So you think Bush won the black vote?


In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them -- half of the rejected ballots -- were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.
This year, it could get worse.
These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-'round.
How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It's easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.
While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played -- with black voters the predetermined losers.
Florida's Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state -- and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in "Al Gore." Optical reading machines rejected these because "Al" is a "stray mark."
By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee's white-majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.
In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.
But let's not get smug about Florida's Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.
Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, "It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. -- about 1 million votes -- were cast by nonwhite voters."
This "no count," as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush's office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures.
Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the "spoiled" votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It's not surprising that the First Brother's team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled.
The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation's worst spoilage rates. That's not surprising. Boss Daley's Democratic machine, now his son's, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago's black vote.
How can we fix it? First, let's shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida's black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote.
This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county's procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage.
In other words, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame. Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking.
It is about to get worse. The ill-named "Help America Vote Act," signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.
California decertified some of Diebold Corp.'s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.
And once again, the history of computer-voting glitches has a decidedly racial bias. Florida's Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.
Going digital won't fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts. In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote-spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing 1 million black voters' ballots. Greg Palast is the author of 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - the New Expanded Election Edition," from which this article is taken. The only reason the Dems won this time is the extreme numbers of democratic voters that turned out!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Isn't it interesting that when the Democrats win an election there isn't one flaw in the election process?

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

Yeah Funny, Not one person lost a seat in Texas..... I can't see how Texas is so out of step with the rest of the nation. Of course out here they don't send any sample ballots before the elections. So people are going blind into the voting booth. Also you can't get a referendum on the ballot by petition. It seems as though the state in this case, thinks they know what's better for you.

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The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it. United State Constitution, Art. I Sec. 9 Par. 2

"Dissent is the Highest form of Patriotism" -- Howard Zinn

I'm afraid Texas is bought and paid for! Did I tell you about the dude that got life in Texas for a joint 30 years ago, I wonder if he's still doin time? In Nevada they send out sample ballots a month in advance. They have all the propositions spelled out, even with pro and con statements and rebuttals to the pro and con statements, so the average Dummy has a chance to know what he's voting for. Nevada also has a paper trail on their machines. Too bad they didn't vote the pot iniciative in, it would have been interesting to see the coppers bringing law suits, because they might have to cut some cops, and the lawyers and judges would be squawking also! They're already bringing lawsuits against the smoking ban iniciative that passed in spite of the heavy saturation of ads by the tobacco lobbysts!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Sorry if this is off topic but I thought it was an interesting factoid.

Clinton: Poverty Rate - 13.7% 1996 Budget Allotted For Poverty Entitlements - $191 Billion (12.2% of the total budget)

Bush: Poverty Rate - 12.7% 2006 Budget Allotted For Poverty Entitlements - $368 Billion (14.6% of the total budget)

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The Bill of Rights.....Void where prohibited by Law.

[quote=Smirgen;17698]Sorry if this is off topic but I thought it was an interesting factoid.

Clinton: Poverty Rate - 13.7% 1996 Budget Allotted For Poverty Entitlements - $191 Billion (12.2% of the total budget)

Bush: Poverty Rate - 12.7% 2006 Budget Allotted For Poverty Entitlements - $368 Billion (14.6% of the total budget)[/quote]

Careful there, Smirgen ...

You are setting yourself up for a LOT of name calling for presenting FACTS like that. Physical threats too. Expect a few brilliant PMs that say "FUCK YOU" to come your way also.

As for me ... I'd say, keep posting here in the forum ... you are a breath of fresh air.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

Careful there, Smirgen ...

You are setting yourself up for a LOT of name calling for presenting FACTS like that. Physical threats too. Expect a few brilliant PMs that say "FUCK YOU" to come your way also.

As for me ... I'd say, keep posting here in the forum ... you are a breath of fresh air.

Vi[/quote]
There's no reason for name calling on reasonable posting, no matter what the opinions are. It's when you make personal attacks on every post I make that I decide that there is no reasoning with you, so I just call a spade a spade. If you act like an asshole, expect to be treated as one! If you want to be civil, then act civil and I will cease and desist my name calling. If you posted rebutals to my posting without the line item criticsm, I'm sure I'd be happy to play with you, but you insist on demeaning me line by line and I will not play that game!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

"I'm sure I'd be happy to play with you, but you insist on demeaning me line by line and I will not play that game!"

Med ... If I were to take issue with everything I disagreed with in your politcal posts, I'd run out of time and space, not to mention get writer's cramp. That's why I usually pick out one or two items. And as far as personal attacks go, if you read back through your posts and mine, you'll find the personal attacks on your side FAR ... FAR outweigh mine. When you make broad statements that I don't believe are true, most likely because you are espousing the Democratic Party line, then I challenge that. Usually, I just ask you questions, the answers to which, would cause you to prove your premises. The vast majority of the time, you don't respond with anything more than a "fuck you," or "you're an asshole." Those kinds of responses go against everything I'm trying to do in this forum ... and that is to get people to think. I'm really sorry you feel as you do about me, but my asking you a question is NOT a personal attack.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

You're trying to get people to think like you, and when they don't, you go on the attack. Look, there are many many people, I for one, whom will never agree with your politics. They are the politics of greed and power. Us peons know we have to do mostly what the rich have deemed to be lawful, and eat shit by the buckets full, But we sure as hell don't have to like it!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Have it your way Med. No problem for me at all.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.