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Article : Pour qui, le “mandate for change”?

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Finances US, démocratie US : des modèles de tricheries pour les Nations d'europe

Francis Lambert

  04/11/2008

... Le journaliste d’investigation britannique Greg Palast ( http://contreinfo.info/article.php3?id_article=2310 ) détaille toutes les techniques qui ont été mises en oeuvre par l’administration Républicaine pour décourager ou éliminer nombre d’électeurs Démocrates des listes électorales. Ces manoeuvres jouent à la marge, mais aux USA, les derniers scrutins présidentiels se sont joués à bien peu de chose. Le déplacement de 300 voix en 2000 et de 60 000 en 2004 aurait suffi à inverser le résultat. (...)

- Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. ...
- Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year’s Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. ...
- Swing state Indiana. In this year’s primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state’s new voter ID law. ...
- Swing state Florida. (NB : état présidé par le frère de W.Bush ... déjà à la source de son élection litigieuse au détriment de Gore en 2000)
Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state’s Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants ...
- And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.

The Ugly Secret. ... We don’t count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted : “spoiled,” unreadable and blank ballots ... This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse. (...)

How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps:
- Step One : The “Dumpster” Vote - Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots ... Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls ? The answer is the GOP’s secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. ...
- Step Two : “Verification” (and Elimination) of New Voters ... A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent). So, the Republican game plan is simple : don’t let new voters vote. ...
- Step Three : New ID Laws ... for example, Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don’t have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it’s about double - 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. ...
- Step Four : Spoiling Ballots ... Another study shows that Hispanics’ vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots. ...
- Step Five : Rejecting Mail-In Ballots ... Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked : everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked. ...

Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems
These millions of uncounted ballots - spoiled ballots, provisional ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified - fully explain the difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in 2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for ?” They never ask, and can’t know, “Did your vote count ?” ...

It comes down to this :
Can the margin of trickery, vote suppression and ballot destruction - three to six million votes - be overcome ? Yes. Because they can’t steal all the votes all the time. Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in some polls. But these are polls of “likely” voters. They exclude first-time and many low-income voters.
So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to happen - for the “unlikely” voters to simply overwhelm the statistical assumption of their laziness. As I’m sure Mr. Obama, a professor of constitutional law, could tell you : the best legal response to systematic vote suppression is to get off yo’ ass !