by Greg Palast
The Undead Vote for Bush
Your fevered conspiracy-prone brains are already saying, Bush won because Kerry’s votes weren’t counted. Yes, that’s true. But what about the voters that don’t exist?
Look at the map of Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) on the facing page. George Bush swept Precinct 512, winning 206 votes out of 166 ballots cast. That’s right: Bush tallied more votes than voters.
Bush also won Precinct 558, where 178 absentee voters produced a remarkable 319 votes.
They don’t call New Mexico the “Land of Enchantment” for nothing.
What makes these precincts special besides the large number of ballots cast by spirits? Answer: Three out of four ghost votes were tallied in Bush precincts.
Kerry wasn’t so lucky. Democratic Precinct 14 reported 114 out of 207 ballots showed no mark for President. Democratic stronghold Precinct 46 had a vanishing vote problem—half the absentee ballots recorded no choice for President.
Almost every precinct recording more votes than voters went for George Bush; whereas almost all precincts with huge votes uncounted are Kerry’s. Every case, every time. Extra votes—Bush’s. Votes lost—Kerry’s. Just look at the map.
The official poltergeist vote in New Mexico was 2,087. But normal “undervoting” masked the total of “extra” votes. Statistically corrected, the ghost vote was higher—a small sum, true, but about half of George Bush’s “victory” margin in the state. Before you leap to conclusions, let’s just say that George Bush is very popular among the undead.
Push-Button Smallpox
What happened to the missing votes?
I’m not going to pretend this was the most difficult investigative story I’ve worked. We didn’t need to call on Sherlock Holmes. In Ohio, the Black Stain of spoiled votes traced directly to bad punch-card machines in the ghetto. In New Mexico, the Red-Brown Tide of spoiled votes corresponded directly to the type of machine used in Native and Hispanic precincts.
Ghost voters for Bush in Albuquerque
Precincts with extra votes shown as ghosts. The white zones are Republican majority precincts. (Data mapped by Prof. Sonja Klveck Elison and Walther Eric Elison. County map courtesy Bernalillo County, New Mexico.)
The old push-button ballot boxes made by Sequoia did just awful. One in ten Native Americans faced with these cheap push-button machines appeared to make no choice for President. But give New Mexico’s Indians a new iVotronics machine and suddenly their indecision disappears. A handful of Native precincts were given some of the newer, flashy machines and, behold! only one in 200 Natives using the upgraded equipment failed to make a choice for President.
Same for Hispanics. Put them in front of an old “Shouptronic” push-button machine and 7.4% of them (one in 13) do not register a vote for President. But, the stats tell us, give a Chicano a good optical scanning machine to use, and 399 out of 400 will choose a President.
This suggests an alternative to the Kunko–Vigil-Giron theory that these citizens waited in line to register their non-vote. Maybe the machines dumped into Native and Hispanic communities are crap. Maybe they don’t work right. And maybe some politicians know they don’t work right and like it that way.
So who got the easy-to-use machines and who got the cheap castoffs? We don’t wipe out Indians anymore by giving them blankets infected with smallpox. We just let them vote on obsolete Shouptronics.
No-Count Champs
If we’re talking machine spoilage, we have to return to Florida to speak with the champ, Dick Carlberg. While the entire state of New Mexico in 2004 had 21,000-some spoiled votes, a single county in Florida, Duval, had a stunning 27,000 ruined ballots in the 2000 election—11,000 of that total from just five precincts.
I should say, “five Black precincts,” 72% African-American according to the Census. Jacksonville is a city more divided than Berlin when the wall was up. The acting elections supervisor in that race, Dick Carlberg, from the white side of the wall, was in charge of counting the vote on the Black side. Those votes were cast on some ancient punch-card machines. At the elections office, Dick was happy to explain to me how he counted those votes. In a voice sticky sweet with Southern charm, he explained that he put the cards through an automatic reader, which just doesn’t read too well if a card isn’t “clean punched.” He ran the cards through once, and thousands indicated no vote for President. When he ran those through again, the punches opened a little more and Al Gore picked up another 160 votes, George Bush just 80.
Bush officially won Florida by 537 votes. Carlberg knew the count was whisker-close when he did his second run. Then he stopped counting.
“So, Dick, if you ran the ‘blank’ ballots through a few more times, we’d have a different President,” I noted. The Republican gave me a big, wide grin and wouldn’t answer.
On a per-voter basis, another county did worse on the count in 2000, far worse. It wasn’t Palm Beach where the strangely designed “butterfly ballot” switched Democratic votes to the Brown Shirt candidate, Pat Buchanan. The TV networks crawled all over Palm Beach where reporters can “investigate” while sipping piña coladas on the beach and filling their dispatches with “honey shots” of the toned and wealthy sporting thong bikinis. Well, yes, I did that, too. But our BBC crew also traveled to beachless Gadsden, the Blackest and poorest of Florida’s sixty-seven counties where one in twelve votes spoiled. In the county seat we found a Black township that would have fit well in South Africa, with busted-out store fronts—and busted voting machines.
Here’s how it worked. Gadsden used optical scanners to read the paper ballots. Any stray mark, easy to make, and zap!—the vote was trashed. How odd. In upscale Tallahassee, next door, they used paper ballots and in the last election did not lose one single vote! The difference is as simple as Black and white. Make a stray mark on a Tallahassee ballot, and zap!— the ballot returns to the voter.
But with all the new loot available for new machines, the public screaming for “reform,” how do you keep the Gadsdens, the Rio Arribas and the Taos Pueblos from having their full vote recorded? The machines changed but the ballot-count apartheid has remained. How does it happen?
It’s easy: Launch Jim Crow into cyberspace.
PART 3
JIM CROW GOES DIGITAL
Sharp readers notice that I’ve avoided a lot of the talk about computer voting and evidence that those computer “black-box” machines were just plain fixed. That’s because we have a less dramatic answer at hand for missing votes: “There’s this Hollywood idea of stealing them [elections]… this sexual thing where, ‘Ah, man! We caught ’em!’ and they were switching votes on the computer and stuff like that,” Santiago Juárez told me, frustrated that Anglo “reformers” cared more about the unknown dangers of touchscreen machines and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about IDs for low riders. “But actually, elections are stolen in ways that aren’t elegant—they’re not Hollywoodish—but they are real effective at suppressing the vote.”
But computers can add a high-tech touch to the old game: Generating lots and lots of digital spoilage; and unlike punch cards, it’s hard to detect, impossible to correct.
And the Lords of the Voting Universe know it, and that drives Ion Sancho just nuts. The dean of Florida’s elections supervisors is the one who posted the zero-spoilage perfect election count in 2002. He knew all about the Gadsden “Black-out” machines before the 2000 election and warned Governor Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
Katherine, as her last act before moving to Congress, ordered all counties to switch to computer “touch screens.” Now, that’s downright odd, says Sancho, because:
1. Computer touch screens produce unrecorded votes at a rate 600% higher than paper ballots with “try it again” scanners.
2. Computer touch screens cost 400% more than the paper-and-scanner combo.
3. With paper, you can recount the vote, check the vote and see with your eyeballs how the voter voted. With computers—forget it.
Could the answer be that it’s not their votes that are lost? The giant differential in spoilage between paper and computer is far higher in minority precincts than white ones, by a factor of three. And someone likes it that way. One such someone is Governor Jeb Bush. After the 2000 embarrassment, Governor Bush appointed a high-sounding “Select Task Force on Elections Procedures.” Apparently, Jeb Bush didn’t select carefully because these experts, to his dismay, called for using paper ballots statewide. They rejected computers. Never mind. Bush overruled them.
You can’t recount a computer vote—something the Bush family finds attractive. Florida’s statutory right to a recount in close races was frustrating Jeb’s desire to digitize democracy. The problem was overcome by Jeb Bush’s replacement for Katherine Harris, Republican Glenda Hood. She helped her boss by issuing a fiat, voiding the right to recount ballots for counties with computer voting.
Leon County elections supervisor Sancho objected. Hood replies that Sancho is “not a team player.” He certainly isn’t. Just for fun, and calling on my rusting skills as an adjunct professor of statistics, I asked Sancho, prior to the 2004 election, to calculate with me the number of Florida votes that would be spoiled because of computerization. The prediction proved accurate in November 2004, with over 25,000 votes lost in computers in the counties where 53.6% of the state’s African-Americans vote.
Governor Jeb gave computers a test run in 2002 in Broward County. The computer system was chosen over the objections of Broward’s Democratic elections supervisor, Miriam Oliphant. On the day of the 2002 gubernatorial primaries, the new computers crashed, machines wouldn’t boot up into operating mode and, all agree, thousands of African-Americans lost their vote. In other words, the test was a success and the vote-eating system was immediately rolled out statewide.
(In response to the computer fiasco, Jeb Bush fired the supervisor who had objected to their use. He replaced her, a Black Democrat, with a Republican who would become, as we will see, very helpful to George Bush in the 2004 race.)
If computers were good enough for Florida, they were good enough for America. Brother George’s Help America Vote Act pushed $2 billion at the states to go digital.
Ignore That Man Behind the Screen, Dorothy
There are good reasons why the Lord wrote down the Ten Commandments on stone tablets and not on a computer chip. He didn’t want Moses choosing just his favorite six.
The sun had not set on Election Day when The San Jose Mercury News gave us the good news:
No Major Glitches Reported with Electronic Voting Machines.
I was glad to hear that! But I had a question for the Mercury and all the other papers that had repeated this happy news, “How do you know?” Exactly what tests of the computer processors did you conduct, what electronic log audit did you review, what paper trail did you follow? Exactly how, my journalist comrades, did you conclude that the new touch-screen voting machines recorded the vote as voters intended?
If the computers are hacked, if the central tabulators in far-off locations are messed with, what exactly did you expect to see—smoke rising from the computer tabulators? A siren going off with a metallic voice screeching, I’ve been hacked! I’ve been hacked!?
Why is it that America’s media elite nearly broke its collective legs in rushing to report that all was A-OK with the touch-screen machines used by 36 million voters? The voters themselves, at exit polls, said they voted for Kerry, but the computers tell us they were lying: The computers said that more people secretly voted for Bush. The computers never get it wrong, are never messed with, never crash.
We hope.
I’m not going to tell you that the computers were hacked on November 2. I don’t know. But for the Media-Bush Axis to pronounce that all went well, that no one toyed with our tallies, without taking twenty minutes to check out the weird data leaking out, is journalism that would have made Pravda proud.
There’s too much evidence of systematic anomalies and problems to say, “All’s well, sleep tight.”
A month after the election, I flew to Columbus, Ohio, and met with investigators Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman. Unlike the Mercury and the rest of the media’s see-no-evil gang, Fitrakis and Wasserman thought they should actually get these basic documents that backed up the touch-screen tallies. As was their right under the states’ Freedom of Information Law. They petitioned officials in the state to produce their voting-machine backup logs. The first reply was none too comforting.
The backup tapes have been destroyed so as not to conflict with the official tally and create confusion.
Huh? The computer logs were different than the “official” totals… so the county did the right thing: threw the evidence in the garbage.
Wasserman and Fitrakis were gob smacked—not just because the true vote was tossed out but because, as lawyers, they told me that chucking voting records is a crime. But heck, if a presidental election can be shoplifted, early recycling of some official papers seems like pretty small stuff.
What about the other counties? Once the two lawyers started raising a stink, the other counties simply refused to hand over the records.
I’d feel a whole lot better about democracy-in-a-box if I could get a receipt for my vote. I get a receipt for a Slurpee, I get a bank statement on my ATM withdrawals, why not a receipt for my choice for president? And by “receipt,” I don’t mean something you take out of the voting booth. That wouldn’t do much good. The “receipt” is a printed copy of your ballot with all choices marked. Put that printed paper ballot in a locked box at the polling station and—voilá!—any questions about the computer can be answered by matching them to the ballots it printed.
But, we were told, that can’t be done.
But it can be. Maybe not in Third World places like Florida or Ohio, but it was accomplished in Venezuela. There, President Hugo Chávez, facing a recall vote, feared that opposition governors would steal the election. All the voting booths in the nation were converted to computers that printed paper ballots—so you could see and touch your ballot (or smell and taste it, if you wished). Chávez won by a million votes—and when the Bush Administration yowled at the outcome, Chávez said, “Well, recount the votes.” A fair election with verified paper audit: one more reason to hate Hugo Chávez.
By the way, Venezuela’s computer vote machines that could, astonishingly, print out ballots, were made in Florida.
Back in the USA, Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc., the company with the funky push-button machines that ate the Chicano vote in New Mexico, was busy rolling out its new computer democracy machines. Three months before the 2004 election the company showed off its new touch-screen box to the California State Legislature with a way-cool button that could switch the screen from English to Spanish. It worked perfectly—until you counted the votes. The choices of those who used the English-language screen tallied just fine. But if a voter hit the “Español” button, it turns out, their vote didn’t add to the machine’s totals. The company said it was just a glitch they would fix. Maybe they did, but ¿quién sabe?
Voting’s Private Parts
Before the voting in November 2004, New Mexico’s Secretary of State assured me that the voting machines were A-OK and would work perfectly. After the voting, she declared she would clean up the mess she promised could not occur. For the cleanup she hired Ernie Marquez.
Ernie certainly had experience with electoral disaster: He had been the elections director of McKinley County—you remember, the Navajo county with the highest vote loss in the state, if not the country. Ernie’s first task was to deal with questions about the handling of the 2004 vote tally by a private company, AES, Automated Election Services. Ernie knew all about AES. Between his misplacing Navajo votes in McKinley County and taking over the entire state’s elections system, he worked for… AES.
The Secretary of State likes Ernie and AES. And they like her. Enough so that, state records show, in 2002 when Ernie was at AES, the company printed, gratis, the Secretary of State’s campaign literature.
This was just too much affection for Holly Jacobson. Holly’s a soccer mom with a heightened sense of justice and a nose for baloney. She gathered some locals with similarly bad attitudes and good computer skills, pooled some cash, registered themselves as “Voter Action New Mexico,” and teamed with a big-shot elections lawyer from California. Now, the Secretary of State was hit with one nasty lawsuit to investigate the poltergeist votes and missing ballots. The case continues.
Holly’s crew asked Ernie for the “canvass” reports of vote details from each machine in the state. Ernie didn’t have it in his state office. The vote totals were kept by his old employer, AES.
Note what’s happening: “privatization” of the voting system. States have been purchasing more than touch screens. They are outsourcing the blood and bones of vote counting. In New Mexico, AES tallies the count from hundreds of machines at a remote location. Their work is mysterious, proprietary and beyond the scope of public scrutiny. Effectively, the privateers call the winners. Hopefully, the voters influence their choices.
In New Mexico, AES had sole control of the tally files for the presidential election. So what? Here’s what: Holly’s group through sources already had gotten their hands on one canvass report of the presidential vote, machine by machine. When they finally got the state’s official files from AES, something had disappeared: Some of the ghost votes had vanished.
