. . . The glitches, hanging chads, “undervotes,” blank ballots, and “overvotes” are not random. If every voter—white or black, Democrat or Green, 99 Percent or 1 Percenter— faced the same chance of their vote “spoiling,” it wouldn’t matter, it would rarely change the winner.
But, believe me, spoilage isn’t random. Not even close.
The US Civil Rights Commission found, in Florida, the chance of an African American losing their vote to such “spoilage” is 900 percent higher than for a white voter. Statistician Philip Klinkner, who conducted the study, tells me that Florida is sadly typical of the nation.
I used to teach statistics myself, so I did a couple more calculations: black voters cast at least 54 percent of ballots spoiled in the USA.
The “uncount” and racial disparity is at its worst in swing states where the motive to steal is highest. In New Mexico in 2004, no fewer than 16,469 missing ballots, almost exclusively found in pueblo and Hispanic precincts, swamped Bush’s “victory margin” of 5,988.
As in every state (no exceptions), the uncount in New Mexico had a dark racial hue. Just one in a hundred (1.11 percent) of Anglo presidential ballots failed to record a choice. But four times as many Hispanic ballots were blank (4.42 percent), and seven times as many Native American ballots were blank (7.05 percent). But note carefully: when paper ballots are read optically, the racial difference disappears.11
In all, Hispanic, Native American, or black voters cast 89 percent (nearly nine out of ten) of ballots that bit the desert dust. The breakdown: 34 percent of the lost ballots were cast by Natives, overwhelmingly Democrats, and 51 percent were cast by Mexican Americans, who vote Democratic nearly two-to-one.
A Harvard University study, “Democracy Spoiled: National, State, and County Disparities in Disenfranchisement Through Uncounted Ballots,” totaled the non-count in swing states.
The authors of the study, Klinkner and Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, both told me that while their report centered on “geographical” differences, what screamed at them were the racial differences. In the majority, the uncounted are voters of color.
In 2004, states reported to the EAC that 133,289 ballots were rejected because of overvotes (extra marks on a ballot), with the highest percentage in “predominantly Hispanic precincts,” according to the commission. Almost the entire total of overvotes came from low-income (i.e., cheap machine) precints. But only half the states and counties even bother to report the number of tossed out “overvote” ballots. And blank ballots (“undervotes”)? Six times as many as overvotes, and just as biased.
And that’s just the spoiled vote. Add in the felon purges, citizen purges, provisional ballots rejected, rejected registrations, and all the other voter-roll legerdemain based on racial profiling, and those biased numbers above burst through the ceiling.
Total the noncount, then crank in the racial factor, and you see that our nation’s elections are spoiled rotten by the Ku Klux count.
In 2012, the color of the voter, not the choice of the voter, could for a third time in a dozen years determine control of the White House.
Forget all the baloney about democracy you heard in the sixth grade from Mrs. Gordon about the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act. Ballot-box apartheid remains as American as apple pie.
No, we don’t have voting booths marked Black or White. Rather, we have voting machines for black, brown, and red precincts, along with counting and registration systems very different for light-skinned and dark-skinned Americans.
Don’t Cage Me, Bro!
In September 2007, a student at the University of Florida in Gainesville confronted Senator John Kerry with what the Washington Post called a “mysterious yellow book.” The student, Andrew Meyer, kept demanding that Kerry explain why, given that the book proved that uncounted votes in Ohio determined the 2004 election, Kerry did not demand a full count. The kid was thrown on the ground and shocked with enough electricity to kill a weaker man, despite pleading, “Don’t Tase me, bro!”
Kerry ducked and wove by saying that, yes, he’d read the strange yellow book, Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast.
That chapter is called “Kerry Won” and you can download it free in its entirety at www.BallotBandits.org.
Kerry never did answer the question.
And it’s not just “spoiled” votes. Of the nine ways America loses six million votes and voters, every one, every one, disproportionately takes away the vote of people of color.
You’ve got to be asking yourself, Why have Democrats not demanded the count of the missing votes?
Even President John Kennedy was deeply reluctant to end segregated voting. In 1963 he hesitated in the face of a personal plea in the Lincoln Room by Martin Luther King.
JFK had good (or at least, political) reasons not to act. When President Lyndon Johnson gave us the Voting Rights Act, he predicted that this would cost the Democratic Party the once-solid South. It’s the sad truth that this is exactly what happened. So God bless America.
Johnson’s gutsy move didn’t quell Democrats’ squeamishness to take on the separate-and-unequal access to the vote. Jimmy Carter relied heavily on the cracker vote and today supports that new Jim Crow tool, voter ID requirements. (Carter wears a white smile, not a white hood, so it’s okay.)
There’s another side to the Democrats’ seemingly odd reluctance to address the apartheid voting system: Democrats are some of the worst abusers of racially loaded voting trickery.
Why? Why, when minority voters, poor voters, students, and the elderly vote strongly Democratic, would “their” party spoil, purge, block, and toss out their votes?
Because all vote theft, like all politics, is local. New Mexico’s former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and former Governor Bill Richardson, each indicted in separate cases, are both Hispanic Democrats. Both did their damned best to ignore then actively deny votes to poor Hispanics and Native Americans. It goes back to state politics, where the Democratic Party’s conservative and wealthy elite does whatever it takes to keep political power out of the hands of the poor.
Pecos Paul Maez and other Hispanic voters were purged by Hispanic politicians. Why? “It’s on the down-low,” Election Supervisor Maez told me, and wouldn’t elaborate. But Hector Balderas, the state auditor, whose mother was purged along with half the voters of Mora County, almost every one Hispanic, told me they were vulnerable because Mora is dirt poor.
Voting rights attorney Santiago Juarez, now state counsel for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), who spends much of his time fighting Hispanic disenfranchisement by Hispanic politicians, explained it:
“You take away people’s health insurance and you take their right to union pay scale, and you take away their pensions. Taking away their vote is just one more thing.”12