Recipe For A Cooked Election

Correcting for that under-reporting, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. Why doesn’t your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It’s right there in black and white in a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election — in a footnote. The Census tabulation of voters voting in the 2004 presidential race "differs," it reads, from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives by 3.4 million votes. This is the hidden presidential count, which, with the exception of the Census’s whispered footnote, has not been reported. In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called "spoilage." Spoilage, not the voters, picked our President for us. Unfortunately, that’s not all. In addition to the three million ballots uncounted due to technical "glitches," millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries. Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, “It’s not the people who vote that count; it’s the people who count the votes.” That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the USA, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don’t get counted decides our winners. In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney’s bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that’s not how it went down. The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The principal means of the election heist — voiding ballots — went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale next time Like a forensic crime scene investigation unit, we can perform a post mortem starting with the exhumation of more than three million uncounted votes: http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1511 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on October 30, 2006]

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