Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a "Kate
Harris" by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry's
team would also, as one state attorney general pointed out to me, have to
litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. This would
entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right
to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of
regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook.

Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to
the will of the people, but to the will to power of the Ohio Republican
machine. 

We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing absentee ballots, in
eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal voters from
registries and other games played in swing states. But why dwell on these
things? Our betters in the political and media elite have told us to get
over it, move on.

To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio's politically
ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own website, "Last time I
checked,” Blackwell said, “Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's
in Congress."



NEW MEXICO GOES KERRY - BUT WHO'S COUNTING?
Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of
Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five times
that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional ballots in
the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to Hispanic, not white,
voters according to a director of the Catholic Church's get-out-the-vote
drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the votes ... but that
won't happen.



Investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money
Can Buy (Penguin 2004). 

Oliver Shykles and Matthew Pascarella of GregPalast.com contributed to
this article.

View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family Fortunes," now
available on DVD, at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

To receive Greg's investigative reports go to:
http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm

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