by Greg Palast
Ghosts do that, I suppose.
But if ghost votes could disappear so easily, just like magic, from the private company tallying the votes of the state’s machines—maybe other votes could disappear, votes from dogcatcher to votes for President of the United States. And if done on Election Day, no one would know.
But I’d rather not think about that.
Mystery Machines
Santiago Juárez nailed it—provisional ballots, spoilage, registration games—the crude stuff bends the elections. But that doesn’t mean that theft “Hollywood-style,” by computer, can’t happen.
Albuquerque speech therapist Joyce Bartley tried to vote for the Democrat running for Congress on the 2004 ballot. In fact, she tried several times on several machines in the same precinct. “I pressed the circle next to the name,” she told our investigator Matt Pascarella, “and his check mark went into the circle of the other candidate.” Hours later, a court clerk, Terry Ashcrom, also tried and couldn’t get the machine to accept the Democrat. Ashcrom told us, “Someone in the line said, ‘You’re a Democrat, right?’ and everybody laughed.” The other voters gave in to the machine’s preference for Congress rather than lose their ballot entirely.
In Sandoval County, a Republican judge found he couldn’t vote for himself. The machine manufacturer explained that the problem was “an inconsistent stream of electricity.” Well, OK then. The company: Ernie Marquez’s old employer AES.
The Republican judge complained and got results, but when Bartley complained to the Democratic Party, even filling out a sworn affidavit about her anti-Democrat machine, the party’s headquarters told her, “Why do you want to do this? This is over. We’re moving on.”
Now why would the Democrats say that? Hold that question.
Some games are crude: In one precinct, Kerry’s name was simply left off the tally sheet. The machine appeared to work so voters were clueless that their choice didn’t tally. If you think that’s easy to catch, forget it. An election official slipped it to the Voter Action crew who gave it to me, fearful he’d lose his job if discovered as our source.
Poll Tape
Poll Tape Without Kerry Listed as Candidate Choice
None of this requires a grand conspiracy. If you know that bad machines eat Native votes, and you don’t change the machines, you know damn well what will happen. “Strategic neglect” is crucial.
“Strategic neglect” wasn’t invented in New Mexico. It’s as old as Jim Crow and as widespread. For example, in Georgia in 2002, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who was in a tough primary, found Diebold’s new computerized touch screens froze, batteries died and votes were lost. “Diebold said that the machines don’t perform well in the heat,” the Congresswoman told me. She let that sink in, then added, “Well, give me a break! What do you think you have in July in Georgia other than heat?”
The Black Congresswoman knew, but didn’t have to say, the answer: In the poor districts, in the sweltering school gyms where Black folk voted, it was Southern-fried hot. In the air-conditioned offices where the Secretary of State tested the machines and in suburban Georgia’s air-conditioned schools, the Diebolds work just fine.
The Voting-Industrial Complex
New Mexico’s Secretary of State seemed curiously uncurious about Hispanic precincts where only one in ten voters chose a president.
But who was I to second-guess Secretary Vigil-Giron? After all, she was a big shot, President, no less, of the National Association of Secretaries of State, the top banana of all our nation’s elections officials.
After the election, rather than schlep out to investigate among the iguanas and Navajos in some godforsaken hole in the desert, she left the state to officiate a dinner meeting for her national association. It was held on a cruise ship. The tab for the moonlight ride was picked up by touch-screen voting machine maker ES&S Corporation. Breakfast, in case you’re curious, was served by touch-screen maker Diebold Corp.
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The Lineup
And there’s undervote that’s unreported. You can give your opponents’ precincts bad voting machines—or don’t give them machines at all. In Jacksonville, Florida, the Republican elections supervisor, knowing of the long lines expected in 2004 in Black precincts, removed several of them. In Ohio, with the high turnout expected, the same trick was repeated, leaving Black people and students in suspiciously selected precincts to wait in line for seven hours or more. It was systemic and measurable.
The chart above looks like a dark, ugly bacterium devouring a defenseless cell. This is statistician Joe Knapp’s “scattergram” of the suspicious placement of voting machines in Franklin County (Columbus), Ohio, confirmed by a nearly identical finding by Elizabeth Liddle of the University of Nottingham in Britain. The attacking splotch represents the Bush-majority precincts, the white ones getting eaten, Kerry’s precincts. In fancy math, it tells us what any bonehead knows: Make people wait seven hours and some will have to leave. The result, Knapp’s precinct-by-precinct calculation, was no less than 17,000 votes lost, cutting Kerry’s net vote by 9,971 in Columbus alone. Congressional investigators, albeit Democrats, thought “hundreds of thousands of votes” were lost statewide. My own estimate is far more conservative, 85,950 frustrated voters. The trick is, as Knapp and Liddle’s bug-war chart shows, the machines were strategically allocated, with the rich getting machine-richer, and the poor getting machine-poorer polling stations. Kerry lost 71,542 votes versus 14,408 lost to Bush.
The point is not the quibbling over the number, higher or lower. The issue is, who’s watching the machine allocation in 2008? Like an Agatha Christie mystery, we get to guess where vote boxes will disappear next.
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Not that Vigil-Giron was satisfied with New Mexico’s voting machinery. She wanted the state to rush into the arms of her meal tickets, the touch-screen computer makers. And like other politicians who have fallen in love with computer voting machines, she found her affection reciprocated. The Secretary of State is a big booster of computers by ES&S and Sequoia. And they boost her. Company executives were on the list of her top ten campaign contributors.
Let’s not single out the New Mexicans. For ES&S, it’s “all in the family” nationwide. They hired the husband of the supervisor of elections in Pinellas, Florida, and the husband of the state legislator representing Broward County, the place where, in 2002, non-operating ES&S machines locked up and lost African-American votes. Florida’s county officials endorsed ES&S machines on the recommendation of their advisor, Sandra Mortham, who, balancing a second hat on her one head, was also lobbyist for ES&S.
It’s 10:00 PM: Do You Know Where Your Absentee Ballot Is?
Voters wary of balloting by computer went postal in 2004: In some states, mail-in ballot requests were up 500%. The probability that all those votes—over 19 million—were counted is zilch.
Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here’s how your trust is used. In the August 2004 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore (aka Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839 absentee votes. But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had been received. When this fishes-and-loaves miracle was disclosed, she was forced to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138. Could LePore know who was voting for whom? Any experienced politicians can tell a voter’s politics with fair accuracy from the ZIP Code. In Palm Beach it was easier: The voter’s party was printed on the outside of the return envelope.
Had a few thousand votes disappeared instead of more of them miraculously appearing, there would be almost no way to figure it out.
We had our eyes on LePore, but who was watching Arapahoe County, Colorado? Three times more absentee ballots mailed to Democrats “failed to return” as compared to Republican ballots, a bias in return rates I found in many Republican-controlled counties. The difference was not accounted for in the number of Dems versus Reps asking for the ballots. Maybe Democrats don’t have the saliva to make the stamp stick. I refuse to
speculate on the fate of the missing ballots.
Democrats by the millions, not trusting county elections officials to operate computers without tampering with them, mailed their ballots to these same officials on faith they will be acknowledged, opened, accepted and properly tallied. Absentee balloting in the USA is the greatest expression of mass faith since the Hebrews walked across the Red Sea bed trusting the Lord would keep the waters parted. The difference is, in 2004, the absentee voters mailed their ballots to Pharaoh’s clerks.
If they don’t like your signature, the envelope you use, the pencil size or the postmark or your ZIP Code, you lose your vote. Pharaoh decides.
Here’s an example. In San Diego, in 2004, the Democratic candidate for mayor lost by 2,108 votes—after 5,551 absentee ballots with her name clearly written in (she was a write-in candidate) were tossed out. The Republican elections officials determined that, while the five thousand voters wrote in her name, they failed to check the box next to her name.
Unusual? Not by a long shot. In 2004, from official reports, we can calculate that half a million (526,426) absentee ballots were received but not counted. And that’s just the ones they acknowledged receiving.
Doing a bit of arithmetic on the precinct-by-precinct reports discloses that, believe it or not, in strong Kerry precincts, voters were 265% more likely to have their absentee ballots tossed out than voters in Bush-majority precincts. Behind this statistic is Jim Crow: the rejection of Black voter absentee ballots ran 316% higher than rejections of white voters’ ballots.
Mail-in voter registration forms are protected by federal law. Absentee ballots are not. Local government must acknowledge receiving your registration and must let you know if there’s a problem (say, with signature or address) that invalidates your registration and you can fix it. But your mail-in vote is an unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if your ballot was received? Was it tossed behind a file cabinet—or tossed out because you did not include your middle initial? In most counties, you won’t know.
You don’t need Einstein to bend the absentee vote. Remember how Jeb Bush removed the “incompetent” Black Democrat Oliphant as elections supervisor in Broward County, Florida? In 2004, her competent Republican replacement sent out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots too late to return. The majority of belated ballots were intended for Democrats. The “Broward problem” was pandemic across America.
Democrats, who once excelled at voting absentee for Chicago’s dead, are now way behind in the new game. Or maybe they are just suffering from “battered party syndrome”: beaten mercilessly by Republicans but unable to break off the relationship.
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Detective Doug
Once you’ve got the caging lists, you can get creative. Besides challenging voters of color on Election Day, you can, if the scent of racism doesn’t bother you, intimidate them.
Forget the burning crosses, that’s passé. This is “Doug.” From his all-black SUV, he took telephoto shots of each Black voter as they went into the Jacksonville early-voting station—every day, all day. That type of creepy KGB stuff is a no-no under civil rights law and the Justice Department agreed to look into the matter—after the election was over. What the detective didn’t know was that as he was filming the voters, our BBC cameras were filming him. He said his name was “Doug,” a licensed detective, and he assured us that he was paid a pretty penny to take photos of the voters day after day. He just couldn’t say who was sending him the check. And he seemed to forget his last name. So we’re including his photo here to see if any of our readers can identify him.
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PART 4
OLD DOGS, OLD TRICKS
Felons of the Future
Back in the dark days before our President decided to Help America Vote, I was sitting in my kitchen in London watching election returns from my homeland. That night, November 6, 2000, and the next day, a parade of African-Americans told our BBC television crews they couldn’t vote—their names were missing from the voter registries. Conspiracy nut that I am, I began to imagine there was some kind of computer program that systematically hunted down Black voters and wiped their names off the registries.
Within weeks, I had the program on two CD-ROM disks from inside the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. If you read my last book, you know it was a list of bad people—57,700 criminals who had registered to vote despite Florida’s lifetime ban on felons voting, including, I noticed, Bernice Kines, convicted on July 31, 2009.
2009? Ultimately, we obtained lists of 94,000 targeted by Harris. At least 91,000 were innocent of any crime, except for 325, like Kines, who were convicted in the future.
However, 54% were guilty of being African-American. Katherine Harris, on Jeb Bush’s command, ordered them removed from the voter rolls before the election. The scrub list was four-to-one Democrats. And that’s how Bush “won” Florida in 2000.
But you knew that. You saw the “felon” report—that is, if you swam to London with your TV, converted its voltage and watched our BBC story or read the London papers. Or you picked it up on samizdat Web sites or from out-of-control radio broadcasters like Randi Rhodes. After a CBS News producer told me in December that her network decided to kill the voter-purge story (we’d fed CBS our material), we used one last desperate trick to get it picked up in the USA: Gave it to a fat guy with a chicken suit.
I admit that The New York Times did report the story of the ethnic cleansing of Florida’s Black “felons”—but four years later, in 2004, and only to assure us that all was now corrected.
But it wasn’t. In April 2004, in complete secrecy, Governor Jeb Bush personally ordered a new purge of 45,000 voters… including that felon of the future, Bernice Kines.
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At a press conference in Boston, Michael Moore holds up my computer displaying evidence of the illegal purge of Black voters from registries. This photo is included here to convince progressive-minded Americans of the importance of buying this book, one of several creative and craven marketing ploys I use to overcome American resistance to information not channeled through celebrities.
Photo: Matt Pascarella, Globalvision 2004
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I called Jesse Jackson in Chicago who, within days, hopped a plane to Atlanta and demanded CNN expose the new voter scrub. And, applause for CNN, they did. But the Rov-atrons were ready. On October 20, 2004, a smarmy little American Enterprise Institute spinmeister named John Lott announced on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight that the U.S. Civil Rights Commission “was not able to identify even one person” wrongly disenfranchised by Jeb’s Black-out operation. At the same time, the same line was repeated nearly word for word by John Fund in The Wall Street Journal. Fund was Vigil-Giron’s special guest speaker to the National Association of Secretaries of State.
Well, Messrs. Lott and Fund, meet Willie Steen. I found Steen working at the Florida Orthopedic Center in Tampa. Odd that: You can’t work in a hospital in Florida if you have a felony conviction. (See “Mr. Lott, Meet Mr. Steen.”) And after you’ve apologized to Steen, we have a print-out of several thousand others you can meet if you’re ever visiting the ghettos of Tampa or Jacksonville.
After our 2000 report, the NAACP sued Jeb and the creators of the racially stained “scrub” list, ChoicePoint, Inc. (the War on Terror profiteers we met in the Fear Chapter). The Bush team confessed to its “error” and agreed not to do it again.
In 2004, my British network thought it a nice touch, now that Governor Jeb would let Black folk vote, to film the newly reenfranchised Steen finally casting his ballot for president. In October 2004, we called the Hillsborough County supervisor of elections to find Steen’s early-vote polling place. A clerk looked up his name and said, “Steen can’t vote. He’s a felon.”
A repeat offender!? Well, in that case, we’d film Willie getting the heave-ho again. The Republican supervisor who’d had Steen scrubbed the second time, advised of our filming, showed up at the polling place. His clerk tol
d us, “Wow, this is extraordinary! Steen’s status was just changed this morning!” Willie got his ballot. God bless America. It’s comforting to know that Republicans will put away the electoral hanging rope when the cameras are rolling.
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Mr. Lott, Meet Mr. Steen
John Lott, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC
“I think a lot of the discussion about disenfranchising African-American voters… they weren’t able to identify even one person.”
Willie Steen, Florida Orthopedic Center, Tampa, Florida
“I went into the place to vote and I was with my son and there were about 40 to 50 other people around and I got up there to vote and they told me I was a convicted felon. I told the young lady that I had never been arrested. I’ve never been arrested in my life. I was in the military for four years and have been in the medical field ever since. You can’t even work for a hospital being a convicted felon…I was in the Persian Gulf War in ’91. It’s pretty screwed up how they did me, but what can I say?