by Greg Palast
“I was upset. I was ashamed—with 40 people around—it made me feel real bad. And I’m just hoping I get a letter stating, hey, you can vote again, Willie.
“I really feel it was bad for African-Americans—but hey, what can we do sometimes? What can we do?”
* * *
Florida 2000 was the wave of the future. The urge to purge went national. In 2004, Ohio purged thousands, though their law allows ex-cons to vote. Texas, which also allows almost all ex-cons to vote, somehow found 525,967 of them registered illegally. Every one was wiped off the voter lists, but, strangely, none busted for the crime of illegal registration. Not to worry. If any voter was wronged, they could ask for a provisional ballot. However, it would not be counted.
My favorite is Colorado. Just weeks before the 2004 election, Colorado’s Secretary of State Donetta Davidson removed 6,000 supposed felons from the state’s voter rolls. In Colorado, convicts lose their vote only while serving time. There’s not one verified case of a Colorado con voting illegally from the big house. It is unlikely that Davidson’s list contained many, if any, potential illegal voters. But it does contain Democrats, overwhelmingly so. And the timing of Davidson’s operation is more than a bit suspect. Federal law bars purges within 90 days of a presidential election to allow a voter to challenge his loss of civil rights. To exempt her action from the federal rule, Republican Secretary of State Davidson declared an “emergency.” However, the only “emergency” in Colorado seems to have been George Bush’s running dead even with John Kerry in the state’s opinion polls.
“Caging” lists, fake felon purges, forged registration forms, evidence tampering, “Black arts” surveillance ops, disappeared absentee ballots, cracked computers. Whatever happened to simply persuading the voters you’ve got the best candidate?
Smooth Criminals?
Voter snuffing really is illegal, Mr. President.
For those who think that Florida’s ballot machinations may have been criminal, there is some official corroboration. On July 15, 2004, the United States Civil Rights Commission requested I testify about BBC’s and Harper’s evidence (I don’t turn over notes or sources) on the felon purge. The Commissioners then voted to request a federal investigation into whether Florida’s highest officials “engineered,” in their words, a racially bent scrub of voter rolls.
* * *
Republican High
The GOP seemed to get awfully lucky with registration switches to the Republican Party in critical counties in swing states. There were the switches in “Little Texas” in New Mexico, and an amazing number of Florida college students, at least 4,000 of them, mostly African-American, who switched to the Republican Party a month before the November 2004 election.
However, Ion Sancho, the non-partisan elections supervisor in Tallahassee, became suspicious when he received a registration switch from one new Republican: his stepdaughter. Look at this signature; it’s not a bad forgery. The students, it turns out, thought they had signed a petition to legalize use of marijuana for medical purposes. Covered over by the “legalize pot” sign-up sheet was a registration change form. The form requires two signatures. The second signature was forged, copied from the one obtained by the “pot” fraud. The students, doubly registered, then lost their right to vote altogether. Elections supervisor Sancho immediately called the cops, but Governor Jeb Bush’s state police informed him that they would be too busy to investigate until after Election Day. They never did.
In Ohio, it was much simpler. Statistician Anthony Fairfax discovered that Black voters were twice as likely as white voters to have their mail-in registrations simply rejected. In Congresswoman Katherine Harris’s district in Florida, Democrats found that, though they submitted registration forms on time, they were entered on the voter rolls only after the deadline, barring them from voting in the Presidential race.
* * *
The vote to dig into “the possibility of criminal violations” of federal law was proposed by Civil Rights Commissioner Chris Edley who is Dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley.
Justice triumphs! Almost. The Commissioners can’t conduct their own criminal probe, which, by law, is handled for them by the Justice Department. They formally requested Attorney General John Ashcroft send investigators to Florida. A year after the election, the Commission was still waiting.
It would be unfair to say President Bush ignored the Commission’s request. Shortly after his reelection, the president replaced Edley, the law school dean, and got rid of Mary Frances Berry, who chaired the Commission and who voted with Edley to investigate the President’s brother.
PART 5
DEMOCRATS CONCEDE 2008
Think of the new computer black boxes as a convenience: You may already have voted in 2008, they just haven’t told you how.
New Mexico ’04 is America ’08
When Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris rustled Election 2000, I couldn’t get American editors interested in Florida. In 2004, I couldn’t get them off it. Like generals refighting the last war, their eyes were glued to Jeb’s latest ballot-bending games in the Sunshine State. I just couldn’t sell sending a crew to film low riders in Rattlesnake, New Mexico, or worse, Columbus, Ohio, the dullest city in the USA.
The real topic of this chapter is Election 2008.
As they prepare for 2008, the GOP is deeply concerned about voting rights: the fewer the better. In 2006, Republican Governor Bobby Taft, fresh from his conviction on a handful of ethical crimes, signed off on roughly one hundred changes to Ohio’s voting laws. His legal trim job won’t stop Democrats from voting in 2008; it’s just that fewer of their votes will count.
But for the real action in 2008, go west, young man. Just as wiping out Black voters in Florida in 2000 was practice for Ohio in ’04, New Mexico ’04 is the test site for disenfranchising the new demographic goliath, the Hispanic vote, that will decide ’08. Republicans, who have turned the American Dream into American Mean, are surprised that Mexican-American voters still don’t feel welcome in their party. Therefore, the voting machinery must be adjusted to correct for these voters’ error in judgment.
Provisional Democrats
The Democrats’ concession speech for 2008 is written in the provisional ballots of New Mexico. I said at the outset of this tale that 21,084 ballots were not counted in the Land of Enchantment. In addition to these votes spoiled, 6,593 of those new-wave “provisional” ballots—more than Bush’s margin—were rejected. They might as well have been tossed in the garbage can.
Easily the worst county in New Mexico was McKinley, with a population three-fourths Navajo, where 6% of the voters were shunted to provisional ballots. An extraordinary 60% of these were effectively dumped in the bin.
After Navajo country, the next highest boatload of provisionals were unleashed on Dona Ana County, where two-thirds of the population is Hispanic. Our research team pored through the arcane stats and found that, in the Chicano precincts of Dona Ana, voters were at least 1,200% more likely to be pushed to a provisional ballot than voters in white majority counties. What’s frightening is that New Mexico is horribly typical of the American West. Its higher total of missing votes simply reflects its huge “minority” population.
But hold on a minute. Where were those legions of Democratic lawyers I’d read about, ready to fight to the death for the right to vote?
In the ten days after the polls closed, the lawyers showed up all right: Republican lawyers, a phalanx of expensive suits lined up to challenge the rights of thousands of darker-skinned voters to have their provisional ballots counted. These provisional ballots held Kerry votes, no question, and the Republican suits wanted them trashed. That’s no surprise. Across the table, they faced the opposition of… no one. The Democratic Party, $51 million left unspent on Election Day, refused to send in its A-team to defend the rights of the challenged voters. Instead, the Green Party sent out a frantic e-mail note to its activists for emergency enlistment of volunteers.
The Greenies’ ponytail crew didn’t stand a chance, and the Democrats lost the votes that would have changed the election.
Why did the Dems just roll over? Hold that question.
Lord, Save Us from “Reform”
Native votes are eaten by bad machines, Bush is picking up votes from the dearly departed, voters named “Rodriguez” and “Hernandez” get those bouncing provisional ballots, absentees go absent and New Mexico’s politicians are right there with the fix: A major “reform” bill that will require voters to show photo IDs at the polling station. Say what?
Dear Lord, save us from “reform.” Almost every evil, devious little improvement in vote-bending originates in some voting “reform” law. The requirement for a photo ID, a hot item for Republicans in almost every state of the Union, was another vote-heist horror show masquerading as reform and voter protection.
The sales pitch for requiring ID is to prevent someone illegally voting by using someone else’s name. The notable thing about this crime is that it doesn’t happen. You are more likely to encounter ballot boxes that spontaneously combust. There are voters struck by lightning, some die after mailing in their ballots (there were a dozen in Arapahoe County, Colorado), but out of tens of millions of votes cast, it’s quite a hunt to find a single criminal case of a bandit stealing someone’s identity merely to cast a vote for the local school board.
So I was amazed to hear that New Mexico state legislator Justine Fox-Young (that’s really her name) claimed to have “several” specific cases of vote identity rustling. Like Joe McCarthy waving his list of Communists in the State Department! I called Ms. Fox-Young.
Q: Justine, you’ve uncovered felony criminals. Do you have the names?
A: Oh, yes!
Q: Really? Wow! Did you turn these names over to the Attorney General of New Mexico or U.S. Attorney?
A: Well, no, someone…well, no, but someone did. I should say there were no convictions.
Q: You had evidence of a crime and you didn’t have the bad guys arrested?
A: Not exactly. There were cases monitored by the FBI.
Of course, dear. And she promised to fax me the names and evidence the next day. That was exciting: If I turned them in, maybe I would get a reward. I’m still waiting.
She called two days later saying that, despite having been unable to send me the evidence, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, a Republican, could back her story. Now, here’s a woman who reportedly flapped documents in the air—here is the evidence!—showing ID theft. First, her fax machine appears to be broken and now I’m sent to the U.S. Attorney. So I dialed her man, Assistant U.S. Attorney Norm Cairns.
After telling me the FBI is conducting lots of investigations surrounding allegations about the elections, I finally jumped into the deep, wide flow of bullshit to ask Norm,
GP: In other words, you can’t back her story?
U.S. Attorney Norm: Well, yeah, uh, I guess you’d say that’s true.
I guess I will say that, Norm.
GP: And how many people have been indicted during this crime wave of voter identity theft while you’ve been on the job?
U.S. Attorney Norm: None.
Still, what’s wrong with asking people to show their ID? I threw that at Santiago Juárez—and he exploded.
“You know”—Santiago put on a cop voice—“‘show me your ID!’ You have Mexicanos that are born here that are stopped by the police and say, ‘Do you have your papers?’ It’s another emotional clamp of a society where you are never invited.
“In Roswell,” he explained, “I grew up with signs that said, ‘No Mexicans, niggers or dogs allowed.’” In Roswell today, Kunko-land, signs are more subtle. PHOTO ID REQUIRED gives the same “not allowed” message to Chicano voters who don’t have the plastic and club memberships that thicken the wallets of the Albuquerque suburbanites of Fox-Young’s Northeast Heights district.
But, I challenged Santiago, Ms. Fox-Young’s fear is that someone could rig an election by having their supporters vote under others’ names.
Santiago replied, “How do you organize thousands of people to vote twice? Hell, it’s hard enough organizing them to vote once.”
The Dangerous Christian
In 2004, three-quarters of a million provisional ballots were thrown out—supposedly illegal voters, yet not one arrest. In seven states, lack of the correct ID card was the key reason for trashing a voter’s provisional ballot. Not a lack of ID, but the “wrong” one.
And who had the “wrong” IDs? The EAC reports that almost all provisional ballots rejected were from twenty-five “urban” areas. Any guesses about the color of the “urb”?
But this creates a dilemma for the Republican National Committee. With rejections that high, how can you go higher? Answer: new ID requirements. Next problem for the GOP: Could they find Democrats to front the newest scheme?
There were plenty. For example, in 2005, enough Caucasian Democrats in Georgia’s legislature joined Republicans to pass a law requiring a special ID card to vote. If you had no driver’s license, you could get a voter ID card—for $20. But you’d need an ID to get the ID.
There was an impediment to Georgia’s new ID law: the U.S. Constitution. The Twenty-fourth Amendment bars “poll taxes,” a fee used in Jim Crow days to keep Blacks and poor Catholics from voting. The Amendment was added in 1964 after America was made ill by photos of Georgia gentlemen beating the crap out of African-American voting-rights workers. (During those one-sided battles, one Georgia gentleman used ax handles to stop desegregation of his diner. He was elected governor of the state.) In 2004, George Bush’s Justice Department approved Georgia’s new ID scam but federal judges quickly enjoined it as an ill-disguised poll tax.
In light of the court’s and the party’s resistance to voter ID cards, the Republicans would need a Democratic cat’s paw to sell IDs as nonpartisan “reforms.” It was not easy for the Republicans to find a dupe of the stature required.
James Earl Carter, who succeeded the axman as Governor of Georgia, is a born-again Christian. God help us. A grown man who calls himself “Jimmy,” he finds something good in everyone.22
As sincere as he is witless, former President Carter was perfect for the Republicans’ ID plan. George Bush had in 2001 already named Carter and ex-President Gerald Ford to head an earlier blue ribbon panel to “reform” elections. That panel came up with reasonably good recommendations including ending the entire game of “purging” exfelons from voter rolls. However, eliminating ex-felon purges would give two million Democrats back their voting rights (93% of all former prisoners vote Democratic if given a chance). Bush’s reaction to giving them the vote? I cannot say if Bush had Karl Rove ritually burn the Carter-Ford report or merely let it suffocate in a file cabinet.
In 2005, the GOP, having ignored the first panel, started over with a second. Bush again appointed Carter, but this time, the nice Jerry Ford was pushed down the stairs and replaced as co-chair of the new panel by…James Baker III. No one calls James Baker “Jimmy.”
By September, the deed was done and the Baker-Carter Election Reform Commission issued its report. Gone was the recommendation to end the ex-con purges. In its place: A mandatory national voter ID card. Some skeptical panel members noted that, for a century, matching voters’ signatures to their registration signatures had, without costing votes or money, stopped identity theft. But Carter, with Baker’s hand in his finger holes, wrote, “We think citizens would prefer to get a free photo ID”! Certainly, ChoicePoint, Inc., of Georgia would prefer it. The new national ID card required only a little expansion of the PATRIOT act, the un–civil rights law.
Jimmy Carter once said, “America deserves a government as good as its people.” Unfortunately, that’s what we get.
The Kissinger-American
Kerry won New Mexico—if you counted the votes. I could see how the non-count could happen in the plantation lands of Little Texas. But one fact drove me straight nuts: In the end, this state and its damaged
elections were in the hands of a Democrat and a Mexican-American one at that.
Or maybe not. I knew it was not a polite question, but it was really bugging me, so I asked Santiago Juárez, “Exactly how does a Mexican get the name William Richardson?”
Governor Richardson’s dad, he explained, was a Citibank executive assigned to Mexico City. There he met Governor Bill’s mom, and—milagro!—a Mexican-American was born. Richardson gets big mileage out of his mother’s heritage, and that makes him, legitimately, a Mexican-American, a politically useful designation. But it’s just as legitimate to say that Richardson is a Citibank-American.
But Governor Richardson is more than that. Between leaving Bill Clinton’s cabinet where he was Secretary of Energy and grabbing a Hispanic-district seat in Congress, Richardson became a partner in (Henry) Kissinger and Associates. That would make Richardson a Kissinger-American as well.
In New Mexico the issue of uncounted votes is more than skin deep. Lots of Mexican-American votes don’t tally, but Citibank-American votes never get lost. Kissinger-American votes always count. The story of America’s failed elections is not about undervotes. It’s about underclass. Disenfranchisement is class warfare by other means. It just happens that in New Mexico, the colors of the underclass are, for the most part, brown and red.
