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HOW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION
by Greg Palast
for The Guardian (UK), Comment
Monday November 6, 2006

Here's how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.

Note the past tense. And I'm not kidding.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won't be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they'll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We've found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here's how they'll do it, in three easy steps:

Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind.

On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year's Eve hangovers, a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act -- strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can't be verified against a state verification database.

Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won't feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register each year. The New York University Law School's Brennan Center told me that, under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three new voters.

How? To begin with, Mr. Bush's Social Security Administration has failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday.

But don't worry: those holding passports from their ski vacations to Switzerland are doing just fine. And that's the point. It's not the number of voters rejected, it?s their color. For example, California's Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured out how to block 40% of registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare counter-move, Los Angeles, with a Hispanic mayor, contacted these citizens, "verified" them and got almost every single one back on the rolls. But throughout the rest of the West, new Hispanics remain victims of the "José Crow" treatment.

In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and the Republican's candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection champ -- partly by keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.

Theft #2: Turned Away - the ID game

A legion of pimple-faced Republicans with Blackberries loaded with lists of new voters is assigned to challenge citizens in heavily Black and Hispanic(i.e. Democratic) precincts to demand photo ID that perfectly matches registration data.

Sounds benign, but it's not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are "protecting the integrity of the vote."

I've heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them "caging lists" -- and it wasn't about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters -- a very Democratic demographic -- to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a "provisional" ballot -- which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their 300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

Theft #3: Votes Spoiled Rotten

The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots are cast in national elections but not counted -- 3,600,380 not counted in 2004 according to US Election Commission stats. These are votes lost because a punch card didn't punch (its chad got "hung"), a stray mark voided a paper ballot and other machinery glitches.

Officials call it "spoilage." I call it, "inaugurating Republicans." Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will "spoil" this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes spoiled or "blank" are cast by voters of color. On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

That's where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl Rove messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses occur when computers crash, fail to start or simply don't respond to your touch. They are the new spoilage machines of choice with, statistically, the same racial bias as the old vote-snatching lever machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with in-precinct scanners don't go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that's why Republican Secretaries of State have installed so few of them.)

So Let's Add it Up

Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly rejected or purged registrations.

Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for "improper ID."

Then add yet another million for Democratic votes "spoiled" by busted black boxes and by bad ballots.

And let's not forget to include the one million "provisional" ballots which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots.

And there's one more group of votes that won't be counted: absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.

Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national challenge campaign. That's morally laudable; electorally suicidal.

Add it all up -- all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred and spoiled -- and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.

So, what are you going to do about it? May I suggest you ? steal back your vote.

It's true you can't win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The regime's sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. If you can't get 55%, then you're just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don't deserve to win back America.

********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE."

For specific advice on How to Steal Back Your Vote, go to http://www.gregpalast.com/steal-back-your-vote

Catch Greg Palast on Election Night on the new Mike Malloy Show on many Air America affiliates.

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potter

interesting

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stickyfingerz

Thanks I needed a good laugh this morning. Imagine having to prove you are who you say you are in order to vote. The fucking nerve of people eh? LMFAO

12clicks

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TheMaster

the joke is on you, "caging lists" scandal is finally coming out

basically: Republicans sending letters to mostly African-American soldiers, which they knew were fighting in Iraq, as they couldn't respond these soldiers got knocked off the voting rolls and so their vote didn't count

more http://www.slate.com/id/2167284/

btw this has been reported all over Europe and other continents already in 2004, but ignored in the US

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The Duck

See the documentary hacking democrazy 2007 and open your eyes.

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Michaelious

I just don't see the republicans winning the presidential election

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stickyfingerz

So you are saying the Democrats fixed the midterm elections???

TheMaster

saw it last month, what surprised me wad that those election officials actually broke down in tears because they never had believed fraud was possible and they were actually tearing up when they saw the proof

what I think a lot of Americans lack and this is why this shit is so easy in the US: in a democracy you're default mode should be scepticism toward what your leaders do, not that ultra patriotic support.

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TheMaster

please, you're joking right

I know this is all you can do, but ... pathetic

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stickyfingerz

You do realize the democrats won the majority right?

baddog

They must have according to the title.

Brujah

That's racist!

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baddog

Idiot, the democrats won.

TheMaster

1. they didn't win everywhere, right ???? they would have won more without this caging
2. MORE important, this was already happening in 2004 for the Presidential elections

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baddog

you are a tool

TheMaster

ah baddog is here

you might wanna read the whole thing

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spunkmaster

They don't have a fucking clue ?

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TheMaster

read: http://www.slate.com/id/2167284/

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TheMaster

http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=42677
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4620

more google "Greg Palast" or "caging lists"

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baddog

Oh, if it is on the Internet it must be true. Pardon me.

Give me 20 minutes and I will write something up on my blog. That should be good enough, right?

CosmicTang

who said anything about winning it? You weren't paying attention. They plan on stealing it.

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stickyfingerz

So what you are saying is it is the governments job to make sure that people that are too stupid to change their voter registration to their new address get a chance to determine who are elected officals get a special chance to vote? Funny I moved between 2004 and 2006 and I managed to make sure my address was correct on my NEW voter registration that I got after I moved and notified them of them move to MAKE SURE I was able to vote with no complications. So these fucking morons got the shitty end of the stick for being well.. morons..


Btw USPS forwards are only good for 1 year from the date you moved. So basically you are saying there were MILLIONS of people that moved within a year and didnt bother to register their new address right?

Also when you go into vote there is a special area you goto if your information was not correctly registered and you are able at that time to correct that. Fucking retards...

stickyfingerz

GOD FUCKING DAMN!! I love it when some fucking foreigner comes on here telling us how OUR voting process works cause he read a few misunderstood blurbs on some leftwing website. Yippee.. Jesus fucking Christ....

TheMaster

weak weak, I guess the BBC, which had it already in 2004, must also be one of those sites???

keep an eye on http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ne...caging+list%22
over the next week

hope it'll be in next week's Newsweek

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TheMaster

this proves you didn't read it

THEY WERE SOLDIERS FIGHTING IN IRAQ! THEY DIDN'T CHANGE MOVE ADDRESSES
letters were marked "Do not forward", so they weren't forwarded to Iraq

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kane

I think a more accurate title would have been "how they attempted to steal the 2006 election." or " How they stole some states in 2006." They may have tired, but in the end they lost the election so they didn't steal the whole thing.

They stole Ohio in 2004 and maybe Florida in 2000 both of which won them the election, but any attempt at theft in 2006 was thwarted.

TheMaster

Democrats released press realease with references to LA Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ...

http://www.democrats.org/a/2007/06/dnc_bush_admini.php

this shit will really hit the fan next week on mainstream media

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TheMaster

I replied to the caging lists part, that was already going on in 2004, probably should have started new thread, but couldn't stop myself on prooving sticky wrong

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stickyfingerz

OH now I see, so lets say the maximum number of soliders in Iraq during the 2006 elections was 100,000.00 Now lets figure out that maybe 20% did not have a family at home to receive the mail, and that say 1% of those family members were too stupid to fucking forward that mail over on their own. That would get rid of a good 5000 votes nationwide that should of got a chance to vote. WOOOOOO!! Its a fucking conspiracy. Jesus fucking Christ you are dumb.

TheMaster

no, you are just as pigheaded as El Presidente
so, now your argument is that it doesn't matter they did this?

if you read some of the articles you'll see the number of 70.000 floating around, only time will tell, fact is that Monica Goodling acknowledged that this was happening

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stickyfingerz

No what you are not getting is this. They send them to soldiers homes. Their address. There are normally family members there. They get the mail for the soldiers and send it over to them. Plus they get their voting forms ahead of election day.

And just who the fuck do you think they would of voted for anyways? 80% of the military votes Republican. This is so retarded its silly.

TheMaster

1. read the articles, not even the family got them
2. because they were kicked off the voting rolls, their voting forms wouldn't be counted
3. they focused on soldiers of minorities, who voted Democrat
4. if you have followed the Liebermann trip to Iraq, you would know from the questions the soldiers are asking, you would see they aren't 80% republican anymore

again read the full articles instead of only titles

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stickyfingerz

Oh so that amount of votes is going to sway the elections nation wide I guess? lmao

TheMaster

you're going in circles, now you're back to: even if it is reality, it doesn't matter

BTW it matters in close races, like Florida, Ohio, ...

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baddog

I am sorry, but let's just say that 70,000 were floating in limbo somewhere. Of those 70,000 how many do you think would have actually gone to the polls? And do you expect that all 70k would have voted Democrat?

What percentage of our registered voters does this 70k represent?

baddog

Hey, let's give them that 70k soldiers in Iraq would all vote Democrat . . . just what difference would that make?

Maybe he wants us to think that the only places the Democrats did not win are where those 70k reside.

TheMaster

same point as with sticky, a couple 1000 votes in some races change the election + you're saying election fraud doesn't really matter???

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TheMaster

you get a GOP monthly paycheck?

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baddog

No, as I stated in post 16, you are a tool. That is all I am saying. Your subsequent arguments have pretty much confirmed my earlier suspicions.

TheMaster

name calling is the last resort of a ... I'll try not to do the same

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