In 2004, I got a report that only one in ten voters in nine precincts in McKinley County, New Mexico—74.7 percent of them Navajo—voted without choosing a president. They drove miles across the Navajo reservation, walked into the voting booth, then said, “Nah, forget it,” and didn’t vote for president of the USA.
Or, at least that’s the official story. That’s what the tallies show.
Indeed, all over the Southwest, Native Americans by the tens of thousands are to this day seized with indecision when confronted with a choice in a voting booth. Coincidentally, Natives register more than seven-to-one Democratic. Coincidentally.
In the Taos Pueblo, “blank” nearly beat the Democratic candidate. That’s what the machines said.
And when you have a precinct that combines Pueblo Indians with poor Hispanics, just forget it: these voters just don’t give a damn. For example, in a special precinct in dirt-poor Doña Ana County created to collect absentee ballots from soldiers overseas, not a single Native or Mexican American doughboy listed a choice for their commander-in-chief. One hundred percent blank, not one voted for President of the United States.
SPOILING: Votes don’t get spoiled because they’re left out of the refrigerator too long. A ballot is “spoiled” if it is supposedly unreadable.
Example: In Florida in 2000, in the presidential race, one county’s ballots stated, “Write in candidate’s name.” Many wrote in “Al Gore,” then also checked his name—and their votes were disqualified. Secretary of State Katherine Harris ruled that such ballots were spoiled, and therefore wouldn’t count, because she could not determine the “intent” of the voter, the preferred candidate of those who wrote, “Al Gore.”
That’s the official story. That’s what the tallies show. Again.
White voters are more decisive. Here, the official story as told by the vote-tallying machines is quite different. In precincts in the suburban upper-income ring around Albuquerque (where voters use paper ballots, not machines), 101 percent of voters chose a president. Most of these, including the ghosts who voted, are big for the GOP.
Call me crazy, but something seemed wrong here. So I reached New Mexico’s Secretary of State Becky Vigil-Giron on her cell while she was driving to the Capitol from Albuquerque. This was before her indictment (that business about corrupt contracts for voting machines). I asked her about the missing Hispanic and Native military votes. The secretary of state told me, “Well, a lot of these people can’t make up their minds.”
Okay, Madame Secretary, that answer works for US media bobbleheads, but the BBC thought I should actually go and meet some of these indecisive Indians.
So I went down to one of the Southwest’s blank-ballot hot spots, the Laguna and Acoma Pueblos of New Mexico, home of what were, according to voting machines, some of the nation’s most indecisive voters. In 2004, these Natives suffered eighteen times the national average of blank or spoiled ballots.
Though the secretary of state says “these people” simply can’t make up their minds, they didn’t seem indecisive to me. They held strong opinions. “The war is a sin,” pueblo leader David Ballo told me—and so was voting for Bush the Sinner.
Maybe there’s another explanation: maybe the machines failed to register their votes. Few Americans realize that in the 2008 presidential election, nearly a million and a half ballots were left uncounted because they were supposedly unreadable, blank, or just somehow lost in the machines.
How does a ballot get spoiled? Not by leaving it out of the fridge.
Remember the belly laughs the press got out of the “hanging chads” during the Florida vote count in 2000?
What’s so funny? Every hanging chad is a vote that didn’t get counted. And there were lots and lots of hung votes. We got our hands on a Florida voting machine with chads still in it. They’re no bigger than Al Gore’s teardrops. Check out my chad:
On punch-card ballots, you have to poke out a hole in the cardboard with a metal thing-y. Sometimes you poke the hole and a little piece of it just hangs there by a corner. You don’t even see it.
In the old days, before the US Supreme Court became the Supreme Corp, the voter’s intent determined if your ballot counted. If you punched a hole, even if the little bugger didn’t fall out completely, it’s damn certain whom you voted for, and the vote counted.
But not in Florida in 2000, nor in Ohio in 2004, nor in too many states today. In Florida, Secretary of State Katherine Harris ruled that if a hole was punched but the “chad” hadn’t dropped off, your vote didn’t count. Nyah, nyah, nyah.
In 2004, the GOP Secretary of State in Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, said the same, though in at least one Republican county, mentally retarded folk were hired as “chad scrapers.” Law professor Bob Fitrakis of Columbus State Community College said that, because of their condition, the “scrapers” could not be asked to testify in investigations.
It’s easy to see if someone voted, even if their chads are hanging out. First, look for a hole. Second, run them through the vote-counting machine. Machines kick out ballots with hung chads—but run the ballot through a couple of times and the machine shakes them off. Florida blocks the rereading of ballots.
Who cares? I mean, how many ballots are spoiled this way? Are you ready for the number? In 2000, the presidency of the United States was determined by 537 Florida votes. In all, Katherine Harris rejected 181,171 ballots.
In Ohio, Ken Blackwell used every trick in the book, from rejecting ballots of the wrong thickness to eliminating three of four voting booths in minority precincts, to bend the vote.10 But it was the horrific ninety-four thousand spoiled votes, mostly from those chad-hangin’ punch-card machines, that accounted for almost all of Bush’s victory there in 2000—and history repeated itself four years later.
The US press made no mention that George Bush was elected twice by chads, not voters.
Maybe you knew about Florida and Ohio, hanging chads and all that. But what about Iowa?
In 2004, ballots not counted totaled 40,537 in Iowa— four times Bush’s supposed plurality of 10,059. (Half— 22,573 ballots—were spoiled; the rest were deep-sixed absentees and provisional ballots.)
Bush’s plurality was also lower than the “undervote” (blank ballot) in Nevada. (The “undervote” for president is not some kind of protest vote: Nevada has a “none of the above” spot on its ballot for refuseniks.)
In 2012, the uncounted vote, not the voters, could well choose our president. Or our Congress. Or both.
And Mr. Rove knows it. And he’s smiling because . . .