Election 2004: A Necessary Illusion: Black Votes in Ohio Never Counted

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.  [more]

  • Black Votes in Ohio "spoiled" - Invalidated by Defective Punch Card Machines [more]
  • New Report: Thousands of Black Votes went Uncounted in Ohio in 2000. Exact Same Defective Machines in use for 2004. Secretary of State Certified the Machines with FULL Knowledge of Defects [more]
  • Stolen Election 2004 [more]
  • Ohio election fraud uproar blasting to new level [more]