DID KERRY REALLY WIN THE ELECTION?

Greg Palast says Kerry really won. In an article at

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php" title="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php" target="_blank"http://www.tompaine.com/artic...

" 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.
At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed
Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to
47 percent.  The exit polls were later combined with—
and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results,
ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote.
 [To read about the skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here .] 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.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote
game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and
pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the
voters but by something called "spoilage."
Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the
vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the
bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state
was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ...
it has never happened in the United States, because the
total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television
totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

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.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again.
Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking
Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes
(called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding
we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the
vote-spoiling punch-card machines.
And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, 
wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close
election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting
device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican,
has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines
that have a habit of eating Democratic votes.
When asked if he feared being this year's
Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's
efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time?
Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law
requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time,
the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a
democracy-damaging 1.96 percent.
The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

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.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming,
but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters
getting these funky "provisional" ballots—
a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not
be counted. Blackwell estimates there were
175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number.
But as challenges were aimed at minorities,
no one doubts these are, again,
overwhelmingly Democratic.

Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards
(easy to tally with the human eye in a recount),
and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and,
golly, you've got yourself a new president.

Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

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.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are
popping up in the election stats, exactly where
we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled
by Republican elections officials.

Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico,
has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African
Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush
"won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before
the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate
among Hispanics simply indicated that such people
simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate
for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the
desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally
of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy,"
Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of
provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship"
program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico,
told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he
identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the
iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given
provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind
"almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when
there was the least question about a voter's
identification. Some voters, Santiago said,
were simply turned away."

============SNIP========= =================
What bothers me is that a group of interested parties,
after the heat of the election of 2000 cooled, did a
massive recount of all votes and concluded that
Al Gore really won. Was anything done about THAT?

NO! Why the hell NOT? From what I can see, in
BOTH elections, the modus operandi of the Bush cartel,
is to get a perceived win, by any means necessary,
and then to try to quash any real effort to find out
who really won the election, primarily by making the
Democrats afraid to look like sore losers if they
demand further investigations.

It further underlines what I have said before.
The Bush Reich, much like the Third Reich, is
corrupt to the core. It is all about creating a perception
that then becomes reality in the mind of the gullible.

As they say, don't look at the man behind the curtain,
the Great and Powerful OZ...why? Because there IS
no magic, just smoke and mirrors.

Bush is the emperor with no clothes, and although
there are plenty of us out here SAYING he has no clothes...

unfortunately, the masses have put stoppers in their ears,
wrapped themselves in their comforters, got a
hot toddy in their hands, and have gone back to
their Matrix like lives of delusion.

The movie, The Matrix is actually a great metaphor
for real life in America. The people have become
deluded that Bush is a "Christian man", that he
protects them from the Boogeyman Bin Laden,
and the "tare-ists", and if takes all your rights and
all your money in the process, then, well, I guess
it's all right, right? HELL NO IT'S NOT RIGHT!

As we see the rats leaving the ship in staggered
droves, we can say a fond farewell to the
snake handling, "Let the Eagle Soar" singing Ashcroft,
and I suppose, before long,
Donald "There are Known Unknowns" Rumsfeld,
Don "the economy is great" Evans..and we will see
others leave.

They in turn, will be replaced by a new cast of villains.
But, the new villains will not be as high profile or
idiosyncratic as these were.

No, the new folks will be more low key, more faceless,
more subservient.

They will no doubt go through the same
Stepford Wife Transformation Factory that robot Laura
went through. They will be the kind of good automatons
that the Second Infection / Bush Reich term two, demands.

So, Kerry won...Hooray! But, he ain't in the White House.

Someone should look into this! :)