GOP Election Shenanigans #2

The excerpts below were published on November 3 (click on the link to read the entire article), the day before the Presidential Election. The author has explained how voting and the ballots can be manipulated, but there was far more to the GOP attempts to deny the vote through intimidation, failing to provide adequate polling places, failing to provide adequate machines in polling places, moving polling places, misleading mailings and misinformation, and of course, Black Box Voting.

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That a Democrat prevailed against such overwhelming election tactics should not lull us into a false sense of security. Our flawed voting system needs to be corrected. And prosecution is a given.

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How McCain Could Win

It's November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the "Bradley effect": Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats' Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
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That's the nightmare. Here's the cold reality.
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Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
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Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still "disappeared" from the lists this week.
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Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
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Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
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And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
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The Ugly Secret
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Here's an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don't count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: "spoiled," unreadable and blank ballots; "provisional" ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
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This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
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That's what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004.
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A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
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Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation's vote registries. And that's just the start of the steal.
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If the noncount were random, it wouldn't matter. But it's not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter's ballot will "spoil" or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter's.
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Does that mean the election's stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot (there's a link at the end).
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How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
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Here's how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.
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Step One: The "Dumpster" Vote - Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
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Then there's New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
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Step Two: "Verification" (and Elimination) of New Voters
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In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations ....
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That's also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants.
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Step Three: New ID Laws
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New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million - and that's way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana's.
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Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
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In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, "spoiled," because the machines lost them, couldn't read them, mangled them or simply didn't register them. But it's not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts - a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican "victory" margin in that state.
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In the primaries and in 2006, the "spoilage" and blank ("undervote") totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the "spoilage" total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. ("Spoilage" is not the same as vote tampering. There is the concern that "black-box" computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That's another matter completely - and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I'm not including here.)
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Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
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...the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn't know that. They're counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope - Got that? - or your vote is toast. I've spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes - though he only received one.
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Greg Palast is the co-author of "Block the Vote," in this month's Rolling Stone Magazine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast and Kennedy are also co-authors of the investigative comic book, "Steal Back Your Vote." Palast, who reports on election fraud for BBC Television, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation fellow for investigative reporting. Prior to his becoming a journalist, Palast was a forensic economist, fraud investigator and taught economics and statistics at Indiana University. palast@gregpalast.net