Attention lurking Greens: I'll make a deal with you.

The fix was already in:

SILENCE OF THE MEDIA LAMBS: The Election Story Never Told
Greg Palast
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=33&row=2
Thursday, May 24, 2001


Editor's Note: Investigative reporting about voting rights violations in the U.S. have been page one news -- in Britain. Palast is fighting mad about the lack of interest shown by U.S. outlets in stories that are making waves worldwide. His report on what happened to his reporting is the latest media "whistleblower" story on MediaChannel, where this story first appeared.

Here's how the president of the United States was elected: In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren't felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the voters on this "scrub list" were, notably, African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats.

Beginning in November, this extraordinary news ran, as it should, on Page 1 of the country's leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the United States, it ran on page zero -- that is, the story was not covered on the news pages. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also was given big television network coverage. But again, it was on the wrong continent: on BBC television, London.

Was this some off-the-wall story that the Brits misreported? A lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise black voters; the commission held dramatic hearings on the evidence. While the story was absent from America's news pages (except, I grant, a story in the Orlando Sentinel and another on C-Span), columnists for the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post cited the story after seeing a U.S. version on the Internet magazine Salon.com. As the reporter on the story for Britain's Guardian newspaper (and its Sunday edition, the Observer) and for BBC television, I was interviewed on several American radio programs, generally "alternative" stations on the left side of the dial.

And now for something of a broader nature, this is from an extensvie analysis of 2000 data in Florida. The author, not a partisan, found that "spoiled" ballots occurred in areas where (a) George W. Bush won big (heavy Republican) counties and (b) where there were a large portion of black voters. This is heavy going but well worth review in terms of why we lost Florida. "Spoiled" ballots in Florida were in the tens of thousands.

Not only is Nader NOT the reason we lost Florida, the recount isn't either. It was all in place before the election in terms of DISENFRANCHISEMENT through the "felon purges" taking real voters off the lists (voters who showed up!) and making sure black votes were taken off of the rolls through
"spoilage."

Whose Votes Don't Count?: An Analysis of Spoiled Ballots in the 2000 Florida Election
Philip A. Klinkner, Associate Professor of Government

Hamilton College 198 College Hill Road Clinton, NY 13323 315-859-4344
http://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida/KlinknerAnalysis2.html

As the tables indicate, the adjusted r2 is now quite high-the model explains over 92 percent of the variance in spoiled ballots. In addition, the percent of black voters remains significant. Finally, in areas where the combined result of multiplying the percent of voters who are black by the voter margin for Bush is positive, there is a positive correlation with spoiled ballots. To put it another way, not only does being black matter in the model, it also matters where you are black. Strongly Republican areas that also had a sizable proportion of blacks had a greater incidence of spoiled ballots. While this finding is only suggestive, it is exactly what one would expect to find in a situation where racial disenfranchisement is likely to occur--black voters are a sizable part of the electorate, but lacked the political power to ensure that their ballots are counted accurately and fairly.

"In conclusion, this analysis offers two important findings:

1. There is no evidence that higher rates of spoiled ballots resulted from such individual factors as education and literacy. Instead, the factors influencing spoiled ballots were systemic. Thus, rather than speaking of individuals who spoiled their ballots, we should speak of individuals who were placed in situations in which it was more likely that their ballots would be spoiled. Furthermore, this finding indicates that any effort to reduce the rate of spoiled ballots must focus on systemic solutions--improved technology, more and better election workers, and stronger efforts to investigate and prosecute any instances of corruption and/or racial disenfranchisement.

2. Even after controlling for other factors, rates of ballot spoilage remain higher in predominantly black areas than in other areas of Florida. As the last model indicates, with all else being equal, for every 1-point increase in the percentage of registered voters who are black, there was a .07 percentage point increase in spoiled ballots.

In addition, these rates were even higher where substantial numbers of blacks were found in counties with large margins for George W. Bush. All of this corresponds to and further reinforces the findings of the USCCR that there is evidence of racial disenfranchisement in the 2000 election in Florida. Consequently, it is important that federal authorities should investigate this matter more thoroughly.