Getting away with it
by Peter Johnson
We live in a country which is often regarded to be an Iconic Democracy, so we can never be too indifferent about our Constitutional rights and protecting their sanctity. However, investigative journalist like Greg Palast, have recently provided disturbing evidence that we are far from forming a “more perfect union.”
Mr. Palast has taken on the role of a Federal Investigator in the Exxon Valdez grounding and oil spill, as well as the Deepwater Horizon investigation in the gulf. He has also published many exposes’ of corruption and fraud. He has had several books on the New York Times best sellers list, like, Armed Madhouse and, The Best Democracy Money can buy. Palast has actively worked to prevent voter fraud. And, very interestingly, he has studied under Milton Freidman at the University of Chicago, as well as many free-trade luminaries, but, he did NOT follow in their footsteps.
He is now considered one of the most knowledgeable investigators of voting fraud alive. My post is intended as a synopsis of an interview about his voting fraud expose’—Billionaires and Ballot Boxes.
As a Guest Post, this sums up some of the interesting comment he made during a talk with Steven Whitney, and this interview comes from the pages of suicide girls’ blog.
Palast admits that Democrats can also make attempts at fraud, saying: “The Democrats have their hands dirty in this s— too. They’re not nearly as good, but their dirty enough, that they’ve got s— stains in their party underwear.”
The interview involves 9 ways he has discovered that can enable elections to be stolen, these are:
CAGING
TOSSING
PRESTIDIGITIZING
SPOILING
REJECTING
ERRORS
EJECTING
STUFFING and,
BLOCKING
The following is a list some of the basic ways that these techniques he mentions are used to foul election results.
It’s no surprise either, when Palast directly implicates Karl Rove as a shadowy mastermind, and he openly admits that he believes the GOP to be most guilty of these types of fraud—often quoting reliable sources like Republican prosecutor, David Iglesias, who affirms many of the dark-side scams that Rove is the brains behind.
CAGING, claims Palast, is what happened to Kerry in 2004 and in the Walker recall election. It is a technique which involves sending out mailings to people like soldiers, students at black colleges, and Jewish voters in Miami who don’t spend all year at the same address. Since these groups must be deployed to Iraq, leave College for the summer, or represent Jewish residents called, snowbirds, who go north in August, and, the letters they received were marked, “Do not forward.” The letters come back; they are “caged.”
This allowed Rove’s people to claim that these groups voted from fraudulent locations—even though Palast sarcastically points out that, “If you’re a soldier you can vote from under your Humvee!” But when these targeted categories of voters, tried to submit absentee ballots, they had no idea that their votes would be challenged and thrown in the garbage. Palast reveals that he is privy to this knowledge because a friend who owns a website—RepublicanNationalCommittee.org was sent misaddressed Caging lists, and passed them on to him.
Palast also irreverently refers to Rove as “turd blossom,” which he says was GW Bush’s nickname for him, and, has published pages of Rove’s Caging lists in Billionaires and Budget Bandits. One is completely composed of Soldiers at a Naval Air Station in Jacksonville! Rove has not denied them!
The Wisconsin caging scam involved a vote crunching machine called Themis, which not only prepares and sends out flawless ballots to Republicans but, with it, the Koch Brother’s operation, “Americans for Prosperity” (without having to buy affordable health care) joke, joke, set up a front called, United Sportsmen of Wisconsin, which coincidentally disappeared right after the Wisconsin recall vote—ya think? The power of Themis allowed Republicans to compile a list of likely Democratic absentee voters in key recall areas of Wisconsin and, these predominantly Democratic Sportsmen were mailed a letter with instructions listing the time and place to mail their absentee ballots. Of course the addresses were phony and the times were outside of the legal deadline for submitting absentee ballots. Such bold apparent criminality would almost be inspiring if it weren’t such a blatantly illegal vote stealing strategy.
And Palast recounts that he was in Baraboo when Obama won there by 28% (a very solid landslide) yet somehow Scott Walker won handily in the recall? What is wrong with this picture, considering that such contested votes are predominately cast in swing states and many of them involve racial targeting?
Palast’s answer for how all of these criminal, fraudulent, Republican maestros, manage to do their dirty work and get away with it, is simply because they put themselves in places of power and authority == like firing the cops and giving themselves the badges. Palast points out that it is easy to steal elections if you basically steal a police department and become the budget department.
TOSSING is the absurd practice of tossing out provisional ballots. When your name has been purged falsely from the rolls voters are told, “Here take this provisional ballot and we’ll count it later.” But they won’t. Palast claims that whatever they say disqualified you in the first place, will still apply, and, will disqualify you later—no matter what they say! He says this form of fraud will be big, because when people come in with the wrong ID to satisfy new voting laws, they will be handed provisional ballots which are really as good as, thrown out, the moment they are received. Palast says that 767,023 were essentially thrown away like this last time–(2010).
Then there is PRESTIDIGITIZING, or the manipulation of computers or data. Incredibly one of the easiest ways to steal votes is by merely unplugging voting machines. This is common in Florida where black poll workers are simply not given the passwords to open them up again until thousands of votes must be eliminated. Catherine Harris (former Florida Republican Secretary of State) in the old Sarasota district was faced with the terrible burden of informing officials that “all those votes just disappeared.” What can she say? It’s certainly not her fault?” there’s no way to prove anything anyway! Palast cites cases of bribing politicians to use faulty machines. And, even though Hugo Chavez and his friends bought their own computer company in the hopes of preventing such losses, Palast says,” all anyone has to do is screw them up so that the votes do not appear,” So, the votes of Chavez’s people where ZAPPED anyway!
SPOILING, simply involves strategies like providing state-of-the-art voting machines in rich white, neighborhoods of Florida, while providing old ones for poorer areas that toss many votes because of unforeseen flaws. The good voting machines are able to do things like identify mistakes with an optical reading scan, and then provide affluent voters an opportunity to try again. Poor areas composed of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans cannot afford such technology and so, a simple error results in tossing out a ballot.
I suppose one could call this problem one of pure affordability since the poor can’t call the shots, but are some voting machines more equal than others? Why can’t topnotch machines be bought for everyone with government provided money?—alas, there is just no way to keep up with those good old corporate entities, having individual status, which only want to throw their lucrative free speech money at any close campaign, and, easily pay the price tags they are faced with, in order to buy them—how misunderstood they are!
Another method of fraud called REJECTING, falsely eliminates many absentee ballots because they are purged or rejected for some unknown or unproven reason—such as claiming that they don’t like the size of your ballot, your postage is due, or even that you didn’t lick it correctly! Palast says he is not kidding! Even if a simple inconsistency between the way your name is spelled on the envelope and the way it is spelled on the ballot is enough to throw it out. Palast says that hundreds of thousands of ballot have been rejected for completely trivial reasons, and that perhaps millions will be rejected because of such minor flaws in the future!
Then there are ERRORS, which allows for the practice of eliminating ballots for simple mistakes like name spelling and even just by deeming a certain name illegible. This means you can also be eliminated for leaving an extra mark, or because you simply have sloppy handwriting. However, this also means names can be tossed out for partisan reasons which are apparent, because of ethnic names, such as those which might reveal probable racial identity. If a name like, Juarez is spelled wrong on your ID this can potentially eliminate you: it’s not like crooked poll workers can never guess which candidate a Latino person is likely to vote for.
Next, EJECTING refers to being disenfranchised because you have the wrong voting photo ID or the wrong document to get the ID, For example in some states a driver’s license is, or was, required to obtain a State ID, but many types of people do not have them or, will have difficulty finding other documents that are acceptable. Mr. Palast points out that the type of voter fraud intended to be prevented by State photo IDs is fraud intended as misrepresentation of another’s ID as your own.
But, unless you are an identical twin, you will need to do some serious editing of the ID you present, or convince poll workers that you really are the person whose ID you have stolen, then it is almost a sure thing that you will get caught—especially in cases where the real person has voted at the same polling place for years, and, may even be recognized on sight by poll workers. Palast points out that it would be pretty insane to be caught, arrested, and jailed for just trying to cast one faulty vote. And anyway, it would be just as easy (or difficult) to alter a State Photo ID as it would be to alter other IDs, such as photo driver’s licenses.
No wonder this type of fraud has virtually no record of happening? But even if the State provides State voter IDs for free, as North Carolina currently does, the provisions attached to these ID bills are usually onerous enough to hamper many people from voting or being able to vote anyway! So free IDs only present a false image of fairness.
What about STUFFING? This is merely adding votes illegally either by paper ballot or by computer. Mr. Palast uses the election of Don Siegelman who was elected governor of Alabama by several thousand votes, as an example; A courthouse in a Republican area was sealed and, claiming a mistake had been made, the GOP initiated a recount and ended up with 8000 more votes than Siegelman—votes that had suddenly and inexplicably been found in the middle of the night.
But, even if there was no official record of this happening, and, no one was allowed to observe the so-called computer recount or question why it had to take place at night, Republicans were able to commit fraud by creating extra unverified votes. When Siegelman raised hell over this scam, he was arrested and placed in a Federal penitentiary. They did this by pulling files on him. As Palast says, “everyone has a file.” If you ask me, his kind of brazen stuffing outshines even Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daily Senior, who famously added dead Chicagoans to the voting rosters.
BLOCKING is the practice of preventing the registration of legal voters. The most common way is by convincing voters that they can’t vote, when they actually can. The largest unrepresented group of voters is ex-cons who actually, CAN register and vote in 44 States after they have paid their debt to society. But they are often assailed by false claims that they can’t vote anymore!
Unfortunately there are millions of Americans in jail for relatively mild offenses like selling pot. Although they may not have violent histories, or a record of offenses, our jail system is clogged by these basically non-criminal types—requiring the State to shell out tons of money to keep them incarcerated. Although they form a large voting block that, usually votes for Democrats, Democrats are understandably, not excited about taking advantage of publicizing the plight of these very eligible voters—probably since no candidate wants to be associated with criminals even though they too, often continue to have legal voting rights—especially after serving their time.
Mr. Palast spends the last part of the interview listing ways that voters can be wise to suppression attempts and simple measures to ensure their votes.
He recommends voting in person and not allowing a bunch of “partisan sharks” to count an Absentee ballot. He also recommend voting early, since, if they try to screw with you, you can come back later and say that you DO have the right to vote. One of the most unexpected recommendations I heard, was his insistence that we register and re-register frequently.
After all, just because we may have voted in the last election does not mean that corrupt polling officials will not try to prevent us from voting this time! He adds, “Don’t be a schmuck! They’ve knocked off 22 million people in the last two years!” He also urges us not to use provisional ballots even it they are promised to be counted later. And he recommend hands on activism to preserve voting rights, and won’t tolerate crap like, “it doesn’t matter.” He adds, “Martin Luther King took a bullet for the vote, you can take a bus.”
It is also troubling to consider that, even if voter outrage prompts even greater numbers of voters in future elections, we can never really know for sure how many more votes could have been added to that increase, since many votes could still have been lost to these types of voter fraud anyway!
But no matter which party commits fraud, or who does it better, Palast insists that this is not a partisan issue. “This is about defending ourselves from ballot bandits.” Voting is a right we all have—perhaps the most important one in a Democracy!
Here is a link to that interview with Palast.
Peter Johnson is a senior citizen who has become much more interested in what is happening in America and the world, than he was as a young man. He’s interested in poetry and expository writing, and has had letters to the editor published in Time magazine, Newsweek and Playboy magazine. He is concerned about ignorance and indifference that has been circulated concerning the significance of man made global warming and is dismayed by the way political lies and corruption are being used to influence the public (apparently free from any penalties or adequate culpability). He frequently writes letters of opinion to the editors of his local newspapers.
Vote stealing photo via shutterstock.com