Kerry Won...

Kerry Won…

By Greg Palast

November 04, 2004
Excerpted from TomPaine.com

—Kerry won. Here are 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.
http://www.tompaine.com/]

—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.

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.

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.

—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.

—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.'

To read the article in full, click here:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php