Were American voters in November really 'dumb' enough, as an understandably testy British news headline lamented, to elect what the editors regarded as a war-mongering buffoon as president?
As small a consolation as it is to an apprehensive planet, a majority of Americans who trudged off to polling stations, it increasingly appears, fully intended to elect John Kerry. Apart from numerous voter suppression gimmicks deliberately built into the rickety US electoral system, as chronicled by Greg Palast and others, it was, according to a growing chorus of well-credentialed sceptics and congressional investigators, the deployment of easily-rigged electronic voting machines that may well have clinched the result for Bush.
Contrary to soothing media accounts, the US election was badly marred by tens of thousands of reported 'irregularities'. For starters, ask yourself what modern country would be so ill-prepared to handle a turnout of only 60 per cent? Just scroll through the teeming complaints in Ohio - half of them afflicting one heavily populated Democratic county. (See https://voteprotect.orgindex.php?display=EIRMapCounty&state=Ohio&cat=ALL&=ED04&county=Cuyahoga) .
All one need do to suppress Kerry votes, as the Republican Ohio Secretary of State is roundly accused, is deploy voting machines away from inner city Democrats who then must wait in often impossible queues. This discouragement tactic is well publicized, as are a batch of other dirty tricks. But the most disturbing question percolating up to public notice is the role of electronic voting devices recording a third of the US vote (versus 13 per cent in 2000) but responsible for tallying 80 per cent of the vote in central tabulators minded by highly partisan pro-Bush private firms. In New Hampshire third party candidate Ralph Nader forced a partial recount (in which Kerry gained votes but not a significant number). More importantly, in Ohio, at the behest of two third party candidates, another recount got under way on December 13.
Demands for recounts were lodged in several other states. A team of Kerry's lawyers descended on Ohio, they tactfully say, "to make sure all votes are counted."A count of Ohio provisional ballots cut Bush's margin to under 119,000. Democratic party firebrand Jesse Jackson visited Ohio to rally support for investigation of voting 'mishaps' that he says cast this election as much into question as the notorious one in the Ukraine. House Judiciary Committee Democrats led by John Conyers conducted fascinating forums looking into voting maladies. An alleged whistleblower, who claims he earlier helped devise a software programme to switch votes to Republicans, is being grilled. An extremely reluctant US mainstream media began to take notice.
Republicans resisted a paper trail requirement for these new electronic devices. Venezuelan electronic machines have them, why not the US? Every computer expert says these machines are a perfect invitation to programme whatever result manufacturers or rogue programmers please, and with no detectable trace. So how do you prove it? The machines, as chance would have it, are manufactured mainly by four US firms which all boast strong Republican (including Christian fundamentalist) ties. The CEO of one such firm even promised to "deliver" Ohio to the Republicans last year. Some 40 million votes passed through the innards of these machines, and evidence that some underwent a 'conversion experience' either there or, more likely, inside easily hacked central tabulators, is accumulating.
The US election came down to whoever won Ohio. Just a one per cent voter swing there makes Kerry president. There were startling cases of voters selecting Kerry and having Bush flash on screen. But visible miscues are the least of the problems.
Despite a mountain of facts attesting that these machines can be altered with ridiculous ease, pundits instantly explained discrepancies between exit polls and the final tallies as the fault of historically reliable exit polls. (Exit polls customarily are accurate to within 0.4 per cent of final tallies whereas pre-election polls have a margin of error ten times larger.)
The media genuflected to the fallible machines. Other observers, like Jesse Jackson and John Conyers, are not so reverent and believe that the mounting problems, electronic and otherwise, arrant deep inquiry before the 2004 vote is really settled. The peculiar thing, you see, about myriad reported malfunctions is that virtually all malfunctioned in favour of Bush.
Are dark suspicions of a fix merely sour grapes? Perhaps. But a voting machine in one Ohio county gave Bush about 4000 votes, and was nabbed only because some bright spark realized there were 638 registered voters. An isolated error? Detecting errors is precisely the problem. Had a plausible number of votes been cast the discrepancy might not have come to light. A North Carolina County machine lost 4,500 votes. Other machines began counting backwards after a certain numerical point. The list goes on.
It gets more interesting. In a chart of the Florida vote, very odd results leap out. In 22 counties with non-electronic machines one showed a slight drop in Democratic voting, and they produced an overall Democratic majority. However, of 52 counties using electronic machines 37 displayed often steep drops in Democratic turnout and huge rises in Republican turnout, so as to pull off a half million vote majority for Bush - despite both 2000 figures and exit polls predicting the opposite result. (See http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm ) In 22 non-electronic counties Bush and Kerry showed similar improvement in turnout while in electronic counties Kerry's vote was flat while Bush soared 45 per cent. The Florida chart was airily dismissed in The New York Times when a couple of Ivy League academics pointed out correctly that small rural communities often go "dixiecrat" (registered Democrats voting Republican). Yet their rebuke misfired inasmuch as the original chart analysts, knowing this, instead had averaged 26 mid-sized counties and still came up with an identical unlikely tilt to Bush.
A statistician at Zogby's Poll web site reckoned that the consistent four per cent advantage to Bush in closely fought states had a statistical improbability of 50 thousand to one. A University of Pennsylvania researcher reported that chances that the gaps between exit polls and votes in three key states were due to random error were 250 million to 1. (Collectively, exit polls had Kerry winning both the electoral college and the popular vote.) University of California professor Michael Hout found that in Florida's heavily Democratic Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties that Bush was awarded 130-260,000 excess votes, whether by error or design. (Bush won Florida by 380 thousand votes).
"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Hout.
Analysts are poring over statistical relationships between the kinds of voting devices and the differences between exit polls and recorded votes, and subjecting them all to every imaginable test. By way of evidence gathering, Bev Harris' organization Black Box Voting is carrying out the largest Freedom of Information trawl ever for public records from thousands of counties. According to Harris: "Among the materials requested are internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips. The latest remarkable electoral oddity to turn up is an obscure, underfunded Democratic nominee for the state supreme court gathering a quarter million more votes than did Kerry. The candidate at the head of the ticket usually leads as vote-getter.So what happened?
Were there earlier inklings of problems? Plenty. (See, for example, www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachineErrors.htm) Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska was chief executive of a voting machine company which blanketed his state with its gadgets just before his 1996 upset victory. Hagel miraculously captured almost every group, including many blacks who never before showed fondness for Republicans. In the all-electronic state of Georgia pre-election polls showed Democratic Senator Max Cleland with a two to five point leads over his Republican challenger - and losing by seven per cent.
In one Texas County in 2000 three Republicans got 18,181 votes each - with two more outside Texas scoring exactly that total too. Pretty uncanny and worrisome.
What is the upshot? A fading, far-fetched scenario is one where the amassing of incontrovertible errors and proven hijinks forces a deeper legal scrutiny of election results. In fact, on the basis of evidence of systematic irregularities, lawyer Cliff Arnebeck of a citizens watchdog group filed in the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn the result and order a state-wide revote. The maneouvre is a long shot, to put it mildly. The Ohio recount, though, has flushes out more seamy antics as I write. Democratic Congressmen already have asked the Government Accounting Office to "immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration"
Did tens of millions of ordinary Americans stand in line, often for many hours, to vote for an ultra-right winger who has blithely bungled everything he has touched? Perhaps the story Republican strategist Karl Rove spread about a vast turnout of rightwing Christians - the American Taliban - is accurate but the numbers don't necessarily support it. A society that prizes accountability must look into these claims dispassionately if only to dispel widening fear that the fix was in.
In CNN exit polling 86 per cent of Democrats in Florida and 80 per cent in Ohio 'were not confident that their vote would be counted accurately." That kind of alienation is dangerous and needs to be soberly addressed. The deadline for election certification in Congress is January 6. Bush may well continue as President but this controversy is not going to go away quietly.
Were American voters in November really 'dumb' enough, as an understandably testy British news headline lamented, to elect what the editors regarded as a war-mongering buffoon as president?
