"I'd just stepped out of my black helicopter to read that one of my favorite journalists, David Corn, had attacked my analysis of the vote in Ohio as the stuff of "grassy knoll conspiracy theorists." (A Stolen Election," The Nation, November 29 issue.) Oh, my! And all because I wrote that the uncounted ballots in Ohio -- more than a quarter million designated "spoiled" or "provisional" -- undoubtedly contain enough votes to overturn George Bush's "victory" margin of 119,000 out of over 5 million cast. Corn says, "Palast wrongly assumes that an overwhelming majority of these ballots contain votes for Kerry." Now why would I think such a thing? Maybe because the precinct-by-precinct analysis of "spoiled" votes (those which machines can't count) by Professor Mark Salling of Cleveland State University, the unchallengeable expert on Ohio voting demographics, concludes that "spoiled" punch cards in Ohio cities come "overwhelmingly" from African-American neighborhoods. The Republican Secretary of State of Ohio does not disagree, by the way; he intends to fix the Jim Crow vote-counting problem in Ohio ... sometime after the next inaugural ball. The second group of uncounted ballots, "provisionals," were also generated substantially in African-American areas, the direct result of a Republican program to hunt down, challenge and suppress the votes cast in black-majority precincts. What happened in Ohio is one-fiftieth of a nationwide phenomenon: the non-count of African-American votes, about a million of them marked as unreadable in a typical presidential race. (See, Palast, "Vanishing Votes," The Nation, March 17, 2004.) I will admit, David, I can't tell you exactly how each of those disenfranchised voters would have cast their ballots. Indeed, one Republican statistician claims these uncounted ballots are cast mostly by African-American supporters of George Bush. Nevertheless, most of us conspiracy nuts on the Grassy Knoll hold to our wild belief that most black citizens whose ballots were spoiled or rejected tried to vote for the tall guy from Massachusetts."- here's the link. Update: "This was an election where you have some glitches but none of these glitches were of a conspiratorial nature and none of them would overturn or change the election results," said Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who, as the state's chief election official, certified the results. But critics have cited numerous Election Day problems, from long lines, a shortage of voting machines in predominantly minority neighborhoods and suspicious vote totals for candidates in scattered precincts. Blackwell oversaw the election process while serving as one of several statewide GOP leaders who co-chaired Bush's campaign. The 2000 Florida recount was also administered by a Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who is now a member of Congress."-from the AP story, "Ohio Certifies Bush Win by 119,000 Votes." An IT professional who says he is a Republican, has "How to Hack the Vote: the Short Version." "Florida evoting machines removed-21 voting machines were 'recalibrated' without supervision Election Day."-check it out here. "Programmer details what led him to speak, hopes Tuesday AM Raw Story confirms other statements in affidavit--Tech analysis finds claim cannot be proven/disproven without source code".-full story here.
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