Voter Fraud Reported on CNN

My dear friends,

There is mounting evidence of electronic and punchcard voting fraud in Ohio and other states that, if exposed and corrected, could conceivably swing the election from Bush to Kerry. There will be plenty of time to move on from this election but that time isn't here yet. Now is the
time for a recount in Ohio.

ELECTRONIC VOTING FRAUD

CNN reports electronic voting errors by the 1000s in Ohio, Florida, and four other states. CNN's website now reports: "An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban
Columbus, (OH) elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots
in that precinct." One lonely precinct in Ohio somehow gave Bush 3,893 extra votes. If among 1000s of Ohio precincts, only 35 other precincts did the same thing or worse in the Buckeye state, Bush's currently alleged margin of victory in Ohio, 136,483, is gone, Kerry-Edwards would win Ohio and the election. If those e-voting errors were intended by
anyone, then that's voting fraud and we're witnessing a repeat of Florida in 2000. Does anyone trust the Republican Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who ordered Ohio elections officials to reject untold numbers of voter registration applications because he didn't like the
thickness of the paper they were printed on?

CNN also reports other e-voting problems just like my those in the email at the bottom below (forwarded by me yesterday to the mgotalk & eb4K-swing listserves) from four Florida election workers who saw people
trying to vote for Kerry on electronic voting machines but Bush kept
coming up. CNN's website now reports "that there were also several dozen
voters in six states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- who said the
wrong candidates appeared on their touchscreen machine's checkout
screen, the coalition said. In many cases, voters said they intended to
select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it
showed them instead opting for President Bush, the group said." It's
reminiscent of the joke cartoon emailed around before the election
showing someone trying to vote electronically for Kerry, but Bush coming up
instead.

What a curious coincidence that this news of apparent voting fraud by
Bush supporters should be released on a Friday afternoon, the usual time
when government officials try to bury unfavorable news stories. News
organizations have reported that Karl "the architect" Rove and other
Bush election officials have been trying to pressure news organizations
into calling states as early as possible for Bush. Not surprising that
Fox "News" trumpeted that it was the first network to call Ohio for
Bush. The earlier news reports on Ohio focused on just the provisional
ballots, like tunnelvision in an echo chamber, ignoring other possible
problems. What about that one precinct in Gahanna, Ohio giving Bush 3,893
extra votes? It could be an isolated incicdent but where's the proof
that it didn't happen elsewhere in Ohio?

PAPER VOTING FRAUD

Award winning journalist and author Greg Palast reports in his article
from tompaine.com below and attached that uncounted "spoiled" votes if
counted would likely give Ohio and New Mexico to Kerry. Ohio used 70%
punchcard ballots in this week's election. So-called spoiled votes
(i.e. undervotes, overvotes, dimpled, hanging or pregnant chads, etc.),
which were 1.96% of the total in the last election in Ohio, are never
counted. Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is required by law to
report the number of spoiled votes, but has failed to do so for this week's
election.

The evidence to justify a recount and full investigation in Ohio is
there and growing. Please join me and others, including an elected
official, in urging Kerry and Edwards to ask for a recount in Ohio. They
don't have to "unconcede" the election but just file a little paper with
the Ohio Secretary of State requesting a recount and posting a deposit
within 5 days after the Secretary certifies the vote count. As Larry
King pointed out on CNN late on election night, concessions are not
legally binding; long ago a Florida candidate conceded an election, but
later turned out to win and took office. I'd rather see that older
Florida history repeat itself than that from 4 years ago.

Joel Freid



Kerry Won
by Greg Palast
Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by TomPaine.com

Kerry won. Here's 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.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry
to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot
tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something
called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the
vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head
boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49
percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United
States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The
television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

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.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last
time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the
not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz).

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the
vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth
Blackwell, wrote before the election, "the possibility of a close
election with punch cards as the state's primary voting device invites a
Florida-like calamity."

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up
to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating
Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine
Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in
Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's
office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm.
But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a
democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical
loss-that's 110,000 votes-overwhelmingly Democratic.

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.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there.
Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional"
ballots-a kind of voting placebo-which may or may not be counted.
Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your
number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are,
again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled
punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the
totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new
president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

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.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the
election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic
areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the
"Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic
population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won"
there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and
he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated
that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of
candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert
to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional
ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee
Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who
got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the
Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor
Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy
provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather
than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling
stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification.
Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry-if we count all the
votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the
leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why?
No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and
provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of
State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and
provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris'
political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count.
Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the
party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the
shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under
PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several
friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the
failure-a second time-to count all the votes, that won't be necessary.
My country has left me.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the
manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The
documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The
Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .





Kitty