Kerry Won...
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004
Excerpted from TomPaine.com


---Kerry won. Here are 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.]


---Whose Votes Are Discarded?---

And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every
official report, come from African-American and minority precincts.
(To learn more, click here.)

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. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission, click here .)

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.


---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.


---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.'


To read the article in full, click here: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php

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Contact: media@gregpalast.com

View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family
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