by Greg Palast
Did Blackwell really know that leaving those punch-card machines in place in the poorest precincts could give his man the election? Given Blackwell’s pitched battle to keep those vote-mangling machines in place, one could be forgiven for being suspicious about his motives. A year before the election, the ACLU sued Ohio and half a dozen other states for dragging their feet on removing these machines known to lose votes. Every state but one—Ohio—signed a deal to replace or fix the busted machinery.
In Michigan, a temporary fix for the bad machines was absurdly easy. Punch-card reading machines were placed in each precinct. Just stick in your card and if your ballot shows no vote for President, it tells you and you get a new ballot—in Michigan. The ACLU said it would accept this cheap and easy solution for Ohio as well. But Blackwell said, in effect, sue me. Blackwell previously conceded that punch-card machines produced more spoiled votes, which, because of the disproportionate placement of those machines in minority districts, was an implicit concession that in 2004 they would eat mostly minority votes. It’s not the kind of statement you’d make if you expect to win in court. But Blackwell knew he wouldn’t have to win the case to win the election: The trial date was set for late November, three weeks after the election.
Delay was unnecessary. Blackwell won in court, though the ACLU, in 2006, is fighting on with an appeal. More enlightening, and frightening, was the judge’s reason for tossing out the suit by African-American voters. The court concluded that the ugly number of uncounted ballots, the “residual vote,” was due in part to “income level of the voters,” not their race. The emphasis is mine. In other words, racial bias in the vote count is a no-no, but class bias is just fine.
This is crucial: You don’t have to “fix” machines to rig an election, you just have to fail to fix the broken ones. Strategically. Like a good vulture, Mr. Blackwell just waits for his kill to die.
But Ohio was just practice. If you want to know what’s coming for 2008, go out to where the deer and the antelope play.
PART 2
THE INDECISIVE INDIAN
Dig this: In November 2004, in early voting, in Precinct 13 in Taos, New Mexico, John Kerry took 73 votes. George Bush got three.
On Election Day itself, 216 in that precinct voted Kerry. This time, Bush got 25, and came in third. Third? Taking second place in the precinct, with 40 votes, was no one at all. Or, at least, that’s what the machines said.
Precinct 13 is better known as the Taos Pueblo. Every single voter there is an American Native or married to one.
Precinct 13 wasn’t unique. All over Indian country, on Election Day 2004, in pueblo after pueblo, on reservation after reservation in New Mexico, as well as in Arizona and Colorado, American Natives were seized by indecision. Indians by the thousands drove to the voting station, walked into the booth and then said, “Who cares?” and walked out without choosing a president.
On Navajo lands, Indian Indecision struck on an epidemic scale. They walked in, they didn’t vote. In nine precincts in McKinley County, New Mexico, which is almost entirely (74.7%) Navajo, less than one in ten voters picked a president. Those who voted on paper ballots early or absentee knew who they wanted (Kerry, overwhelmingly), but the machine-counted vote said Indians simply couldn’t make up their minds or just plain didn’t care. On average, across the state, the machine printouts say that 7.3%—one in twelve voters—in majority Native precincts didn’t vote for president. That’s three times the percentage of white voters who appeared to abstain.
No Hee-Ah-Hoe
So I dropped in on Taos, Precinct 13, and asked Ruben Romero, who holds the grand title of Governor and War Chief of the pueblo, “Why can’t you people do something as simple as pick a president?”
The War Chief ignored my deliberate provocation. Unflappable, in his slow rhythmic English, he explained, “We thought they knew about these sophisticated things, so we trusted them.” By them he meant the local, politically hostile white officials from the county who wheeled in new machines before the vote. He was resigned to it. Nothing new on the rez.
Outside his window were ruins of an old steeple where, in 1847, the Taos Indians took refuge from the U.S. cavalry, trusting the soldiers wouldn’t fire on a Catholic church. The troops, Romero told me, leveled it with artillery and left the Natives’ bodies under the rubble. It remains the pueblo cemetery today. Beyond it, on the mesa ridge, you could see the second homes of Houston oil brokers. They bought them for $2 million each and spent another half million to make them look like the pueblo’s adobe mud-brick houses. Down the pueblo’s dirt path was the smokehouse, not the traditional cleansing hut, but a shack where Anglos could buy cheap un-taxed cigarettes, and beyond that, the reservation’s big employer, its piteous little casino where workers from the nearby Wal-Mart lose their rent money. Which wasn’t much. In 1999, my British newspaper surveyed starting wages for Wal-Mart cashiers: $6.50 an hour in most of the USA, but $4.50 near Indian reservations.
The “old” pueblo is old indeed—built five hundred to one thousand years ago. Its spirit houses are entered through holes in the roof. In these adobe dwellings stacked like mud condos, no electricity is allowed nor running water—nor Republicans as far as records show. Richard Archuleta, “Head of Tourism” (i.e., cigarette sales, gambling and the annual pow-wow), a pro-plumbing Native with gray pigtails and hands as big as flank steaks, taught me Tiwa for thanks, “Hee-Ah-Hoe.” Of course, for all I knew, it could have meant my mom services sailors.21
Richard Archuleta, Taos Precinct 13
Richard wasn’t buying the indecision theory of the Native non-count. Indians were worried about their Bureau of Indian Affairs grants, their gaming licenses and working conditions at their other big employer: the U.S. military. Richard’s dad and five brothers enlisted. It was just assumed, he said, if you’re Native, you served in the Army or the Marines. A lot of red Indian blood was spilling in Falluja, and the pueblo, using little or no electricity, was not interested in Iraq’s oil. On the pueblo’s mud-brick walls there were several hand-painted signs announcing Democratic Party powwows, none for Republicans. Richard showed me where the Ketchup Queen herself, First Lady wannabe Teresa Heinz Kerry, had stopped and had lunch before the election. Laura Bush wouldn’t do that. Indecisive? Indians are Democrats. Case closed, white boy.
The Color That Counts
It wasn’t just Natives who couldn’t seem to pick a President. Throughout New Mexico, indecisiveness was pandemic…at least, that is, among people of color. In Taos and Dona Ana counties, the same indecision virus that struck the Indian reservations also hit half a dozen of majority Mexican-American precincts where less than one in ten voters chose a president. Or so the machines said. Across the state, high-majority Hispanic precincts recorded a 7.1% vote for nobody for president.
Here’s the arithmetic. George Bush won New Mexico and its electoral votes by only 5,988 ballots. That’s the official count. Yet, altogether no less than 21,084 ballots showed no vote for president in New Mexico in 2004.
Whose “unvotes” were these? I asked Dr. Philip Klinkner, the expert who ran stats for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, to look at the New Mexico data. His solid statistical analysis discovered that if you’re Hispanic, the chance your vote will not record on the machine was 500% higher than if you are white. For Natives, it’s off the charts.
The Hispanic and Native vote is no small potatoes. Every tenth New Mexican is American Native (9.5%) and half the remaining population (43%) is Mexican-American.
I punched the “no-count” stats into the state’s demographic profile and, with a little high school algebra, calculated that Hispanics, Natives and the tiny population of Black people in New Mexico cast no less than 89% of these no-choice votes. Let me repeat that: Nine out of ten votes uncounted were cast by non-Anglo voters.
Who would they have voted for?
Our team drove an hour across the high desert from the Taos Reservation to Española in Rio Arriba County. According to the official
tallies, entire precincts of Mexican-Americans registered few or zero votes for president in the last two elections. Española is where the Los Alamos workers live, not the PhDs in the white lab coats, but the women who clean the hallways and the men who bury the toxins. They work through contractors so the government won’t have to pay benefits. Job “security” is a joke. This was not Bush country, and the people we met with, including the leaders of the get-out-the-vote operations, knew of no Hispanics who insisted on waiting at the polling station to cast their vote for “nobody for President.”
Whose Votes Don’t Count?
Ballot “Spoilage” in New Mexico
The Bushes make a big deal about having lots of part-Mexican children. But, despite the Bush family photo ops, the huge majority of Mexican-Americans, especially in New Mexico, and a crushing majority of Natives (over 90%), vote Democratic. What if those voters weren’t indecisive; what if they punched in a choice and it did not record?
Let’s do the arithmetic. As minority voters cast 89% of the state’s 21,084 blank ballots, that’s 18,765 missing minority votes. Given the preferences of other voters in those pueblo and barrio neighborhoods, those 18,765 voters of color should have swamped Bush’s “majority” with Kerry votes. But that would have required those votes be counted.
Disappearing Democrats of Area 51
My first call in New Mexico was “Little Texas,” the group of mesquite-and-rattler-populated New Mexico counties tucked atop the snout of the Lone Star State. There Republican officials preside over Hispanic voters and the results are, let’s say, mysterious.
I asked Mr. Dave Kunko, Chief Deputy Clerk in the Little Texas county of Chaves, what happened to the vote in the Hispanic precincts in his domain. Chaves is 42% Hispanic, yet carried for George Bush in 2000, thanks to a stunning number of blank ballots—up to 10% percent of all votes—in the Hispanic precincts of the county. Kunko, a white Republican, told me, “Well, there’s a lot of these people who just don’t want to vote for president.”
Chaves is one big county—over six thousand square miles. Apparently, Hispanics drive notable distances to register their refusal to vote. I spoke with Kunko three months before the 2004 election—my editors reasoning it would be better to hunt for missing votes before they went missing.
I started off with Little Texas’s counties of Chaves, Eddy and Curry because an old political hand in the state Senate had told me, “If this election’s going to be stolen, it will be stolen in Little Texas.” And he suggested I look at the registration stats. Democratic registrations should have been way up because of a big drive by the Catholic Church to register Hispanics. But here’s what happened:
Chaves County: Registered Democrats drop by 10.6%
Curry County: Registered Democrats drop by 11.9%
Eddy County: Registered Democrats drop by 13.1%
Now how weird is that? We were told by a nice white lady in the Eddy County elections office that these Hispanic voters had switched parties—by the thousands. That would be unprecedented in the nation. People may switch their votes, but it just doesn’t happen that, en masse, people file papers to switch party registrations. Santiago Juarez, lawyer with the Church voter-drive, registered Hispanic “low riders,” the kids who drive chopped and jacked Chevys with neon trim under the sissy skirts. He doesn’t remember registering many Republicans among them, and certainly he would have remembered someone switching from Democrat to Republican. There were none.
Where’d the registrations go? How do Democrats just disappear? Chaves County is home of Roswell and “Area 51,” which more inventive minds believe houses the U.S. military’s captured UFOs. Were the Democrats removed to Area 51? Mr. Kunko’s office had a more straightforward explanation for the big-time plunge in Democratic registrations. His clerks had “cleaned up” the rolls under authority of the Help America Vote Act—lots of apparent “felons” and other suspect voters. That the cleansing had a political tinge, well, that’s too bad, eh? I’m sure the purge was done fairly, but we’ll have to take it on faith, as the state wouldn’t release the purge lists.
The Great Brown Ballot Boycott?
Still, despite Kunko and his party’s actions, many Hispanic Democrats remained registered on the books. But that didn’t mean they would be allowed to vote.
According to Kunko’s records, Mexican-Americans early on showed a blasé attitude toward the presidential election: Relatively few showed up for early voting. Of course, that may have to do with the fact that Kunko’s office placed the only early voting booth in that mammoth-sized county in a white suburban shopping center. It was about an hour’s drive from the slaughterhouses and dairies where the brown voters work. If they chose to make the long trek to the polling station, they would have had to drive fast, as the county closed the poll at 6:00 P.M.
To counter the inventive placement of the polling station, the Church organized a bus and caravan to take young, newly registered Chicano low riders to the Roswell poll. Santiago said many of his first-time voters were turned away for having the wrong ID. Maybe the middle initial was missing from the license, or “Jr.” added. No perfect match, no vote. A gotcha! set of rules that seemed to apply only to voters of a darker hue. A young Chicana told Santiago she wouldn’t return to try again; one round of humiliation was enough. “They don’t want me there anyway,” she said. And they don’t.
On Election Day, despite Little Texas remaining half Democratic in registration, George Bush romped to a large and unexpected (if not inexplicable) victory, taking Chaves, for example, nearly two votes to one. Crucial to this “victory” was the apparent renewed “boycott” of the presidential choices by Hispanic voters.
In Kunko’s county, for example, just about every white person chose a president—Bush. In the six whitest of white precincts (82% Anglo), less than one in a hundred ballots “spoiled,” that is, showed no presidential choice. Indeed, the white folk of Chaves were so enthusiastic about our democracy that they appeared to vote more than once. Precinct 21 (83% Anglo) registered eight more votes for President than voters! The only other “extra-vote” precinct was also three-fourths Caucasian.
While in the white precincts there were more votes than voters, in the Hispanic precincts it was just the opposite—more voters than votes. In New Mexico overall, Hispanic ballots were five times as likely as white ballots to go unrecorded. But in the “brownest” precincts, those with a population more than 75% Hispanic, the vote loss was 900% higher than in 75% white precincts. Maybe Hispanics can’t pick a president. Or maybe, just maybe, their votes vanished into dysfunctional, error-diseased machines.
Of course, Little Texas wasn’t alone in experiencing a “boycott” by Hispanic and Native voters. In Quay County, Hispanic-heavy Precinct 6A recorded 115 votes for county commissioner, zero for President. In a dozen precincts in minority areas, 90% or more of the voters recorded no vote for President on Election Day.
The “unvote” added up. In the Bush-controlled areas, purges, ID games, spoilage, poll-location tricks and provisional balloting cost Kerry dearly. In those counties, the average recorded vote for Democrats compared to their registrations was an odd, dismal 44.2%, whereas Republicans tallied a vote equal to 103.2% of their registrations. Vote shifts of that magnitude are the stuff of dreams. But are they the voters’ dreams or the machines’?
Democrats in Dreamland
Just because Kunko put down the missing Hispanic vote to some kind of racial indecisiveness doesn’t make him a dumbbell, racist redneck Republican party hack. So I thought it reasonable to get a view of the vanished Hispanic vote from a Hispanic Democrat, the one in fact in charge of the vote statewide. I reached Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron on her cell phone while she was cruising through the desert between Albuquerque and the capital. This was still months before the 2004 election.
Ambitious, fast-talking, and chatty, Vigil-Giron said she would prevent another voting disaster like the one that occurred in 2000 when, for example, a Hispanic pre
cinct in Española recorded zero votes for President.
I was intrigued by her relaxed investigative style. While the Secretary of State looked into that one case of a precinct with a zero vote and discovered—surprise!—machine error, she showed no interest in investigating the less dramatic vote disappearances throughout her state though they added up to thousands of vanished votes. She didn’t have to examine other machines, she said, because she knew why votes weren’t recorded. In Hispanic and Native areas, a loss of 10% to 14% in blank ballots, she told me, “is the normal where people just don’t want to vote for President.” Kunko’s Brown Boycott theory! I had to ask twice to believe it.
I was too dumbstruck to ask her why Mexicans and Indians like to drive to the polls and stand in line to register their ambivalence.
On November 2, 2004, three months after I spoke with the Secretary of State, the supposed Brown Ballot Boycott hit with a vengeance in Dona Ana County—64% Hispanic—in Little Texas. There were 207 ballots mailed in from overseas, mostly Mexican-American soldiers. Not one registered a choice for President. Or at least that’s what the machines said.
I guess the Secretary of State was right: Our Chicano boys in uniform just don’t give a damn who ends up as their commander-in-chief.
New Mexico ended Election Day 2004 with more uncounted votes than almost any state in America. Vigil-Giron had the authority to open the machines sealed right after the elections. In the face of the wacky returns, and with still-uncounted and missing ballots far exceeding George Bush’s victory margin, the Democratic Secretary of State moved decisively: She turned down $114,000 from concerned voters who offered to pay for a recount and investigation of the machines. On January 12, 2005, Vigil-Giron ordered all machines wiped clean, thereby eliminating crucial evidence regarding the November tallies.