[EM] "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Recount"

Mon Aug 7 23:35:04 PDT 2006

Greg says just getting paper ballots involved is NOT enough - Mexico is 
demonstrating ways to destroy elections using paper ballots - I AGREE!

Many point to horror stories about failures of "DRE"s - and call these 
unacceptable - I AGREE, for the boxes that get labeled "DRE" without 
having needed ability included.

Considering the state of the art:
      The dependable uses of computers in ATMs, etc.
      That election work is not complex, as seen by programmers/engineers.
      DREs have to be doable.
      Makers should be required to certify quality.
      Test certifiers should be required to certify successful testing.

The big reason I continue to press this topic is that:
      The Plurality voting (ONLY vote for your single most preferred 
candidate) done in most of our elections FAILS to let voters state their 
desires as well as Ranked Choice voting would.
      But Ranked Choice ballots (rank in order your most preferred 
candidates) need computers to do the counting quickly and correctly.

Following report seems serious and worth studying:
      Subject:  Report of the Irish  "Commission on Electronic Voting"
      http://www.cev.ie/htm/report/download_second.htm

DWK

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [nygreen] [Fwd: "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Recount"]
Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 09:45:42 -0400
From: Betty Wood <bkwood at odyssey.net>
To: nygreen at yahoogroups.com

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	"We Don't Need No Stinkin' Recount"
Date: 	Mon, 7 Aug 2006 07:33:14 -0400
From: 	Greg Palast <palast at gregpalast.com>
Reply-To: 	Greg Palast <palast at gregpalast.com>
To: 	bkwood at odyssey.net <bkwood at odyssey.net>

       "WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' RECOUNT"

*Mexico's Lesson In The Dangers Of The Paper Ballot*

*By Greg Palast*
/for The Guardian, Comment is Free/
Monday August 7, 2006

In the six years since I first began investigating the burglary ring we
call "elections" in America, a new Voting Reform industry has grown up.
That's good. What's worrisome is that most of the effort is focused on
preventing the installation of computer voting machines. Paper ballots,
we're told, will save our democracy.

Well, forget it. Over the weekend, Mexico's ruling party showed how you
can rustle an election even with the entire population using the world's
easiest paper ballot.

On Saturday, Mexico's electoral tribunal, known as the "TRIFE" (say
"tree-fay") ordered a re-count of the ballots from the suspect July 2
vote for president. Well, not quite a recount as in "count all the
ballots" -- but a review of just 9% of the nation's 130,000 precincts.

The "9% solution" was the TRIFE's ham-fisted attempt to chill out the
several hundred thousand protesting supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador who had gathered in the capital and blocked its main Avenue.
Lopez Obrador, the Leftist challenger known by his initials AMLO,
supposedly lost the presidential vote by just one half of one percent of
the vote.

I say "supposedly" lost because, while George Bush congratulated his
buddy Felipe Calderon on his victory, the evidence I saw on the ground
in Mexico City fairly shrieks that the real winner was challenger AMLO.

President Bush should consider some inconvenient truths about the
Mexican vote count:

First: The exit poll of 80,000 voters by the Instituto de Mercadotecnia
y Opinion showed that AMLO bested Calderon by 35.1% to 34.0%.

Second: The precinct-by-precinct returns were quite otherworldly. I used
to teach statistics and what I saw in Mexico would have stumped my
brightest students.

Here's the conundrum: The nation's tens of thousands of polling stations
report to the capital in random order after the polls close. Therefore,
statistically, you'd expect the results to remain roughly unchanged as
vote totals come in. As expected, AMLO was ahead of the right-wing
candidate Calderon all night by an unchanging margin -- until after
midnight. Suddenly, precincts began reporting wins for Calderon of five
to one, the ten to one, then as polling nearly ended, of one-hundred to one.
More...
How odd. I checked my concerns with Professor Victor Romero of Mexico's
National University who concluded that the reported results must have
been a "miracle." As he put it, a "religious event," but a statistical
impossibility. There were two explanations, said the professor: either
the Lord was fixing the outcome or operatives of the ruling party were
cranking in a massive number of ballots when they realized their man was
about to lose.

How could they do it? "Easy pea-sy," as my kids would say. In Mexico,
the choices for president are on their own ballot with no other offices
listed. Those who don't want to vote for President just discard the
ballot. There is no real ballot security. In areas without reliable
opposition observers (about a third of the nation), anyone can stuff
ballots into the loosely-guarded cardboard boxes. (AMLO showed a tape of
one of these ballot-stuffing operations caught in the act.)

It's also absurdly easy to remove paper ballots, disqualify them or
simply mark them "nulo" ("null," unreadable).

The TRIFE, the official electoral centurions, rejected AMLO's request to
review those precincts that reported the miracle numbers. Nor would the
tribunal open and count the nearly one million "null" votes -- allegedly
"uncountable" votes which totaled four times Calderon's putative plurality.

Mexico's paper ballot, I would note, is the model of clarity -- with
large images of each party which need only be crossed through. The
ruling party would have us believe that a million voters waited in line,
took a ballot, made no mark, then deliberately folded the ballot and
placed it in the ballot box, pretending they'd voted. Maybe, as in
Florida in 2000, those "unreadable" ballots were quite readable. Indeed,
the few boxes re-counted showed the "null" ballots marked for AMLO. The
Tribunal chose to check no further.

The only precincts the TRIFE ordered re-counted are those where the
tally sheets literally don't tally -- precincts in which the arithmetic
is off. They refuse even to investigate those precincts where ballot
boxes were found in city dumps.

There are other "miracles" which the TRIFE chose to ignore: a weirdly
low turnout of only 44% in the state where Lopez Obrador is most
popular, Guerrero (Acapulco), compared to turnouts of over 60%
elsewhere. The votes didn't vanish, the ruling party explained, rather
the challenger's supporters, confident of victory, did not bother to
vote. Confident ... in Mexico?

In other words, despite the right to paper ballots, the election was
fiddled, finagled and fixed.

Does this mean US activists should give up on the fight for paper
ballots and give in to robo-voting, computerized democracy in a box.
Hell, no! Lopez Obrador has put hundreds of thousands in the street week
after week demanding, "vota por vota" -- recount every vote. But AMLO's
supporters can only demand a re-count because the paper ballot makes a
recount possible. Were Mexico's elections held on a Diebold special,
there would be no way to recount the electrons floating in cyberspace.

Paper ballots make democracy possible, but hardly guarantee it. "Null"
votes, not voters, have chosen Mexico's president. The only other nation
I know of with such a poisonously high percentage of "null" votes is the
"Estados Unidos," the USA.

And just as in Mexico, the "null" vote, the trashed, spoiled, rejected
ballots, overrode the voters' choice, so it was north of the Rio Grande
in 2000 and 2004. Ballot spoilage, not computer manipulation, stole Ohio
and Florida in those elections -- and will steal Colorado and New Mexico
in the 2008 election.

In other words, my fellow gringo activists, we'd better stop fixating on
laptop legerdemain and pledge our lives and fortunes to stopping the
games played with registration rolls, provisional ballots, absentee
ballots, voter ID demands and the less glamorous, yet horribly
effective, methods used to suppress, invalidate and otherwise ambush the
vote.

*****

Greg Palast is the author of the just-released New York Times
bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE
<http://www.gregpalast.com/mailing/link.php?URL=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5ncmVncGFsYXN0LmNvbS9tYWRob3VzZS9pbmRleC5waHAvb3JkZXItdGhlLWJvb2sv&Name=&EncryptedMemberID=NDQ5ODk%3D&CampaignID=23&CampaignStatisticsID=15&Demo=0&Email=bkwood@odyssey.net>: 

Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to
Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front
Lines of the Class War." Go to www.GregPalast.com
<http://www.gregpalast.com/mailing/link.php?URL=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5HcmVnUGFsYXN0LmNvbQ%3D%3D&Name=&EncryptedMemberID=NDQ5ODk%3D&CampaignID=23&CampaignStatisticsID=15&Demo=0&Email=bkwood@odyssey.net>.
See Palast's July 12 investigation of the Mexican election on Democracy
Now!
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