http://www.gregpalast.com/spoiling-america/ Spoiling America
Excerpted from Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Steal Back Your Vote" investigative comic. You can download all 24 pages at www.StealBackYourVote.org. Odd thing about the 207 voters of precinct 999 in Dona Ana County, New Mexico.
Not a single one could choose between George Bush and John Kerry in 2004. Or at least that's what their ballots said.
The Secretary of State at the time told me, "Some of those people just can't make up their minds." Dirt-poor Dona Ana is 63% Hispanic and the precinct is made up entirely of overseas voters, mostly the Chicano soldiers in Iraq or on duty. The machines say that Hispanic soldiers don't care who becomes their commander-in-chief. Or maybe, the machines failed to register their votes.
Few Americans realize that in 2004, 1,389,231 ballots were never counted because they were "spoiled." How do ballots spoil? They get left out of the 'fridge? No, they're supposedly unreadable, blank, or just somehow lost in the machines.
Here's an unfun fact: not everyone's vote spoils the same.
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that the chances of an African-American voter losing their vote is 900% higher than a white voter. Hispanic votes vanished at a rate 500% higher than Anglo votes. Something's rotten. ************************ Go to www.StealBackYourVote.org to download the guide for free or pick up print copies of the investigative comic book by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Every donation you make for copies of the comic allows us to send more out to low income groups in states like Ohio, New Mexico and Colorado. Get the guide now - all copies will be sent out via priority mail. If your group would like to distribute the Steal Back Your Vote guide please contact keri (at) gregpalast.com for special rates. After you've picked up the comic book get the t-shirt. Wear it into the polling place and tell them that they can't steal your vote! Support the fund by picking up the Steal Back Your Vote t-shirt by the cool people over at Clothing for the American Mind. A portion of every purchase goes to support the Palast Investigative Fund. *******************
October 20, 2008 By ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST
"I don't think the Democrats get it. All these new rules and games … could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."
Rolling Stone Magazine is making this important investigative story available on the net in its entirety, free of charge.
Read this excerpt, then read it all on-line at RollingStone.com. Or download it all, with the Kennedy-Palast voter guide, Steal Back Your Vote, at StealBackYourVote.org. "The new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.
"Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not," says Donna Brazile. "We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise." Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering. - From the current Rolling Stone These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.
Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.
This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."
Download the rest – and get the Kennedy-Palast comic book/voter guide – at StealBackYourVote.org. Or, read it on-line, and watch the video, at www.RollingStone.com. ShareThis