Back in the US, Back in the US, Back in the USSR

Remember the Beatles' White Album? Remember the song, "Back in the USSR"?

Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC
Didn't get to bed last night
On the way the paper bag was on my knee
Man, I had a dreadful flight

I'm back in the USSR
You don't know how luck you are, boys
Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR

My Dad gave me that album as a "get well" present when I was 9, and I always wondered what John and Paul were saying there. Were they intimating that the US and USSR were more alike than different?

Well, now I know.

"The people who cast the votes do not decide an election, the people who count the votes do."
Joseph Stalin

We helped end the USSR. Who will help us end this regime?

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KERRY WON OHIO
JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004

Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished.

By Greg Palast

This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his
State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with
punch cards as the state's primary voting device invites a Florida-
like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection
campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but
boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter
what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB.
But their choice won't count because their votes won't be counted.

The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and
in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-
holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots.

OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN
American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical
presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the
garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral
dumpster reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In
a careful county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the
Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that
54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans.
And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide, the number of
Black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile is approximately one
million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from
Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly
Democratic demographic.

Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney
get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly
and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the
White House.

Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes" -- too
many punches in the cards -- and "undervotes." Here we find the
hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional
punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole
doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we
humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading
these cards ... if allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated
Al Gore, by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not,
as is generally believed, by halting a "recount."

Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal
investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900%
more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio
Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was
the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-
eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil
rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed
insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card
machines had an "overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in
Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the
machinery ... sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the
meantime, the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican,
strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after
the election.

Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed
a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this
year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If
not, they would have gotten another card.

Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines
had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes,
overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George
Bush's lead of 136,000 votes.


JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT
Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes,
the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would
have turned Democrat blue.

But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional
ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by
federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially
for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to
save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was,
in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-
bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.

Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy
and rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio, that
gives a virtually ballot veto to Secretary of State Blackwell.

Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of
provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory,
the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in
the "wrong" precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same
President.

Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots.
The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of
the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican
strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass
challenges on election day.

This is the first time in four decades that a political party has
systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of
thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While
investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the
Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for
spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to
block on any pretext.

We found that every single address of the thousands on these
Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You
might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.

Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from
voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor
technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year,
Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even
with a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights
Act.

But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally
questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level
dirty tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show
the lists were copied directly to the Republican National
Committee's chief of research and to the director of a state
campaign.

Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican
caging list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas,
African-American soldiers shipped Over There.

You don't have to guess the preferences registered on the
provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage,
while Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters
vote.

Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional
ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-
precinct rule, are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's
skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican
officials -- late and improbably large purges of voter rolls,
rejection of registrations -- maximized the use of provisional
ballots which will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly
tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's plenty in that
category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even
though they are wrongly identified.


KERRY BLACKS OUT
It was heartening that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the
political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color
of votes not counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the
strongest democracy on earth a million disenfranchised African
Americans is the best we can do." The Senator promised the NAACP
convention, "This November, we're going to make sure that every
single vote is counted."

But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate in
history to break a campaign promise after losing an election. The
Senator waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter
million Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-
spoiled ballots to be counted.

While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against
taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers
would, first, have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards.
Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would
undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or restricting a hand
count. Most daunting, Kerry's team would also, as one state attorney
general pointed out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected
provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a
hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote, with
Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of regulations from
the old Jim Crow handbook.

Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not
to the will of the people, but to the will to power of the Ohio
Republican machine.

We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing absentee
ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal
voters from registries and other games played in swing states. But
why dwell on these things? Our betters in the political and media
elite have told us to get over it, move on.

To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio's
politically ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own
website, "Last time I checked," Blackwell said, "Katherine Harris
wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress."



NEW MEXICO GOES KERRY - BUT WHO'S COUNTING?
Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of
Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five
times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional
ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to
Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic
Church's get-out-the-vote drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just
count up the votes ... but that won't happen.