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En fait de lecture d’un texte, c’est à celle de deux textes comme amorce de beaucoup d’autres lectures que nous convions nos lecteurs. Cela concerne une hypothèse qui commence à être développée dans les milieux dissidents et des droits civiques aux USA : l’“hypothèse VoterGate”, c’est-à-dire l’hypothèse de ce qui serait, selon le mot de Thom Hartmann dont le texte est ci-dessous, “the most massive election fraud in the history of the world”.
Une hypothèse est faite à partir d’une enquête concernant le constat d’une grande divergence entre les sondages post-votes (à la sortie des bureaux de vote) et les résultats définitifs, — divergence aboutissant à Kerry vainqueur dans un cas et Kerry battu dans l’autre, et dans des États aussi essentiels que la Floride et l’Ohio. D’autre part, il y a les cas spécifiques de l’Ohio (à nouveau) et du Nouveau Mexique, développés d’une façon extrêmement détaillée par Greg Palash, journaliste réputé de Harper’s. (Deuxième texte ci-dessous, sur TomPaine.com.)
Divers réseaux s’occupent de cette affaire des fraudes du 2 novembre qui, si elle se confirmait, serait évidemment énorme. Diverses préoccupations ont été exprimées sur la “loyauté” du dépouillement électronique qui ne laisse aucune trace-papier ( !), dans un pays où les machines électroniques de dépouillement sont gérées par des sociétés privées, en général proches politiquement et idéologiquement des républicains et de GW Bush. D’autre part, il y a les hypothèses des votes non comptés, pour les États de l’Ohio et du Nouveau Mexique. Le décompte de l’État de Floride est également suspect. Et ainsi de suite, — la vaste Amérique n’est jamais à court de sensations.
On recommande ici de suivre cette affaire sur les réseaux concernés, notamment http://blackboxvoting.org (“org”, pas “com”), mais également
Sur la validité théorique générale de cette hypothèse, bien sûr, on ne peut qu’envisager une approche positive. Ce qui importe ici est la privatisation du processus qui, effectivement, non seulement autorise mais favorise toutes les fraudes. (Et l’on songe, bien entendu, à l’engagement idéologique du monde des corporates aux USA, visible
Mais soyons plus sérieux. L’hypothèse de la fraude est une simple question de bon sens, et un tribut rendu au professionnalisme des gens de la bande GW. Le soupçon n’existe pas avec l’administration GW, il n’y a que les certitudes qui sont celles de l’illégalité massive et constante, quasiment structurelle ; un accès de sincérité ou de loyauté par rapport au processus démocratique signifierait que cette administration est en grand danger de perdre ses vertus, qu’elle en devient méprisable. Cette administration ne fonctionne qu’au mensonge et à la fraude, et il faut rechercher le plus gros mensonge et la plus grosse fraude possibles pour espérer s’approcher de la réalité. Il serait tout simplement extraordinaire et surréaliste qu’il y ait eu “absence de fraude”, — c’est-à-dire faute professionnelle grave pour l’équipe de Karl Rove, — pour cette victoire imprévue et inattendue.
Toutes ces actions sur Internet vont-elles déboucher sur une vraie affaire politique ? On a vu d’autres cas où la connexion s’est faite, dans quelques-uns des scandales-GW qui ont été révélés au public grâce à Internet durant le premier terme. Attendons la suite. Pour nous faire patienter, il y a cette belle pensée de Greg Palash, comme conclusion de son article : « Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure — a second time — to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me. »
By Thom Hartmann, AlterNet. Posted November 5, 2004
The hot story in the blogosphere is that the ''erroneous'' exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all – it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?
Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time – and through the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters – we may well find out (Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org just filed what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states. Even raw voter analyses are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls to coincide with what the machines ultimately said.
But in all the discussion about voting machines, let's never forget the concept of the commons, because this usurpation is the ultimate felony committed by conservatives this year.
At the founding of this nation, we decided that there were important places to invest our tax (then tariff) dollars, and those were the things that had to do with the overall ''life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'' of all of us. Over time, these commons – in which we all make tax investments and for which we all hold ultimate responsibility – have come to include our police and fire services; our military and defense; our roads and skyways; our air, waters and national parks; and the safety of our food and drugs.
But the most important of all the commons in which we've invested our hard-earned tax dollars is our government itself. It's owned by us, run by us (through our elected representatives), answerable to us, and most directly responsible for stewardship of our commons.
And the commons through which we regulate the commons of our government is our vote.
About two years ago, I wrote a story for Common Dreams, ''If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines,'' that exposed how Sen. Chuck Hagel had, before stepping down and running for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska, been the head of the voting machine company (now ES&S) that had just computerized Nebraska's vote. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's ''Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election.'' According to Bev Harris, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska, nearly all on unauditable machines he had just sold the state. And in all probability, Hagel will run for president in 2008.
In another, later article I wrote at the request of MoveOn.org and which they mailed to their millions of members, I noted that in Georgia – another state that went all-electronic – ''USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, 'In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49% to 44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss.' Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, 'Pollsters may have goofed' because 'Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them.''' Nearly every vote in the state was on an electronic machine with no audit trail.
In the years since those first articles appeared, Bev Harris has published her book on the subject (''Black Box Voting''), including the revelation of her finding the notorious ''Rob Georgia'' folder on Diebold's FTP site just after Cleland's loss there; Lynn Landes has done some groundbreaking research, particularly her new investigation of the Associated Press, as have Rebecca Mercuri and David Dill. There's a new video out on the topic, Votergate, available at votergate.tv.
Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill into Congress requiring a voter-verified paper ballot be produced by all electronic voting machines, and it's been co-sponsored by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives. The two-year battle fought by Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay to keep it from coming to a vote, thus insuring that there will be no possible audit of the votes of about a third of the 2004 electorate, has fueled the flames of conspiracy theorists convinced Republican ideologues – now known to be willing to lie in television advertising – would extend their ''ends justifies the means'' morality to stealing the vote ''for the better good of the country'' they think single-party Republican rule will bring.
Most important, though, the rallying cry of the emerging ''honest vote'' movement must become: Get Corporations Out Of Our Vote!
Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our vote, in a secret and totally invisible way? Particularly a private corporation founded, in one case, by a family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and in another case partly owned by Saudi investors?
Of all the violations of the commons – all of the crimes against We The People and against democracy in our great and historic republic – this is the greatest. Our vote is too important to outsource to private corporations.
It's time that the U.S.A. – like most of the rest of the world – returns to paper ballots, counted by hand by civil servants (our employees) under the watchful eye of the party faithful. Even if it takes two weeks to count the vote, and we have to just go, until then, with the exit polls of the news agencies. It worked just fine for nearly 200 years in the U.S.A., and it can work again.
When I lived in Germany, they took the vote the same way most of the world does – people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are hand-counted by civil servants taking a week off from their regular jobs, watched over by volunteer representatives of the political parties. It's totally clean, and easily audited. And even though it takes a week or more to count the vote (and costs nothing more than a bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German people know the election results the night the polls close because the news media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a percent off.
We could have saved billions that have instead been handed over to ES&S, Diebold, and other private corporations.
Or, if we must have machines, let's have them owned by local governments, maintained and programmed by civil servants answerable to We The People, using open-source code and disconnected from modems, that produce a voter-verified printed ballot, with all results published on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
As Thomas Paine wrote at this nation's founding, ''The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.''
Only when We The People reclaim the commons of our vote can we again be confident in the integrity of our electoral process in the world's oldest and most powerful democratic republic.
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. His most recent books are ''The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,'' ''Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,'' ''We The People: A Call To Take Back America,'' and ''What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy.''
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
By Greg Palast, TomPain.com, November 04, 2004
Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. In the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.
Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, ''Bush Family Fortunes,'' based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .
Kerry won. Here are the facts.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. [To read about the skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here .] Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, ''Who did you vote for?'' Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, ''Was your vote counted?'' The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, ''An Election Spoiled Rotten,'' November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called ''spoilage.'' Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
Whose Votes Are Discarded?
And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts.
We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks.
And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.
So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called ''undervotes'' in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the ''overvotes'' where voter intent may be discerned.
Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”
But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.
The Impact Of Challenges
First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.
In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky ''provisional'' ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote
Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, ''John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted.''
How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.
CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'
Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the ''Little Texas'' area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush ''won'' there 68 percent to 31 percent.
I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.
Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.
''They were handing them out like candy,'' Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?
Santiago Juarez who ran the ''Faithful Citizenship'' program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that ''his'' voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind ''almost religiously,'' he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.
Your Kerry Victory Party
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.
But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.
What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.
I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.
Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, ''Bush Family Fortunes,'' based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD.
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
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