It seems to me that someone really didn’t want Hispanic votes counted, or black votes counted, and really, really didn’t want Native votes counted.
Back at the Acoma Pueblo, the residents had a concern beyond their kids getting shot up in Iraq. (While Native Americans roundly disparage foreign wars, they are often the first to volunteer.)
South of Albuquerque, about two hundred miles from Nowhere, the pueblo lands don’t look like they could support an awful lot of agriculture or ranching.
It wasn’t always that way, but the runoff from the nearby uranium mines pretty much poisoned the land—and undoubtedly the Acoma people, though no one bothers to measure that.
The land is poisoned but not dead—not yet. However, there’s a new worldwide uranium rush happening. So county officials, and owners of the mineral rights (not the pueblo, of course), want in on the action.
The Acoma call the resource-laced mountain above them their Mother. “She’s sacred to us,” Acoma elder David Ballo said. And sacred to the bottom lines of the mining companies that want to drill into her.
The big mining company out West is BP, which has gone “Beyond Petroleum”—way beyond petroleum. The Piute tribe is suing the company for poisoning their drinking water with uranium, and the Ute Indians are suing BP for stealing their oil à la Koch. But I digress. Surely BP would not harm Mother Mountain.
But America being a democracy, it would be put to a vote. As the tally of those who would be poisoned by the result is higher than those who would poison them, it seemed like the county board would go with leaving Mom alone.
But then the pueblo got the “Pecos Paul” treatment. You remember Pecos, the Hispanic elections supervisor who found the state purged his own registration.
The massive purge of voter rolls in Hispanic areas turned into a civil-rights massacre in the pueblos. Without notice, voters were barred for using “fake” addresses like, “near the pueblo church,” which is not fake in Indian country. They needed “postal street numbers” that didn’t exist.
The result: two hundred in the Acoma Pueblo showed up at the polls only to find their names purged—poof!
Not to worry! The voters were each given a “provisional” ballot.
A what?
After Katherine Harris’s faux felon-purge in Florida, the Congressional Black Caucus demanded a way for wrongfully purged voters to still get their ballot.
Karl Rove agreed. Not a good sign.
So the Bush administration invented the “provisional” ballot. If your name doesn’t appear on the voter registry, you can ask for a provisional ballot.
A better term would be “placebo” ballot. It makes you think you voted, but you haven’t.
I spoke with John Brakey of AUDIT-AZ. The poll-watching group filed complaints in 2004 with the Arizona Secretary of State after Brakey witnessed several poll workers forcing voters to vote on provisional ballots. Mr. Brakey, these wouldn’t be, uh, Latino voters, would they? “The poll workers were asking people their names and checking the list. One voter had the name Juarez. The poll workers looked it up as a W—and then pushed him over to a provisional.”
Arizona responded by putting an end to the practice— that is, an end to the poll watching. Brakey was arrested in 2008 while monitoring a polling station.
The Congressional Black Caucus voted for HAVA. They won legal voters the right to get a provisional ballot—but, unfortunately, not the right to have it counted.
In Florida, I met Willie Steen—hospital orderly, father, and felon. Well, actually, he’s not a felon, but Katherine Harris listed him as one because some guy named William O’Steen had committed a crime. In Harris’s defense, it was an easy mix-up because, despite having different names, both were listed as BLA in her database.13
Anyway, Steen took his five-year-old boy to the polling place to show him how democracy worked. The lesson was instructive. They told Steen’s son that because of daddy’s criminal record, he couldn’t vote. Steen, who never had even a parking ticket, could now ask for a provisional ballot, and the record could be checked.
And indeed, once they check the record, they’d find he’d been wrongly listed as a felon. And so his provisional ballot would not be counted. There is zero provision for correcting the errors that lead to the purge in the first place.
In 2008, well over 2.1 million US citizens were given provisional ballots because they were not legal voters (felons, aliens, the insane, had fraudulent voting addresses, etc.). Given that illegal voting is a go-to-jail crime, America is apparently in the grip of a crime wave involving millions of ne’er-do-wells.
And how many arrests for the criminal attempts to vote with provisional ballots? Uh, zero. Zero out of a million supposedly illegal voters. (They are easy to find: they sign their names on the provisional ballot, a second crime.)
But maybe, just maybe, these are not criminals but victims of a crime: the crime of deliberately preventing citizens from voting.
But they could be criminals. We know that because most of them are BLA or HISP.
Now, let’s get back to the Acoma Pueblo where the poisoned are facing off at the ballot box with the poisoners. Two hundred received provisional ballots and sent them to the county clerk, a pro-poison politician.
He rejected every single one of them.
And for good reason: they were not sealed in official provisional ballot envelopes.
And for good reason: the clerk never sent the pueblo the official provisional ballot envelopes.
Captain Iglesias didn’t like the smell of that. The US attorney swooped down and brought a federal complaint against the county officials for disenfranchising the Native Americans.
The officials, by the way, were all Democrats.
But Karl Rove was, apparently, not at all pleased. Here was the proof of vote fraud and a bust of corrupt Democrats, but to Republican Party officials this was not the job Iglesias was sent to do.
The problem was that Iglesias was not supposed to bust officials defrauding voters—he was supposed to bust the voters.
Captain Iglesias didn’t get it. So they got him.
Question: Pueblo Indians are Democrats through and through. Why did Democrats steal votes from Democrats?
Why do so many ballots disappear in America? And, why, weirdly, so many from Indian reservations?
TOSSING Provisional Ballots: A creature of the Help America Vote Act. When a citizen finds their name has been wrongly purged from the voter rolls, the voter may demand one of these “provisional” ballots. Like a placebo, the voter leaves the polling station happy, believes their vote has been counted. Once the voter is out of sight, most of these quasi-ballots are thrown out.
Ballot-tossing has a notable color scheme: Most tossers are white and most of the tossed are not.
Follow the money. Follow the Koch Oil truck and the BP drill bits.
You can’t siphon off someone’s oil, nor poison their kids, nor take away their land and life and liberty unless you take away their vote.
Here is the key to understanding vote suppression:
No One Steals Votes to Win an Election.
Every crime requires two elements: motive and opportunity. Opportunity is how it’s done. Motive is why it’s done.
So why steal votes, spoil ballots, purge registrations? Don’t tell me, “To steal elections.” Well, duh! That’s like saying a safe-cracker’s motivation is to get into a bank vault. No, the bank burglar’s motive is not to get inside the vault but to get the money out of it.
This is crucial: When I went back to the Harvard study data, back to the raw EAC data, I found that poor whites do just as badly in the noncount as blacks and Hispanics. We see race in the stats because in America, skin color and poverty have an ugly correlation. But the noncount, county-by-county, leads to this uglier truth: vote theft is class war by other means.
Do the math: if the entire 99 percent voted, the 1 percent would not win an awful lot of elections. Democracy is the socialism of power.
Tom Paine said that. But then, they wouldn’t let him vote either.
Indeed, as more African Americans and Latinos join the 1 percent, some are happy to yelp, “Tally-ho!” and join in the hunt of the poor voter.
Before Paine exiled himself to France (where they wouldn’t let him vote either), he warned us about the disenfranchisement of the poor by the rich through the power of their purse:
“Personal rights, of which the right of voting for representatives is one, are a species of property of the most sacred kind: and he that would employ his pecuniary property, or presume upon the influence it gives him, to dispossess or rob another of his property or rights, uses that pecuniary property as he would use fire-arms.”
In other words, when a rich guy uses his money to influence an election, it’s no different than armed robbery.