t r u t h o u t - Greg Palast and Farhad Manjoo: Presidential Debate

t r u t h o u t - Greg Palast and Farhad Manjoo: Presidential Debate: " Greg Palast and Farhad Manjoo: Presidential Debate
Salon.com
Tuesday 16 November 2004
Reporter Greg Palast and Salon's Farhad Manjoo debate the election results in Ohio.
Greg Palast: Sean Hannity called me a putz. Oh, my! And soft-porn-site scribe Frank Salvato put me in with the 'black helicopter' conspiracy league. Golly!
I can live with that. But when Salon disses my report of vote suppression in Ohio ('Was the Election Stolen?' by Farhad Manjoo), I have to respond. Manjoo went after my article, 'Kerry Won,' the latest in my series of investigations of our manipulated election system first published in America by ... Salon: 'Florida's Flawed 'Voter-Cleansing' Program.'
Now, the facts. Most voters in Ohio cast their ballots for John Kerry, which should, in accordance with Mrs. Gordon's civics lessons from sixth grade, have given Kerry the Electoral College majority and the White House. Trouble is, those votes won't be counted.
So where are these uncounted, but winning, votes? When I went to sleep the night of Nov. 2, Kerry was down in Ohio by 136,000 votes. But over a quarter million ballots had yet to be counted. Those abandoned ballots, overwhelmingly Democratic, sit in two piles, one called 'spoiled' and the other 'provisional.'
The ugly, secret shame of American democracy is that 2 million votes are 'spoiled' in presidential elections - tossed away untallied as 'unreadable.' And the nasty part is that roughly half are cast by African-Americans. To learn of this astonishing Jim Crow thumb on the U.S. electoral scales, you have to hunt through the appendixes of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission report on the Florida 2000 race.

The ugly, secret shame of American democracy is that 2 million votes are "spoiled" in presidential elections - tossed away untallied as "unreadable." And the nasty part is that roughly half are cast by African-Americans. To learn of this astonishing Jim Crow thumb on the U.S. electoral scales, you have to hunt through the appendixes of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission report on the Florida 2000 race. The government's demographers concluded that of the 179,855 votes "spoiled" in Florida that year, 54 percent were cast by blacks. All other credible studies tell us that Florida is horribly typical of the nation.

Last Tuesday, in Ohio, Republicans played the spoilage game for all it was worth. Over 93,000 ballots were chucked on the spoilage pile, almost all of them generated by those infernal chad-making punch-card machines.