by Greg Palast
In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough—1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government’s Election’s Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn’t locate to tote up. Why doesn’t your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It’s right there in black and white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election—in a footnote to the report on voter turnout. The Census tabulation of voters voting “differs,” it reads, from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes.
This is the hidden presidential count, which, with the exception of the Census’s whispered footnote, has not been reported. In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called “spoilage.” Spoilage, not the voters, picked our President for us.
Unfortunately, that’s not all. In addition to the 3 million ballots uncounted due to technical “glitches,” millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.
Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, “It’s not the people who vote that count; it’s the people who count the votes.” That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the USA, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don’t get counted decides our winners.
In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines, “black boxes,” that could flip your vote from John Kerry to George Bush. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney’s bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that’s not how it went down. The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The new black boxes played their role, albeit minor, but the principal means of the election heist—voiding ballots, overwhelmingly of the poor and Black—went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale in 2008.
Like a forensic CSI unit, we can perform a post mortem starting with the exhumation of more than 3 million uncounted votes:
Provisional Ballots Rejected. An entirely new species of ballot debuted nationwide in 2004, the “provisional ballot.” These were crucial to the Bush victory. Not that Republicans won this “provisional” vote. Republicans won by the rejection of provisional ballots that were cast overwhelmingly in Democratic precincts. The sum of “the uncounted” is astonishing: 676,676 ballots lost in the counties reporting to the federal government. Add in the missing jurisdictions and the un-vote climbs to over a million: 1,090,729 provisional ballots tossed out.
Spoiled Ballots. You vote, you assume it’s counted. Think again. These are the votes that bad machines fail to record. Your “x” was too light for a machine to read. You didn’t punch the card hard enough and so you “hung your chad.” Therefore, your vote didn’t count and, crucially, you’ll never know it. And you’d have lots of company. The federal election assistance agency toted up nearly a million ballots cast not counted. Add in states too shy to report to Washington, the total “spoilage” jumps to a rotten 1,389,231.
Absentee Ballots Uncounted. The number of absentee ballots has quintupled in many states, with the number rejected on picayune technical grounds rising to over half a million (526,420) in 2004. In swing states, absentee ballot shredding was pandemic.
Voters Barred from Voting. In this category we find that combination of incompetence and trickery that stops voters from pulling that lever in the first place. There’s the purge of “felon” voters from vote registries that continues to eliminate thousands whose only crime is VWB, Voting While Black. It includes subtle games like eliminating polling stations in opponent’s districts, creating impossible lines. No one can pretend to calculate a hard number for all votes lost this way any more than you can find every bullet fragment in a mutilated body. But it’s a safe bet that the numbers reach into the hundreds of thousands of voters locked out of the voting booth.
An Apartheid Vote Count? If the Boot Fits…
Maps by Mark J. Salling, PhD, Cleveland State University
Counting by Colors
So big deal. If the buried ballots split evenly, then Kerry voters didn’t get the shaft. But that’s not what happens.
Not everyone’s vote “spoils” the same.
Look at the maps of Cleveland, Ohio (Cuyahoga County), on the opposing page. That boot-shaped stain on the top shows the precincts where ballots were thrown away, “spoiled.” The vote spoilage boot makes a perfectly matched pair with Cleveland’s boot-shaped ghetto shown on the bottom.
The maps tell us: Dive into the electoral Dumpster and you’ll find that the ballots rotting away there are very Black.
But why pick on Ohio?
Look at the chart “Rejection of Votes by Race.”
REJECTION OF VOTE
BY RACE
This little gem is taken from an unnoticed appendix to a report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. There are two sticks. The short stick shows ballots of “non-Black” voters rejected: 1.6%. That is, just one in 63 ballots cast by white folk are tossed in the garbage.
Now look at the black stick: 14.4% of Black voters’ ballots are tossed in the garbage, uncounted. One in seven.
This bar chart showing racially biased hanky-panky in the vote count is a statistical analysis of precinct-by-precinct data in Florida. Now let’s do the arithmetic, class. Given the racial breakdown of Florida’s population (13% African-American), that means that over half (54%) of the “spoiled” votes in Florida were cast by African-American voters.
So what? I’ll tell you what, using the 2000 election as an example (no, I haven’t gotten over it). Black folk cast 54% of the 179,855 ballots “spoiled” in Florida in that election. Given the nearly unanimous support for Democrats among those Black voters, candidate Al Gore undoubtedly was the choice of the vast majority of those votes thrown in the spoilage bin. Indeed, we can calculate, with high accuracy, that Gore’s total vote in the state would have been higher by 77,000 if all spoiled votes had been tallied 18—in a race officially giving the presidency to Mr. Bush by 537 votes.
I’m not saying that the Bush family “stole” the election, but that in Florida in 2000, Al Gore actually received at least 77,000 more of the votes cast in Florida than Mr. Bush.
They just didn’t count them.
But that is the Florida of “Jeb Crow,” a very un-nice name sometimes used for our President’s brother Jeb, Governor of the Sunshine State. Other states are different, right?
Wrong. It turns out Florida is, statistically, terribly typical of the USA. Like Florida, 13% of the population of America the Beautiful is African-American, and if you’re Black, the chance your vote will be “spoiled” is 900% higher than if you’re white, same as in Florida. And that’s not pretty.
Consider the effect of spoilage on the Kerry-Bush tally. Of the 1.4 million spoiled ballots cast and not counted in 2004, based on the racial difference in spoilage, we know that a bit more than half, about three-quarters of a million of those uncounted votes, were cast by African-American voters. And we haven’t even gone over the horrendous “spoilage” rates among Hispanics and Native Americans. Altogether, nearly a million minority votes were lost in 2004, disappeared, just fftt!
Add to the 1.4 million spoiled votes the 1.1 million rejected provisionals, all of them race-loaded, and yo
u’ve found the key to unlock the strange results of 2004, where voters told exit pollsters they voted “Kerry” but the official count said “Bush.” Take a look at these states:
* * *
Voters Lie?
Voters Said
(Exit Poll)
Votes Counted
(Official Tally)
Iowa
Kerry wins by 2%
Bush wins by 1%
New Mexico
Kerry wins by 2%
Bush wins by 1%
Ohio
Kerry wins by 4%
Bush wins by 2%
* * *
Nationwide, 51% told polling agents standing at the voting station exits that, only minutes before, they had voted for Kerry. Only 48% of those leaving the polls said they voted for Bush. But the voters were wrong: They had, said the official tally, voted just the opposite of what they told the polling agents. The official tally was: Bush 51%, Kerry 48%.
The exit polls differed from the official tally because:
a. voters had temporary amnesia,
b. voters lie or
c. not all votes were counted.
I went to sleep election night with the exit polls showing Kerry ahead in swing states. But between 1:05 AM and 6:41 AM the next morning, goblins went to work. By dawn, CNN’s exit poll for Ohio showed Kerry dead even with Bush among women, and down by five percentage points among men.
Look at the balls now:
They’ve changed!
What happened? Were thousands of Bush voters locked in the voting booths, released at 2:00 AM, then queried about their choices? Not quite. The network’s polling company applied a fancy algorithm, a mathematical magic wand, to slowly transform the exit polls to match the official count.
CNN Exit Poll 6:41 AM The Day After the Vote
And that’s bad. By quietly contaminating the exit polls, the networks snuffed the canary that would signal that something was deeply wrong about the vote count.
Hunting for a Democrat to defend the Twilight Zone between the exit polls and the “official” polls, media latched on to Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s old advisor. An expert at walking that fine line between minor criminality and psychopathic ambition, Morris knows which way his next client’s wind blows. On CNN, Morris said:
Exit polls are almost never wrong. So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they’re used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible.
His opening was promising, suggesting the Ohio count was as phony as a Ukrainian primary. But then he switches into full Morris:
It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.
So, Dick, you’re telling us there was an evil cabal among six pollsters, competitors who don’t even like each other, conspiring one dark night to make George Bush look like a vote thief?
There’s another explanation for Kerry’s leading the exit polls: Kerry won.
That is, either voters in Ohio (and nationwide) forgot whom they voted for just minutes earlier or, for a small but significant few, the ballots they cast were not counted. But we can count them: Add Ohio’s 103,660 “spoiled” votes to the 33,998 provisional ballots rejected to the 15,519 absentee ballots never counted to the several thousand lost due to voting machine shortages (we’ll get to that), and mix in the race of the voters who lost their vote and you have a recipe to cook an election, no matter whom the voters choose. The same went for Iowa and New Mexico in 2004, and possibly a half dozen others; the voters’ choice was undone by the un-count.
* * *
November 2, 2004
Night of the Uncounted
Iowa
New Mexico
Ohio
Ballots “Spoiled”
18,847
21,084
103,660
Provisional Ballots Uncounted
7,368
6,593
33,998
Absentee Ballots Uncounted
10,596
4,217
15,519
Ghost Votes and Blocked Votes
unknown
2,087
85,950
Total Uncounted 19
36,811
33,981
239,127
Bush “Victory” Margin
10,059
5,988
118,599
* * *
We’ve got the body (the wounded elections), we’ve got the bullet holes (the missing votes), now where are the smoking guns? How does the GOP disappear the vote? And why do Democratic ballots spoil so much more readily than Republican ballots? How’s it done?
But that little Bill O’Reilly in your head is screaming, Get over it; let’s move on already. That’s the point of investigation. What they tested in 2000 and practiced in 2004, they are preparing to roll out in 2008, big-time.20
In fall 2004, my editors wanted to know, How do they keep doing it? How could the Republican Party keep a million Black ballots from being counted in the face of all those voting reforms passed after the 2000 fiasco? We couldn’t figure how they’d game it again. Then we got the e-mails.
PART 1
“CAGING LISTS”: GREAT WHITE REPUBLICANS TAKE VOTERS CAPTIVE
John A. Wooden loves a good joke. We all do, but Wooden is special, because he’s also Satan’s best friend (if Bush was the Lord’s candidate), a prankster and the man who answered a big part of our riddle. Not that he knew it at first.
Wooden runs the WhiteHouse.org site and GeorgeWBush.org. No, he doesn’t have a special White House security clearance, he just owns sites with those names. What’s fun is that all e-mails that end with “@GeorgeWBush.org” go to him. Unfortunately for the Republican National Committee, a clerk there did not know that confidential missives involving political conspiracy should be sent only to “GeorgeWBush.com” addresses. The clerk accidentally added dot-org to a name in the “copy to” line instead of dot-com. Wooden got them and giggled, then sent them to our offices.
Most of our sources are jittery insiders who drop off brown envelopes at the risk of their jobs or even their lives. So when our investigator Oliver Shykles called me after midnight on October 8, 2004, to say a joke site was passing on some inscrutable e-mails from the RNC, I assumed 1) we’d been set up, 2) Wooden was pulling our leg or 3) the e-mails were the usual worthless self-preening gasbag baloney that is sent around inside a campaign.
The e-mails were none of the above. They were hot stuff. The intended addressees were Brett Doster and Randy Kammerdiner. Brett directed the entire Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida; Randy, in Washington, directed research ops for the Republican National Committee. Tim Griffin, Research Director and Deputy Communications Director for the Bush campaign, also received a copy. And attached to the first e-mail was a list of about 2,000 names and addresses on a spreadsheet, in a file named “CAGING.XLS.” What made this list so special that it had to be flashed immediately to the top Bush campaign honchos?
After our team spent hours going over them, it became clear that virtually every list—GeorgeBush.org captured over fifty of them, with tens of thousands of names—were made up entirely of voters in African-American neighborhoods that we checked against ZIP Codes. The lists included the ghettos of Lauderdale, Pompano Beach and a town with the Gone-with-the-Wind name of Plantation, Florida. Why would the campaign chiefs want that?
With just a couple weeks to go before the vote, I flew to Tallahassee to show the list to Ion Sancho, the supervisor of elections for Leon County. A real straight shooter who favors no party, Sancho is looked on as the final word on voting procedure in the state. He confirmed my new suspicion. “The only thing that I can think of—African-American voters listed like this—these might be individuals that will be challenged if they attempt to vote on Election Day.”
&nb
sp; Sancho wasn’t happy about the list we showed him. In his entire career of nearly two decades running elections in the capital area, the supervisor had not encountered a single Election Day challenge. He’s made sure of that, pointedly warning political parties not to play that game. Moreover, it was known that legions of Black voters were expected to pour in for the 2004 vote, threatening to swamp polling places and build up lines that could cause hours of waiting. If the Republicans challenged thousands of voters, Sancho said, that would “wreck” the entire voting process. “It would discourage and intimidate legitimate voters.” It would sabotage voting in Black precincts.
Did Republicans plan a giant ambush for Election Day, challenging and blocking citizens when they showed up to vote?
That would not be nice. And it could be, as well, a crime, a violation of federal voting rights law. BBC laid the lists before Ralph Neas, the famed civil rights attorney, who explained that you cannot challenge the rights of large groups of voters where race is a factor in your targeting, even if individual challenges have some legitimate basis. That’s the law.
And political parties, until 2004, have long kept on the good side of the law. It had been decades since a political party had attempted to stop citizens from voting on Election Day. Half a century ago, the White Citizens Councils of the old Confederacy, mostly Democrats, had blocked African-Americans, using everything from “literacy” questions asked only of voters of color to the simple expedient of beatings and the hanging rope.