ENCALHE

novembro 6, 2008

"Obama, O Presidente Negro", por Jasson de Oliveira Andrade

Obama, O Presidente Negro
Jasson de Oliveira Andrade
Em 1926, Monteiro Lobato escreveu um romance sob o título O Presidente Negro, no qual ele descreve a eleição de 2228, que elegeu um negro, Jim Roy, para presidente dos Estados Unidos. O livro foi republicado em 1956 pela Brasiliense. Em Nota dos Editores, essa observação: “Como H.G. Wells, Monteiro Lobato talvez não tenha imaginado coisas, e sim apenas antecipado coisas”. Foi o que realmente aconteceu. Em 4/11/2008, a previsão de Monteiro Lobato se concretizou com a eleição do afro-americano Barack Hussein Obama, presidente. Nessas eleições de 4 de novembro, concorreram dois candidatos: o democrata Obama, 47, senador e negro, e McCain, 72, senador, republicano e branco. Ambos disputavam os votos do Colégio Eleitoral, composto por 538 delegados, eleitos por votação popular. Cada Estado elege seus delegados, conforme sua representação no Congresso e vai de 3 delegados a 55 (Califórnia). Esperava-se uma disputa duríssima, como ocorreu nas eleições de 2000 e 2004, vencidas por Bush, assim relatada por Luiz Raatz, do Estadão: “Após duas eleições extremamente apertadas, em 2000 e 2004, quando Bush venceu após garantir apenas um Estado de vantagem sobre o rival – Flórida contra Al Gore e Ohio contra John Kerry – Obama conseguiu uma vantagem folgada contra o oponente”. Realmente foi uma vitória mais fácil do que se esperava: Obama, para vencer, precisava de 270 votos ou delegados. Conseguiu, faltando apenas 37 votos, 338 delegados (68 votos a mais do necessário), contra 163 de McCain, ou seja, o dobro de votos ou delegados. Uma vitória massacrante. O democrata venceu em vários Estados, como Ohio (decisivo para Bush em 2004 para derrotar John Kerry), Indiana, Carolina do Norte, Virgínia, Flórida (decisiva para Bush em 2000 para derrotar Al Gore), Pensilvânia, New Hampshire, Novo México e Nevada. Nos votos populares, até agora, 62,1 milhões votaram em Obama contra 55,1 milhões para McCain.
A vitória esmagadora de Obama se deve à crise econômica americana, que está afetando todos os países, inclusive o Brasil. O atual presidente, Bush, é o de pior avaliação nos Estados Unidos. Além da economia, a política internacional também pesa nessa avaliação, principalmente a invasão do Iraque. Milhares de soldados morreram lá e os gastos estão sendo enormes. Este é um dos problemas que Obama terá que resolver. Os iraquianos querem a retirada dos soldados norte-americanos. Como o presidente democrata procederá? A conferir.
“Nos EUA, a esperança venceu o medo”, diz o título da Nota do Blog do jornalista Luiz Antonio Magalhães. Ele acrescenta: “A herança que o novo presidente está recebendo de George W. Bush não poderia ser pior, o que torna a sua performance ainda mais importante, crucial. Que o espírito de Franklin Delano Roosevelt [que superou a crise de 1929] anime Barack Hussein Obama Jr. e que o dia 4 de novembro de 2008 passe para a história como o início de novos tempos”. TOMARA!
JASSON DE OLIVEIRA ANDRADE é jornalista em Mogi Guaçu
Postado em: 05/11/2008
Portal Mogi Guaçu

"Obama, O Presidente Negro", por Jasson de Oliveira Andrade

Obama, O Presidente Negro
Jasson de Oliveira Andrade
Em 1926, Monteiro Lobato escreveu um romance sob o título O Presidente Negro, no qual ele descreve a eleição de 2228, que elegeu um negro, Jim Roy, para presidente dos Estados Unidos. O livro foi republicado em 1956 pela Brasiliense. Em Nota dos Editores, essa observação: “Como H.G. Wells, Monteiro Lobato talvez não tenha imaginado coisas, e sim apenas antecipado coisas”. Foi o que realmente aconteceu. Em 4/11/2008, a previsão de Monteiro Lobato se concretizou com a eleição do afro-americano Barack Hussein Obama, presidente. Nessas eleições de 4 de novembro, concorreram dois candidatos: o democrata Obama, 47, senador e negro, e McCain, 72, senador, republicano e branco. Ambos disputavam os votos do Colégio Eleitoral, composto por 538 delegados, eleitos por votação popular. Cada Estado elege seus delegados, conforme sua representação no Congresso e vai de 3 delegados a 55 (Califórnia). Esperava-se uma disputa duríssima, como ocorreu nas eleições de 2000 e 2004, vencidas por Bush, assim relatada por Luiz Raatz, do Estadão: “Após duas eleições extremamente apertadas, em 2000 e 2004, quando Bush venceu após garantir apenas um Estado de vantagem sobre o rival – Flórida contra Al Gore e Ohio contra John Kerry – Obama conseguiu uma vantagem folgada contra o oponente”. Realmente foi uma vitória mais fácil do que se esperava: Obama, para vencer, precisava de 270 votos ou delegados. Conseguiu, faltando apenas 37 votos, 338 delegados (68 votos a mais do necessário), contra 163 de McCain, ou seja, o dobro de votos ou delegados. Uma vitória massacrante. O democrata venceu em vários Estados, como Ohio (decisivo para Bush em 2004 para derrotar John Kerry), Indiana, Carolina do Norte, Virgínia, Flórida (decisiva para Bush em 2000 para derrotar Al Gore), Pensilvânia, New Hampshire, Novo México e Nevada. Nos votos populares, até agora, 62,1 milhões votaram em Obama contra 55,1 milhões para McCain.
A vitória esmagadora de Obama se deve à crise econômica americana, que está afetando todos os países, inclusive o Brasil. O atual presidente, Bush, é o de pior avaliação nos Estados Unidos. Além da economia, a política internacional também pesa nessa avaliação, principalmente a invasão do Iraque. Milhares de soldados morreram lá e os gastos estão sendo enormes. Este é um dos problemas que Obama terá que resolver. Os iraquianos querem a retirada dos soldados norte-americanos. Como o presidente democrata procederá? A conferir.
“Nos EUA, a esperança venceu o medo”, diz o título da Nota do Blog do jornalista Luiz Antonio Magalhães. Ele acrescenta: “A herança que o novo presidente está recebendo de George W. Bush não poderia ser pior, o que torna a sua performance ainda mais importante, crucial. Que o espírito de Franklin Delano Roosevelt [que superou a crise de 1929] anime Barack Hussein Obama Jr. e que o dia 4 de novembro de 2008 passe para a história como o início de novos tempos”. TOMARA!
JASSON DE OLIVEIRA ANDRADE é jornalista em Mogi Guaçu
Postado em: 05/11/2008
Portal Mogi Guaçu

"Obama, O Presidente Negro", por Jasson de Oliveira Andrade

Obama, O Presidente Negro
Jasson de Oliveira Andrade
Em 1926, Monteiro Lobato escreveu um romance sob o título O Presidente Negro, no qual ele descreve a eleição de 2228, que elegeu um negro, Jim Roy, para presidente dos Estados Unidos. O livro foi republicado em 1956 pela Brasiliense. Em Nota dos Editores, essa observação: “Como H.G. Wells, Monteiro Lobato talvez não tenha imaginado coisas, e sim apenas antecipado coisas”. Foi o que realmente aconteceu. Em 4/11/2008, a previsão de Monteiro Lobato se concretizou com a eleição do afro-americano Barack Hussein Obama, presidente. Nessas eleições de 4 de novembro, concorreram dois candidatos: o democrata Obama, 47, senador e negro, e McCain, 72, senador, republicano e branco. Ambos disputavam os votos do Colégio Eleitoral, composto por 538 delegados, eleitos por votação popular. Cada Estado elege seus delegados, conforme sua representação no Congresso e vai de 3 delegados a 55 (Califórnia). Esperava-se uma disputa duríssima, como ocorreu nas eleições de 2000 e 2004, vencidas por Bush, assim relatada por Luiz Raatz, do Estadão: “Após duas eleições extremamente apertadas, em 2000 e 2004, quando Bush venceu após garantir apenas um Estado de vantagem sobre o rival – Flórida contra Al Gore e Ohio contra John Kerry – Obama conseguiu uma vantagem folgada contra o oponente”. Realmente foi uma vitória mais fácil do que se esperava: Obama, para vencer, precisava de 270 votos ou delegados. Conseguiu, faltando apenas 37 votos, 338 delegados (68 votos a mais do necessário), contra 163 de McCain, ou seja, o dobro de votos ou delegados. Uma vitória massacrante. O democrata venceu em vários Estados, como Ohio (decisivo para Bush em 2004 para derrotar John Kerry), Indiana, Carolina do Norte, Virgínia, Flórida (decisiva para Bush em 2000 para derrotar Al Gore), Pensilvânia, New Hampshire, Novo México e Nevada. Nos votos populares, até agora, 62,1 milhões votaram em Obama contra 55,1 milhões para McCain.
A vitória esmagadora de Obama se deve à crise econômica americana, que está afetando todos os países, inclusive o Brasil. O atual presidente, Bush, é o de pior avaliação nos Estados Unidos. Além da economia, a política internacional também pesa nessa avaliação, principalmente a invasão do Iraque. Milhares de soldados morreram lá e os gastos estão sendo enormes. Este é um dos problemas que Obama terá que resolver. Os iraquianos querem a retirada dos soldados norte-americanos. Como o presidente democrata procederá? A conferir.
“Nos EUA, a esperança venceu o medo”, diz o título da Nota do Blog do jornalista Luiz Antonio Magalhães. Ele acrescenta: “A herança que o novo presidente está recebendo de George W. Bush não poderia ser pior, o que torna a sua performance ainda mais importante, crucial. Que o espírito de Franklin Delano Roosevelt [que superou a crise de 1929] anime Barack Hussein Obama Jr. e que o dia 4 de novembro de 2008 passe para a história como o início de novos tempos”. TOMARA!
JASSON DE OLIVEIRA ANDRADE é jornalista em Mogi Guaçu
Postado em: 05/11/2008
Portal Mogi Guaçu

"Obama, O Presidente Negro", por Jasson de Oliveira Andrade

Obama, O Presidente Negro
Jasson de Oliveira Andrade
Em 1926, Monteiro Lobato escreveu um romance sob o título O Presidente Negro, no qual ele descreve a eleição de 2228, que elegeu um negro, Jim Roy, para presidente dos Estados Unidos. O livro foi republicado em 1956 pela Brasiliense. Em Nota dos Editores, essa observação: “Como H.G. Wells, Monteiro Lobato talvez não tenha imaginado coisas, e sim apenas antecipado coisas”. Foi o que realmente aconteceu. Em 4/11/2008, a previsão de Monteiro Lobato se concretizou com a eleição do afro-americano Barack Hussein Obama, presidente. Nessas eleições de 4 de novembro, concorreram dois candidatos: o democrata Obama, 47, senador e negro, e McCain, 72, senador, republicano e branco. Ambos disputavam os votos do Colégio Eleitoral, composto por 538 delegados, eleitos por votação popular. Cada Estado elege seus delegados, conforme sua representação no Congresso e vai de 3 delegados a 55 (Califórnia). Esperava-se uma disputa duríssima, como ocorreu nas eleições de 2000 e 2004, vencidas por Bush, assim relatada por Luiz Raatz, do Estadão: “Após duas eleições extremamente apertadas, em 2000 e 2004, quando Bush venceu após garantir apenas um Estado de vantagem sobre o rival – Flórida contra Al Gore e Ohio contra John Kerry – Obama conseguiu uma vantagem folgada contra o oponente”. Realmente foi uma vitória mais fácil do que se esperava: Obama, para vencer, precisava de 270 votos ou delegados. Conseguiu, faltando apenas 37 votos, 338 delegados (68 votos a mais do necessário), contra 163 de McCain, ou seja, o dobro de votos ou delegados. Uma vitória massacrante. O democrata venceu em vários Estados, como Ohio (decisivo para Bush em 2004 para derrotar John Kerry), Indiana, Carolina do Norte, Virgínia, Flórida (decisiva para Bush em 2000 para derrotar Al Gore), Pensilvânia, New Hampshire, Novo México e Nevada. Nos votos populares, até agora, 62,1 milhões votaram em Obama contra 55,1 milhões para McCain.
A vitória esmagadora de Obama se deve à crise econômica americana, que está afetando todos os países, inclusive o Brasil. O atual presidente, Bush, é o de pior avaliação nos Estados Unidos. Além da economia, a política internacional também pesa nessa avaliação, principalmente a invasão do Iraque. Milhares de soldados morreram lá e os gastos estão sendo enormes. Este é um dos problemas que Obama terá que resolver. Os iraquianos querem a retirada dos soldados norte-americanos. Como o presidente democrata procederá? A conferir.
“Nos EUA, a esperança venceu o medo”, diz o título da Nota do Blog do jornalista Luiz Antonio Magalhães. Ele acrescenta: “A herança que o novo presidente está recebendo de George W. Bush não poderia ser pior, o que torna a sua performance ainda mais importante, crucial. Que o espírito de Franklin Delano Roosevelt [que superou a crise de 1929] anime Barack Hussein Obama Jr. e que o dia 4 de novembro de 2008 passe para a história como o início de novos tempos”. TOMARA!
JASSON DE OLIVEIRA ANDRADE é jornalista em Mogi Guaçu
Postado em: 05/11/2008
Portal Mogi Guaçu

"Obama, O Presidente Negro", por Jasson de Oliveira Andrade

Obama, O Presidente Negro
Jasson de Oliveira Andrade
Em 1926, Monteiro Lobato escreveu um romance sob o título O Presidente Negro, no qual ele descreve a eleição de 2228, que elegeu um negro, Jim Roy, para presidente dos Estados Unidos. O livro foi republicado em 1956 pela Brasiliense. Em Nota dos Editores, essa observação: “Como H.G. Wells, Monteiro Lobato talvez não tenha imaginado coisas, e sim apenas antecipado coisas”. Foi o que realmente aconteceu. Em 4/11/2008, a previsão de Monteiro Lobato se concretizou com a eleição do afro-americano Barack Hussein Obama, presidente. Nessas eleições de 4 de novembro, concorreram dois candidatos: o democrata Obama, 47, senador e negro, e McCain, 72, senador, republicano e branco. Ambos disputavam os votos do Colégio Eleitoral, composto por 538 delegados, eleitos por votação popular. Cada Estado elege seus delegados, conforme sua representação no Congresso e vai de 3 delegados a 55 (Califórnia). Esperava-se uma disputa duríssima, como ocorreu nas eleições de 2000 e 2004, vencidas por Bush, assim relatada por Luiz Raatz, do Estadão: “Após duas eleições extremamente apertadas, em 2000 e 2004, quando Bush venceu após garantir apenas um Estado de vantagem sobre o rival – Flórida contra Al Gore e Ohio contra John Kerry – Obama conseguiu uma vantagem folgada contra o oponente”. Realmente foi uma vitória mais fácil do que se esperava: Obama, para vencer, precisava de 270 votos ou delegados. Conseguiu, faltando apenas 37 votos, 338 delegados (68 votos a mais do necessário), contra 163 de McCain, ou seja, o dobro de votos ou delegados. Uma vitória massacrante. O democrata venceu em vários Estados, como Ohio (decisivo para Bush em 2004 para derrotar John Kerry), Indiana, Carolina do Norte, Virgínia, Flórida (decisiva para Bush em 2000 para derrotar Al Gore), Pensilvânia, New Hampshire, Novo México e Nevada. Nos votos populares, até agora, 62,1 milhões votaram em Obama contra 55,1 milhões para McCain.
A vitória esmagadora de Obama se deve à crise econômica americana, que está afetando todos os países, inclusive o Brasil. O atual presidente, Bush, é o de pior avaliação nos Estados Unidos. Além da economia, a política internacional também pesa nessa avaliação, principalmente a invasão do Iraque. Milhares de soldados morreram lá e os gastos estão sendo enormes. Este é um dos problemas que Obama terá que resolver. Os iraquianos querem a retirada dos soldados norte-americanos. Como o presidente democrata procederá? A conferir.
“Nos EUA, a esperança venceu o medo”, diz o título da Nota do Blog do jornalista Luiz Antonio Magalhães. Ele acrescenta: “A herança que o novo presidente está recebendo de George W. Bush não poderia ser pior, o que torna a sua performance ainda mais importante, crucial. Que o espírito de Franklin Delano Roosevelt [que superou a crise de 1929] anime Barack Hussein Obama Jr. e que o dia 4 de novembro de 2008 passe para a história como o início de novos tempos”. TOMARA!
JASSON DE OLIVEIRA ANDRADE é jornalista em Mogi Guaçu
Postado em: 05/11/2008
Portal Mogi Guaçu

novembro 4, 2008

"05 de Novembro. O país está em choque. Dentro da cabine, o eleitor americano se tornou "Homem da Klan" e Obama recebeu 6 milhões de votos menos…"

“… que o previsto nas pesquisas de intenção de voto ( … )”.

Pois bem, assim começa o desesperado artigo “Como pôde McCain vencer?” ( “How McCain Could Win” ) , assinado por Greg Palast – o jornalista que, há anos, denuncia a maracutaia para perpetuar os republicanos no poder – e publicado no site Truth.out, em 03 de Novembro. Perceba que ele inicia o artigo datando como 05 de Novembro, ou seja, como se fosse o dia seguinte à eleição americana. Por quê? Um simples exercício de futurologia macabra, com base em seu próprio trabalho.
Como pôde, então, McCain vencer?
Simplesmente desapareceram da base de dados com os eleitores negros ou hispânicos que se inscreveram para votar, em estados como Flórida ( 2000 ) e, da última vez, em Ohio ( 2004 ). Como o eleitor negro e pobre costuma votar em democratas, a supressão do voto atinge de morte este partido. O sujeito aparece na seção e descobre que, simplesmente, seu nome não está lá.
( Aliás, vocês têm lido os jornais, nem que seja uma passada de olhos? Não sei em qual, saiu ontem uma matéria extensa, acho que no Folhão: simplesmente não se parece atinar para o absurdo que tomou conta. Não se deixa de mencionar os “erros”, os “eleitores desaparecidos por engano”, mas como se falasse de uma República de Bananas acostumada com fraudes escancaradas. Simples assim. Tipo: “dez mil eleitores negros sumiram das listas no Arizona. TSK, TSK… Que pena. Ainda bem que o Brasil dá lições ao mundo. Ah, sim, antes que esqueçamos de informar: McCain venceu por 100 votos, tá?”.
Leia o artigo, Palast dá números apavorantes. Por exemplo: no Colorado, dois secretários estaduais ( os Estados são responsáveis pela sua listagem de eleitores ) Republicanos excluíram 19.4% dos eleitores inscritos ( 1 em cada 5 ). Em certos estados, o camarada que for se inscrever para poder votar, tem ainda que declarar sua preferência partidária. Na Wikipédia, em que pese a quase certa presença de erros, dá para se ter uma idéia de como se dá o processo eleitoral norte-americano ( em inglês ). Diz ainda Palast que, desde a eleição passada, 10 milhões de eleitores americanos foram abduzidos pelo Governo Republitiliano e simplesmente foram despachados para o espaço sideral ( os números são esses, a fantasia à Arquivo X é cortesia minha ).
Infelizmente, o texto de onde extraí e reproduzi o trecho também está em inglês, e eu não estou com tempo para tentar, da forma que eu conseguisse ( free-style ), traduzir o texto inteiro.
Se você tem familiaridade com o idioma, e quer saber mais sobre o processo de branqueamento do eleitorado norte-americano, que resultou na eleição surpreendente do ancião McCain ( que, após a divulgação do resultado sofreu um enfarte fulminante, levando a Vice-Presidente Sarah Palin a assumir a cadeira de Presidente da única potência mundial ), veja a seguir:

How McCain Could Win
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t Perspective

Two Obama canvassers prepare their pitch before knocking on registered Republicans’ doors in Arvada, Colorado. (Photo: Kevin Moloney / The New York Times)

.
It’s November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the “Bradley effect”: Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats’ Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
That’s the nightmare. Here’s the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado.
Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire
voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year’s Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they’re still “disappeared” from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year’s primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state’s new voter ID law. They had drivers’ licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they’d let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn’t cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don’t have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state’s Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new “verification” process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here’s an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don’t count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: “spoiled,” unreadable and blank ballots; “provisional” ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That’s what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation’s vote registries. And that’s just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn’t matter. But it’s not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter’s ballot will “spoil” or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter’s.
Does that mean the election’s stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot ( there’s a link at the end ).
How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
Here’s how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.
Step One:
The “Dumpster” Vote – Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls?
The answer is the GOP’s secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he’s going to help us vote, look out. But Democrats didn’t. They signed on to the GOP bill, believing this “reform” law would prevent “another Florida.” Instead, “Help America Vote” Floridated the entire nation.
Here’s how: Help America Vote empowered secretaries of state to remove fraudulent and suspicious voters from the voter registries. It was the trick used by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 when she purged “felon” voters. Except they weren’t felons. And now her GOP confrères are doing it in dozens of states, calling folks felon voters, “inactive” voters, suspect voters, whatever.
Take Colorado. The GOP didn’t exactly trumpet it’s erasing 19.4 percent of voters’ names. It was, as detectives say, “hidden in plain sight,” buried deep inside a US Elections Assistance Commission administrative report, among tables of mind-numbing stats through which I was trawling some months ago. (I used to teach statistics at Indiana University, so I enjoy reading matrices like others enjoy novels.)
For BBC TV and Rolling Stone, I asked the current Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, “Why all the purging?” No answer, not a word, stonewalled even when I flew into Denver and stood outside his door. He was, I guess, too busy preparing to count his own votes as Republican candidate for Congress.
So, where are the Democrats? That’s the really scary part. I spoke with Paul Hultin, appointed by Colorado’s Democratic governor to the state’s Election Reform Commission. Hultin’s a terrific attorney. He knows, and says, that Help America Vote was a law “born in corruption,” but he’s spent his time on Colorado’s voting machines, which he knows are busted. He’s the Democrats’ expert, and he didn’t know that a fifth of his state’s voters had vanished from the voter rolls.
Well, don’t worry. Hultin’s official committee will be holding hearings on the voting debacle in Colorado … on November 19.
Then there’s New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
The company and state choose the purging “algorithms,” those mathematical formulae that, depending on how you tweak them, can go through a voter roll like a hot knife through cream cheese.
So, what happens to the purged voters? They’re told to scram when they arrive to vote or, if they squawk, they get a “provisional” ballot on which they can pretend to vote.
Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don’t get counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the 2004 election was that there were more than three million voters shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That’s what caused Kerry to lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of provisionals will rise, as will rejections.
Whatever keeps you from getting a real ballot – purged name, for example – keeps you from having the provisional counted as well. That’s because Democrats won the right of every voter to get a provisional ballot, but not the right to have that ballot counted. And how many will go uncounted? Double the 1.1 million loss in 2004 – not just because of the GOP’s purge-mania, but because of a vicious little codicil in Help America Vote that went into effect since the last election …
Step Two: “Verification” (and Elimination) of New Voters
For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new obstacles to voting. When we say “new” voters, let’s be clear – we mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).
So, the Republican game plan is simple: don’t let new voters vote. There are three steps to this block-and-steal tactic. First, under the new law, states can deny new voters registration on the grounds their names can’t be verified against government data files. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not, because we don’t have Soviet-style citizenship files in the US. The Social Security Administration is rejecting nearly half of the names submitted because there is no multi-state compatible tracking system. Of course, the Republicans know that.
New voter verification losses are huge. In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations, a trick discovered by his Democratic successor, Debra Bowen. She told me most of the rejected vote applicants had Hispanic, Vietnamese, Islamic and other “odd” names – odd, that is, for Republicans.
It used to be that you filled out a registration card and, bingo, you were registered. Not any more. That’s also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants. They were victims of strict “matching” algorithms. Other states are also playing the “match” game. The result is voters will find themselves simply missing (or in some states, required to show extra ID – another horror show we’ll discuss below). But don’t worry, a of couple million new voters will get provisional ballots. That way, they can practice filling out their ballots for the day when democracy returns to America.
Step Three: New ID Laws
Karl Rove said, “I go to the grocery store and I wanna cash a check to pay for my groceries I gotta show a little bit of ID. Why should it not be reasonable … at the voting place they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID.” And so, while buying his Pampers, Rove came up with a game-winner for the GOP.
Karl, let me answer your question. The reason, according to several studies by the Bush administration itself, is that lots of folks don’t have government ID. Some are nuns, some are poor, lots are brown or old. I was on Fox TV with Lady Rothschild a couple of weeks ago. The lady, a McCain supporter, approved of the ID requirement – and was truly surprised to find out that some poorer Americans don’t have passports. “Why don’t they?” her Fox-mates asked, incredulous. Well, not every barrio kid has just returned from his estate outside London.
Rove knows that. He certainly knows that, for example, Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don’t have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it’s about double – 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million – and that’s way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana’s.
Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn’t like your touch. Or, your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.
In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, “spoiled,” because the machines lost them, couldn’t read them, mangled them or simply didn’t register them. But it’s not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts – a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican “victory” margin in that state.
Another study shows that Hispanics’ vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots.
In the primaries and in 2006, the “spoilage” and blank (“undervote”) totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the “spoilage” total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. (“Spoilage” is not the same as vote tampering. There is the concern that “black-box” computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That’s another matter completely – and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I’m not including here.)
Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
You’ve mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked.
This time, the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn’t know that. They’re counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope – Got that? – or your vote is toast. I’ve spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes – though he only received one. (Have a mail-in ballot in hand? Then, for God’s sake, walk it in to the polling place or local board of elections. Sign, seal and deliver it in person.)
You may get it right, but historic data suggest that, when combining the FTF games with the usual mail-in cock-ups, Obama will lose another million votes to mail-in disqualifications.
Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems
These millions of uncounted ballots – spoiled ballots, provisional ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified – fully explain the difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in 2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” They never ask, and can’t know, “Did your vote count?”
How would they get away with it? Well, they begin explaining away how the “pollsters” get it wrong, how pollsters didn’t figure the “Bradley Effect” of lying, racist voters. They’ll tell us the new, young and Black Obamaniacs gave money, went to rallies – but never bothered to vote. But the real reason will never be whispered: They cast votes that just weren’t counted.
Will the election be stolen on Tuesday? No, it’s already been stolen. That is, several million voters are doomed to lose their ballots; most won’t even know it. Overwhelmingly, they are the poor, minorities, new voters – Obama voters. Does that mean McCain’s got it in the bag and you’re helpless? Not at all.
Don’t Steal Your Own Vote
In 2004, I and other investigators wrote, long before Election Day, “Ohio’s stolen.” We were deadly right.
It’s happening again. For six years, the Democratic Party has been snoozing through a quiet, brilliantly executed Republican operation to block, stop and purge voters by the millions. As New Mexico voting rights attorney John Boyd put it, “I don’t think the Democrats get it. 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.”
Karl Rove once said, “We have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored glasses.” He wasn’t complaining; he was boasting.
I know that the Obama campaign is not happy that I bring up the issue of a possible theft of the election. They fear voters will be “discouraged” by the possibility that the election is fixed.
Well, frankly, if you’re too bummed out by this recitation of facts and statistics to vote, then maybe you don’t deserve to vote, or to drive or to reproduce. Did Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream … so I’m going back to sleep”?
Votes can’t be saved by “hope” alone. There are simple ways to protect your own vote, from walking in your “mail-in” to refusing a provisional ballot. (You can download the list at
StealBackYourVote.org, written with Bobby Kennedy, a professor of law.)
It comes down to this: Can the margin of trickery, vote suppression and ballot destruction – three to six million votes – be overcome? Yes. Because they can’t steal all the votes all the time. Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in some polls. But these are polls of “likely” voters. They exclude first-time and many low-income voters.
So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to happen – for the “unlikely” voters to simply overwhelm the statistical assumption of their laziness. As I’m sure Mr. Obama, a professor of constitutional law, could tell you: the best legal response to systematic vote suppression is to get off yo’ ass!
——–
Greg Palast is the co-author of “Block the Vote,” in this month’s Rolling Stone Magazine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast and Kennedy are also co-authors of the investigative comic book, “Steal Back Your Vote.” Palast, who reports on election fraud for BBC Television, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation fellow for investigative reporting. Prior to his becoming a journalist, Palast was a forensic economist, fraud investigator and taught economics and statistics at Indiana University.
palast@gregpalast.net
MAIS:
Is the Election About to Be Stolen in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Elsewhere?

"05 de Novembro. O país está em choque. Dentro da cabine, o eleitor americano se tornou "Homem da Klan" e Obama recebeu 6 milhões de votos menos…"

“… que o previsto nas pesquisas de intenção de voto ( … )”.

Pois bem, assim começa o desesperado artigo “Como pôde McCain vencer?” ( “How McCain Could Win” ) , assinado por Greg Palast – o jornalista que, há anos, denuncia a maracutaia para perpetuar os republicanos no poder – e publicado no site Truth.out, em 03 de Novembro. Perceba que ele inicia o artigo datando como 05 de Novembro, ou seja, como se fosse o dia seguinte à eleição americana. Por quê? Um simples exercício de futurologia macabra, com base em seu próprio trabalho.
Como pôde, então, McCain vencer?
Simplesmente desapareceram da base de dados com os eleitores negros ou hispânicos que se inscreveram para votar, em estados como Flórida ( 2000 ) e, da última vez, em Ohio ( 2004 ). Como o eleitor negro e pobre costuma votar em democratas, a supressão do voto atinge de morte este partido. O sujeito aparece na seção e descobre que, simplesmente, seu nome não está lá.
( Aliás, vocês têm lido os jornais, nem que seja uma passada de olhos? Não sei em qual, saiu ontem uma matéria extensa, acho que no Folhão: simplesmente não se parece atinar para o absurdo que tomou conta. Não se deixa de mencionar os “erros”, os “eleitores desaparecidos por engano”, mas como se falasse de uma República de Bananas acostumada com fraudes escancaradas. Simples assim. Tipo: “dez mil eleitores negros sumiram das listas no Arizona. TSK, TSK… Que pena. Ainda bem que o Brasil dá lições ao mundo. Ah, sim, antes que esqueçamos de informar: McCain venceu por 100 votos, tá?”.
Leia o artigo, Palast dá números apavorantes. Por exemplo: no Colorado, dois secretários estaduais ( os Estados são responsáveis pela sua listagem de eleitores ) Republicanos excluíram 19.4% dos eleitores inscritos ( 1 em cada 5 ). Em certos estados, o camarada que for se inscrever para poder votar, tem ainda que declarar sua preferência partidária. Na Wikipédia, em que pese a quase certa presença de erros, dá para se ter uma idéia de como se dá o processo eleitoral norte-americano ( em inglês ). Diz ainda Palast que, desde a eleição passada, 10 milhões de eleitores americanos foram abduzidos pelo Governo Republitiliano e simplesmente foram despachados para o espaço sideral ( os números são esses, a fantasia à Arquivo X é cortesia minha ).
Infelizmente, o texto de onde extraí e reproduzi o trecho também está em inglês, e eu não estou com tempo para tentar, da forma que eu conseguisse ( free-style ), traduzir o texto inteiro.
Se você tem familiaridade com o idioma, e quer saber mais sobre o processo de branqueamento do eleitorado norte-americano, que resultou na eleição surpreendente do ancião McCain ( que, após a divulgação do resultado sofreu um enfarte fulminante, levando a Vice-Presidente Sarah Palin a assumir a cadeira de Presidente da única potência mundial ), veja a seguir:

How McCain Could Win
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t Perspective

Two Obama canvassers prepare their pitch before knocking on registered Republicans’ doors in Arvada, Colorado. (Photo: Kevin Moloney / The New York Times)

.
It’s November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the “Bradley effect”: Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats’ Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
That’s the nightmare. Here’s the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado.
Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire
voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year’s Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they’re still “disappeared” from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year’s primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state’s new voter ID law. They had drivers’ licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they’d let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn’t cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don’t have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state’s Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new “verification” process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here’s an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don’t count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: “spoiled,” unreadable and blank ballots; “provisional” ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That’s what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation’s vote registries. And that’s just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn’t matter. But it’s not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter’s ballot will “spoil” or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter’s.
Does that mean the election’s stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot ( there’s a link at the end ).
How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
Here’s how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.
Step One:
The “Dumpster” Vote – Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls?
The answer is the GOP’s secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he’s going to help us vote, look out. But Democrats didn’t. They signed on to the GOP bill, believing this “reform” law would prevent “another Florida.” Instead, “Help America Vote” Floridated the entire nation.
Here’s how: Help America Vote empowered secretaries of state to remove fraudulent and suspicious voters from the voter registries. It was the trick used by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 when she purged “felon” voters. Except they weren’t felons. And now her GOP confrères are doing it in dozens of states, calling folks felon voters, “inactive” voters, suspect voters, whatever.
Take Colorado. The GOP didn’t exactly trumpet it’s erasing 19.4 percent of voters’ names. It was, as detectives say, “hidden in plain sight,” buried deep inside a US Elections Assistance Commission administrative report, among tables of mind-numbing stats through which I was trawling some months ago. (I used to teach statistics at Indiana University, so I enjoy reading matrices like others enjoy novels.)
For BBC TV and Rolling Stone, I asked the current Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, “Why all the purging?” No answer, not a word, stonewalled even when I flew into Denver and stood outside his door. He was, I guess, too busy preparing to count his own votes as Republican candidate for Congress.
So, where are the Democrats? That’s the really scary part. I spoke with Paul Hultin, appointed by Colorado’s Democratic governor to the state’s Election Reform Commission. Hultin’s a terrific attorney. He knows, and says, that Help America Vote was a law “born in corruption,” but he’s spent his time on Colorado’s voting machines, which he knows are busted. He’s the Democrats’ expert, and he didn’t know that a fifth of his state’s voters had vanished from the voter rolls.
Well, don’t worry. Hultin’s official committee will be holding hearings on the voting debacle in Colorado … on November 19.
Then there’s New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
The company and state choose the purging “algorithms,” those mathematical formulae that, depending on how you tweak them, can go through a voter roll like a hot knife through cream cheese.
So, what happens to the purged voters? They’re told to scram when they arrive to vote or, if they squawk, they get a “provisional” ballot on which they can pretend to vote.
Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don’t get counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the 2004 election was that there were more than three million voters shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That’s what caused Kerry to lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of provisionals will rise, as will rejections.
Whatever keeps you from getting a real ballot – purged name, for example – keeps you from having the provisional counted as well. That’s because Democrats won the right of every voter to get a provisional ballot, but not the right to have that ballot counted. And how many will go uncounted? Double the 1.1 million loss in 2004 – not just because of the GOP’s purge-mania, but because of a vicious little codicil in Help America Vote that went into effect since the last election …
Step Two: “Verification” (and Elimination) of New Voters
For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new obstacles to voting. When we say “new” voters, let’s be clear – we mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).
So, the Republican game plan is simple: don’t let new voters vote. There are three steps to this block-and-steal tactic. First, under the new law, states can deny new voters registration on the grounds their names can’t be verified against government data files. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not, because we don’t have Soviet-style citizenship files in the US. The Social Security Administration is rejecting nearly half of the names submitted because there is no multi-state compatible tracking system. Of course, the Republicans know that.
New voter verification losses are huge. In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations, a trick discovered by his Democratic successor, Debra Bowen. She told me most of the rejected vote applicants had Hispanic, Vietnamese, Islamic and other “odd” names – odd, that is, for Republicans.
It used to be that you filled out a registration card and, bingo, you were registered. Not any more. That’s also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants. They were victims of strict “matching” algorithms. Other states are also playing the “match” game. The result is voters will find themselves simply missing (or in some states, required to show extra ID – another horror show we’ll discuss below). But don’t worry, a of couple million new voters will get provisional ballots. That way, they can practice filling out their ballots for the day when democracy returns to America.
Step Three: New ID Laws
Karl Rove said, “I go to the grocery store and I wanna cash a check to pay for my groceries I gotta show a little bit of ID. Why should it not be reasonable … at the voting place they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID.” And so, while buying his Pampers, Rove came up with a game-winner for the GOP.
Karl, let me answer your question. The reason, according to several studies by the Bush administration itself, is that lots of folks don’t have government ID. Some are nuns, some are poor, lots are brown or old. I was on Fox TV with Lady Rothschild a couple of weeks ago. The lady, a McCain supporter, approved of the ID requirement – and was truly surprised to find out that some poorer Americans don’t have passports. “Why don’t they?” her Fox-mates asked, incredulous. Well, not every barrio kid has just returned from his estate outside London.
Rove knows that. He certainly knows that, for example, Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don’t have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it’s about double – 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million – and that’s way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana’s.
Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn’t like your touch. Or, your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.
In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, “spoiled,” because the machines lost them, couldn’t read them, mangled them or simply didn’t register them. But it’s not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts – a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican “victory” margin in that state.
Another study shows that Hispanics’ vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots.
In the primaries and in 2006, the “spoilage” and blank (“undervote”) totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the “spoilage” total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. (“Spoilage” is not the same as vote tampering. There is the concern that “black-box” computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That’s another matter completely – and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I’m not including here.)
Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
You’ve mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked.
This time, the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn’t know that. They’re counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope – Got that? – or your vote is toast. I’ve spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes – though he only received one. (Have a mail-in ballot in hand? Then, for God’s sake, walk it in to the polling place or local board of elections. Sign, seal and deliver it in person.)
You may get it right, but historic data suggest that, when combining the FTF games with the usual mail-in cock-ups, Obama will lose another million votes to mail-in disqualifications.
Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems
These millions of uncounted ballots – spoiled ballots, provisional ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified – fully explain the difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in 2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” They never ask, and can’t know, “Did your vote count?”
How would they get away with it? Well, they begin explaining away how the “pollsters” get it wrong, how pollsters didn’t figure the “Bradley Effect” of lying, racist voters. They’ll tell us the new, young and Black Obamaniacs gave money, went to rallies – but never bothered to vote. But the real reason will never be whispered: They cast votes that just weren’t counted.
Will the election be stolen on Tuesday? No, it’s already been stolen. That is, several million voters are doomed to lose their ballots; most won’t even know it. Overwhelmingly, they are the poor, minorities, new voters – Obama voters. Does that mean McCain’s got it in the bag and you’re helpless? Not at all.
Don’t Steal Your Own Vote
In 2004, I and other investigators wrote, long before Election Day, “Ohio’s stolen.” We were deadly right.
It’s happening again. For six years, the Democratic Party has been snoozing through a quiet, brilliantly executed Republican operation to block, stop and purge voters by the millions. As New Mexico voting rights attorney John Boyd put it, “I don’t think the Democrats get it. 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.”
Karl Rove once said, “We have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored glasses.” He wasn’t complaining; he was boasting.
I know that the Obama campaign is not happy that I bring up the issue of a possible theft of the election. They fear voters will be “discouraged” by the possibility that the election is fixed.
Well, frankly, if you’re too bummed out by this recitation of facts and statistics to vote, then maybe you don’t deserve to vote, or to drive or to reproduce. Did Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream … so I’m going back to sleep”?
Votes can’t be saved by “hope” alone. There are simple ways to protect your own vote, from walking in your “mail-in” to refusing a provisional ballot. (You can download the list at
StealBackYourVote.org, written with Bobby Kennedy, a professor of law.)
It comes down to this: Can the margin of trickery, vote suppression and ballot destruction – three to six million votes – be overcome? Yes. Because they can’t steal all the votes all the time. Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in some polls. But these are polls of “likely” voters. They exclude first-time and many low-income voters.
So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to happen – for the “unlikely” voters to simply overwhelm the statistical assumption of their laziness. As I’m sure Mr. Obama, a professor of constitutional law, could tell you: the best legal response to systematic vote suppression is to get off yo’ ass!
——–
Greg Palast is the co-author of “Block the Vote,” in this month’s Rolling Stone Magazine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast and Kennedy are also co-authors of the investigative comic book, “Steal Back Your Vote.” Palast, who reports on election fraud for BBC Television, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation fellow for investigative reporting. Prior to his becoming a journalist, Palast was a forensic economist, fraud investigator and taught economics and statistics at Indiana University.
palast@gregpalast.net
MAIS:
Is the Election About to Be Stolen in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Elsewhere?

"05 de Novembro. O país está em choque. Dentro da cabine, o eleitor americano se tornou "Homem da Klan" e Obama recebeu 6 milhões de votos menos…"

“… que o previsto nas pesquisas de intenção de voto ( … )”.

Pois bem, assim começa o desesperado artigo “Como pôde McCain vencer?” ( “How McCain Could Win” ) , assinado por Greg Palast – o jornalista que, há anos, denuncia a maracutaia para perpetuar os republicanos no poder – e publicado no site Truth.out, em 03 de Novembro. Perceba que ele inicia o artigo datando como 05 de Novembro, ou seja, como se fosse o dia seguinte à eleição americana. Por quê? Um simples exercício de futurologia macabra, com base em seu próprio trabalho.
Como pôde, então, McCain vencer?
Simplesmente desapareceram da base de dados com os eleitores negros ou hispânicos que se inscreveram para votar, em estados como Flórida ( 2000 ) e, da última vez, em Ohio ( 2004 ). Como o eleitor negro e pobre costuma votar em democratas, a supressão do voto atinge de morte este partido. O sujeito aparece na seção e descobre que, simplesmente, seu nome não está lá.
( Aliás, vocês têm lido os jornais, nem que seja uma passada de olhos? Não sei em qual, saiu ontem uma matéria extensa, acho que no Folhão: simplesmente não se parece atinar para o absurdo que tomou conta. Não se deixa de mencionar os “erros”, os “eleitores desaparecidos por engano”, mas como se falasse de uma República de Bananas acostumada com fraudes escancaradas. Simples assim. Tipo: “dez mil eleitores negros sumiram das listas no Arizona. TSK, TSK… Que pena. Ainda bem que o Brasil dá lições ao mundo. Ah, sim, antes que esqueçamos de informar: McCain venceu por 100 votos, tá?”.
Leia o artigo, Palast dá números apavorantes. Por exemplo: no Colorado, dois secretários estaduais ( os Estados são responsáveis pela sua listagem de eleitores ) Republicanos excluíram 19.4% dos eleitores inscritos ( 1 em cada 5 ). Em certos estados, o camarada que for se inscrever para poder votar, tem ainda que declarar sua preferência partidária. Na Wikipédia, em que pese a quase certa presença de erros, dá para se ter uma idéia de como se dá o processo eleitoral norte-americano ( em inglês ). Diz ainda Palast que, desde a eleição passada, 10 milhões de eleitores americanos foram abduzidos pelo Governo Republitiliano e simplesmente foram despachados para o espaço sideral ( os números são esses, a fantasia à Arquivo X é cortesia minha ).
Infelizmente, o texto de onde extraí e reproduzi o trecho também está em inglês, e eu não estou com tempo para tentar, da forma que eu conseguisse ( free-style ), traduzir o texto inteiro.
Se você tem familiaridade com o idioma, e quer saber mais sobre o processo de branqueamento do eleitorado norte-americano, que resultou na eleição surpreendente do ancião McCain ( que, após a divulgação do resultado sofreu um enfarte fulminante, levando a Vice-Presidente Sarah Palin a assumir a cadeira de Presidente da única potência mundial ), veja a seguir:

How McCain Could Win
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t Perspective

Two Obama canvassers prepare their pitch before knocking on registered Republicans’ doors in Arvada, Colorado. (Photo: Kevin Moloney / The New York Times)

.
It’s November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the “Bradley effect”: Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats’ Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
That’s the nightmare. Here’s the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado.
Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire
voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year’s Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they’re still “disappeared” from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year’s primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state’s new voter ID law. They had drivers’ licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they’d let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn’t cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don’t have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state’s Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new “verification” process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here’s an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don’t count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: “spoiled,” unreadable and blank ballots; “provisional” ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That’s what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation’s vote registries. And that’s just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn’t matter. But it’s not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter’s ballot will “spoil” or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter’s.
Does that mean the election’s stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot ( there’s a link at the end ).
How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
Here’s how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.
Step One:
The “Dumpster” Vote – Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls?
The answer is the GOP’s secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he’s going to help us vote, look out. But Democrats didn’t. They signed on to the GOP bill, believing this “reform” law would prevent “another Florida.” Instead, “Help America Vote” Floridated the entire nation.
Here’s how: Help America Vote empowered secretaries of state to remove fraudulent and suspicious voters from the voter registries. It was the trick used by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 when she purged “felon” voters. Except they weren’t felons. And now her GOP confrères are doing it in dozens of states, calling folks felon voters, “inactive” voters, suspect voters, whatever.
Take Colorado. The GOP didn’t exactly trumpet it’s erasing 19.4 percent of voters’ names. It was, as detectives say, “hidden in plain sight,” buried deep inside a US Elections Assistance Commission administrative report, among tables of mind-numbing stats through which I was trawling some months ago. (I used to teach statistics at Indiana University, so I enjoy reading matrices like others enjoy novels.)
For BBC TV and Rolling Stone, I asked the current Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, “Why all the purging?” No answer, not a word, stonewalled even when I flew into Denver and stood outside his door. He was, I guess, too busy preparing to count his own votes as Republican candidate for Congress.
So, where are the Democrats? That’s the really scary part. I spoke with Paul Hultin, appointed by Colorado’s Democratic governor to the state’s Election Reform Commission. Hultin’s a terrific attorney. He knows, and says, that Help America Vote was a law “born in corruption,” but he’s spent his time on Colorado’s voting machines, which he knows are busted. He’s the Democrats’ expert, and he didn’t know that a fifth of his state’s voters had vanished from the voter rolls.
Well, don’t worry. Hultin’s official committee will be holding hearings on the voting debacle in Colorado … on November 19.
Then there’s New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
The company and state choose the purging “algorithms,” those mathematical formulae that, depending on how you tweak them, can go through a voter roll like a hot knife through cream cheese.
So, what happens to the purged voters? They’re told to scram when they arrive to vote or, if they squawk, they get a “provisional” ballot on which they can pretend to vote.
Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don’t get counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the 2004 election was that there were more than three million voters shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That’s what caused Kerry to lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of provisionals will rise, as will rejections.
Whatever keeps you from getting a real ballot – purged name, for example – keeps you from having the provisional counted as well. That’s because Democrats won the right of every voter to get a provisional ballot, but not the right to have that ballot counted. And how many will go uncounted? Double the 1.1 million loss in 2004 – not just because of the GOP’s purge-mania, but because of a vicious little codicil in Help America Vote that went into effect since the last election …
Step Two: “Verification” (and Elimination) of New Voters
For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new obstacles to voting. When we say “new” voters, let’s be clear – we mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).
So, the Republican game plan is simple: don’t let new voters vote. There are three steps to this block-and-steal tactic. First, under the new law, states can deny new voters registration on the grounds their names can’t be verified against government data files. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not, because we don’t have Soviet-style citizenship files in the US. The Social Security Administration is rejecting nearly half of the names submitted because there is no multi-state compatible tracking system. Of course, the Republicans know that.
New voter verification losses are huge. In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations, a trick discovered by his Democratic successor, Debra Bowen. She told me most of the rejected vote applicants had Hispanic, Vietnamese, Islamic and other “odd” names – odd, that is, for Republicans.
It used to be that you filled out a registration card and, bingo, you were registered. Not any more. That’s also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants. They were victims of strict “matching” algorithms. Other states are also playing the “match” game. The result is voters will find themselves simply missing (or in some states, required to show extra ID – another horror show we’ll discuss below). But don’t worry, a of couple million new voters will get provisional ballots. That way, they can practice filling out their ballots for the day when democracy returns to America.
Step Three: New ID Laws
Karl Rove said, “I go to the grocery store and I wanna cash a check to pay for my groceries I gotta show a little bit of ID. Why should it not be reasonable … at the voting place they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID.” And so, while buying his Pampers, Rove came up with a game-winner for the GOP.
Karl, let me answer your question. The reason, according to several studies by the Bush administration itself, is that lots of folks don’t have government ID. Some are nuns, some are poor, lots are brown or old. I was on Fox TV with Lady Rothschild a couple of weeks ago. The lady, a McCain supporter, approved of the ID requirement – and was truly surprised to find out that some poorer Americans don’t have passports. “Why don’t they?” her Fox-mates asked, incredulous. Well, not every barrio kid has just returned from his estate outside London.
Rove knows that. He certainly knows that, for example, Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don’t have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it’s about double – 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million – and that’s way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana’s.
Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn’t like your touch. Or, your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.
In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, “spoiled,” because the machines lost them, couldn’t read them, mangled them or simply didn’t register them. But it’s not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts – a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican “victory” margin in that state.
Another study shows that Hispanics’ vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots.
In the primaries and in 2006, the “spoilage” and blank (“undervote”) totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the “spoilage” total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. (“Spoilage” is not the same as vote tampering. There is the concern that “black-box” computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That’s another matter completely – and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I’m not including here.)
Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
You’ve mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked.
This time, the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn’t know that. They’re counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope – Got that? – or your vote is toast. I’ve spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes – though he only received one. (Have a mail-in ballot in hand? Then, for God’s sake, walk it in to the polling place or local board of elections. Sign, seal and deliver it in person.)
You may get it right, but historic data suggest that, when combining the FTF games with the usual mail-in cock-ups, Obama will lose another million votes to mail-in disqualifications.
Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems
These millions of uncounted ballots – spoiled ballots, provisional ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified – fully explain the difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in 2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” They never ask, and can’t know, “Did your vote count?”
How would they get away with it? Well, they begin explaining away how the “pollsters” get it wrong, how pollsters didn’t figure the “Bradley Effect” of lying, racist voters. They’ll tell us the new, young and Black Obamaniacs gave money, went to rallies – but never bothered to vote. But the real reason will never be whispered: They cast votes that just weren’t counted.
Will the election be stolen on Tuesday? No, it’s already been stolen. That is, several million voters are doomed to lose their ballots; most won’t even know it. Overwhelmingly, they are the poor, minorities, new voters – Obama voters. Does that mean McCain’s got it in the bag and you’re helpless? Not at all.
Don’t Steal Your Own Vote
In 2004, I and other investigators wrote, long before Election Day, “Ohio’s stolen.” We were deadly right.
It’s happening again. For six years, the Democratic Party has been snoozing through a quiet, brilliantly executed Republican operation to block, stop and purge voters by the millions. As New Mexico voting rights attorney John Boyd put it, “I don’t think the Democrats get it. 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.”
Karl Rove once said, “We have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored glasses.” He wasn’t complaining; he was boasting.
I know that the Obama campaign is not happy that I bring up the issue of a possible theft of the election. They fear voters will be “discouraged” by the possibility that the election is fixed.
Well, frankly, if you’re too bummed out by this recitation of facts and statistics to vote, then maybe you don’t deserve to vote, or to drive or to reproduce. Did Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream … so I’m going back to sleep”?
Votes can’t be saved by “hope” alone. There are simple ways to protect your own vote, from walking in your “mail-in” to refusing a provisional ballot. (You can download the list at
StealBackYourVote.org, written with Bobby Kennedy, a professor of law.)
It comes down to this: Can the margin of trickery, vote suppression and ballot destruction – three to six million votes – be overcome? Yes. Because they can’t steal all the votes all the time. Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in some polls. But these are polls of “likely” voters. They exclude first-time and many low-income voters.
So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to happen – for the “unlikely” voters to simply overwhelm the statistical assumption of their laziness. As I’m sure Mr. Obama, a professor of constitutional law, could tell you: the best legal response to systematic vote suppression is to get off yo’ ass!
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Greg Palast is the co-author of “Block the Vote,” in this month’s Rolling Stone Magazine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast and Kennedy are also co-authors of the investigative comic book, “Steal Back Your Vote.” Palast, who reports on election fraud for BBC Television, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation fellow for investigative reporting. Prior to his becoming a journalist, Palast was a forensic economist, fraud investigator and taught economics and statistics at Indiana University.
palast@gregpalast.net
MAIS:
Is the Election About to Be Stolen in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Elsewhere?

"05 de Novembro. O país está em choque. Dentro da cabine, o eleitor americano se tornou "Homem da Klan" e Obama recebeu 6 milhões de votos menos…"

“… que o previsto nas pesquisas de intenção de voto ( … )”.

Pois bem, assim começa o desesperado artigo “Como pôde McCain vencer?” ( “How McCain Could Win” ) , assinado por Greg Palast – o jornalista que, há anos, denuncia a maracutaia para perpetuar os republicanos no poder – e publicado no site Truth.out, em 03 de Novembro. Perceba que ele inicia o artigo datando como 05 de Novembro, ou seja, como se fosse o dia seguinte à eleição americana. Por quê? Um simples exercício de futurologia macabra, com base em seu próprio trabalho.
Como pôde, então, McCain vencer?
Simplesmente desapareceram da base de dados com os eleitores negros ou hispânicos que se inscreveram para votar, em estados como Flórida ( 2000 ) e, da última vez, em Ohio ( 2004 ). Como o eleitor negro e pobre costuma votar em democratas, a supressão do voto atinge de morte este partido. O sujeito aparece na seção e descobre que, simplesmente, seu nome não está lá.
( Aliás, vocês têm lido os jornais, nem que seja uma passada de olhos? Não sei em qual, saiu ontem uma matéria extensa, acho que no Folhão: simplesmente não se parece atinar para o absurdo que tomou conta. Não se deixa de mencionar os “erros”, os “eleitores desaparecidos por engano”, mas como se falasse de uma República de Bananas acostumada com fraudes escancaradas. Simples assim. Tipo: “dez mil eleitores negros sumiram das listas no Arizona. TSK, TSK… Que pena. Ainda bem que o Brasil dá lições ao mundo. Ah, sim, antes que esqueçamos de informar: McCain venceu por 100 votos, tá?”.
Leia o artigo, Palast dá números apavorantes. Por exemplo: no Colorado, dois secretários estaduais ( os Estados são responsáveis pela sua listagem de eleitores ) Republicanos excluíram 19.4% dos eleitores inscritos ( 1 em cada 5 ). Em certos estados, o camarada que for se inscrever para poder votar, tem ainda que declarar sua preferência partidária. Na Wikipédia, em que pese a quase certa presença de erros, dá para se ter uma idéia de como se dá o processo eleitoral norte-americano ( em inglês ). Diz ainda Palast que, desde a eleição passada, 10 milhões de eleitores americanos foram abduzidos pelo Governo Republitiliano e simplesmente foram despachados para o espaço sideral ( os números são esses, a fantasia à Arquivo X é cortesia minha ).
Infelizmente, o texto de onde extraí e reproduzi o trecho também está em inglês, e eu não estou com tempo para tentar, da forma que eu conseguisse ( free-style ), traduzir o texto inteiro.
Se você tem familiaridade com o idioma, e quer saber mais sobre o processo de branqueamento do eleitorado norte-americano, que resultou na eleição surpreendente do ancião McCain ( que, após a divulgação do resultado sofreu um enfarte fulminante, levando a Vice-Presidente Sarah Palin a assumir a cadeira de Presidente da única potência mundial ), veja a seguir:

How McCain Could Win
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t Perspective

Two Obama canvassers prepare their pitch before knocking on registered Republicans’ doors in Arvada, Colorado. (Photo: Kevin Moloney / The New York Times)

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It’s November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the “Bradley effect”: Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats’ Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
That’s the nightmare. Here’s the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado.
Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire
voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year’s Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they’re still “disappeared” from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year’s primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state’s new voter ID law. They had drivers’ licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they’d let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn’t cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don’t have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state’s Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new “verification” process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here’s an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don’t count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: “spoiled,” unreadable and blank ballots; “provisional” ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That’s what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation’s vote registries. And that’s just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn’t matter. But it’s not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter’s ballot will “spoil” or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter’s.
Does that mean the election’s stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot ( there’s a link at the end ).
How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
Here’s how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.
Step One:
The “Dumpster” Vote – Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls?
The answer is the GOP’s secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he’s going to help us vote, look out. But Democrats didn’t. They signed on to the GOP bill, believing this “reform” law would prevent “another Florida.” Instead, “Help America Vote” Floridated the entire nation.
Here’s how: Help America Vote empowered secretaries of state to remove fraudulent and suspicious voters from the voter registries. It was the trick used by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 when she purged “felon” voters. Except they weren’t felons. And now her GOP confrères are doing it in dozens of states, calling folks felon voters, “inactive” voters, suspect voters, whatever.
Take Colorado. The GOP didn’t exactly trumpet it’s erasing 19.4 percent of voters’ names. It was, as detectives say, “hidden in plain sight,” buried deep inside a US Elections Assistance Commission administrative report, among tables of mind-numbing stats through which I was trawling some months ago. (I used to teach statistics at Indiana University, so I enjoy reading matrices like others enjoy novels.)
For BBC TV and Rolling Stone, I asked the current Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, “Why all the purging?” No answer, not a word, stonewalled even when I flew into Denver and stood outside his door. He was, I guess, too busy preparing to count his own votes as Republican candidate for Congress.
So, where are the Democrats? That’s the really scary part. I spoke with Paul Hultin, appointed by Colorado’s Democratic governor to the state’s Election Reform Commission. Hultin’s a terrific attorney. He knows, and says, that Help America Vote was a law “born in corruption,” but he’s spent his time on Colorado’s voting machines, which he knows are busted. He’s the Democrats’ expert, and he didn’t know that a fifth of his state’s voters had vanished from the voter rolls.
Well, don’t worry. Hultin’s official committee will be holding hearings on the voting debacle in Colorado … on November 19.
Then there’s New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
The company and state choose the purging “algorithms,” those mathematical formulae that, depending on how you tweak them, can go through a voter roll like a hot knife through cream cheese.
So, what happens to the purged voters? They’re told to scram when they arrive to vote or, if they squawk, they get a “provisional” ballot on which they can pretend to vote.
Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don’t get counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the 2004 election was that there were more than three million voters shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That’s what caused Kerry to lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of provisionals will rise, as will rejections.
Whatever keeps you from getting a real ballot – purged name, for example – keeps you from having the provisional counted as well. That’s because Democrats won the right of every voter to get a provisional ballot, but not the right to have that ballot counted. And how many will go uncounted? Double the 1.1 million loss in 2004 – not just because of the GOP’s purge-mania, but because of a vicious little codicil in Help America Vote that went into effect since the last election …
Step Two: “Verification” (and Elimination) of New Voters
For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new obstacles to voting. When we say “new” voters, let’s be clear – we mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).
So, the Republican game plan is simple: don’t let new voters vote. There are three steps to this block-and-steal tactic. First, under the new law, states can deny new voters registration on the grounds their names can’t be verified against government data files. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not, because we don’t have Soviet-style citizenship files in the US. The Social Security Administration is rejecting nearly half of the names submitted because there is no multi-state compatible tracking system. Of course, the Republicans know that.
New voter verification losses are huge. In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations, a trick discovered by his Democratic successor, Debra Bowen. She told me most of the rejected vote applicants had Hispanic, Vietnamese, Islamic and other “odd” names – odd, that is, for Republicans.
It used to be that you filled out a registration card and, bingo, you were registered. Not any more. That’s also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants. They were victims of strict “matching” algorithms. Other states are also playing the “match” game. The result is voters will find themselves simply missing (or in some states, required to show extra ID – another horror show we’ll discuss below). But don’t worry, a of couple million new voters will get provisional ballots. That way, they can practice filling out their ballots for the day when democracy returns to America.
Step Three: New ID Laws
Karl Rove said, “I go to the grocery store and I wanna cash a check to pay for my groceries I gotta show a little bit of ID. Why should it not be reasonable … at the voting place they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID.” And so, while buying his Pampers, Rove came up with a game-winner for the GOP.
Karl, let me answer your question. The reason, according to several studies by the Bush administration itself, is that lots of folks don’t have government ID. Some are nuns, some are poor, lots are brown or old. I was on Fox TV with Lady Rothschild a couple of weeks ago. The lady, a McCain supporter, approved of the ID requirement – and was truly surprised to find out that some poorer Americans don’t have passports. “Why don’t they?” her Fox-mates asked, incredulous. Well, not every barrio kid has just returned from his estate outside London.
Rove knows that. He certainly knows that, for example, Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don’t have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it’s about double – 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million – and that’s way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana’s.
Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn’t like your touch. Or, your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.
In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, “spoiled,” because the machines lost them, couldn’t read them, mangled them or simply didn’t register them. But it’s not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts – a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican “victory” margin in that state.
Another study shows that Hispanics’ vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots.
In the primaries and in 2006, the “spoilage” and blank (“undervote”) totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the “spoilage” total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. (“Spoilage” is not the same as vote tampering. There is the concern that “black-box” computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That’s another matter completely – and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I’m not including here.)
Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
You’ve mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked.
This time, the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn’t know that. They’re counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope – Got that? – or your vote is toast. I’ve spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes – though he only received one. (Have a mail-in ballot in hand? Then, for God’s sake, walk it in to the polling place or local board of elections. Sign, seal and deliver it in person.)
You may get it right, but historic data suggest that, when combining the FTF games with the usual mail-in cock-ups, Obama will lose another million votes to mail-in disqualifications.
Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems
These millions of uncounted ballots – spoiled ballots, provisional ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified – fully explain the difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in 2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” They never ask, and can’t know, “Did your vote count?”
How would they get away with it? Well, they begin explaining away how the “pollsters” get it wrong, how pollsters didn’t figure the “Bradley Effect” of lying, racist voters. They’ll tell us the new, young and Black Obamaniacs gave money, went to rallies – but never bothered to vote. But the real reason will never be whispered: They cast votes that just weren’t counted.
Will the election be stolen on Tuesday? No, it’s already been stolen. That is, several million voters are doomed to lose their ballots; most won’t even know it. Overwhelmingly, they are the poor, minorities, new voters – Obama voters. Does that mean McCain’s got it in the bag and you’re helpless? Not at all.
Don’t Steal Your Own Vote
In 2004, I and other investigators wrote, long before Election Day, “Ohio’s stolen.” We were deadly right.
It’s happening again. For six years, the Democratic Party has been snoozing through a quiet, brilliantly executed Republican operation to block, stop and purge voters by the millions. As New Mexico voting rights attorney John Boyd put it, “I don’t think the Democrats get it. 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.”
Karl Rove once said, “We have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored glasses.” He wasn’t complaining; he was boasting.
I know that the Obama campaign is not happy that I bring up the issue of a possible theft of the election. They fear voters will be “discouraged” by the possibility that the election is fixed.
Well, frankly, if you’re too bummed out by this recitation of facts and statistics to vote, then maybe you don’t deserve to vote, or to drive or to reproduce. Did Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream … so I’m going back to sleep”?
Votes can’t be saved by “hope” alone. There are simple ways to protect your own vote, from walking in your “mail-in” to refusing a provisional ballot. (You can download the list at
StealBackYourVote.org, written with Bobby Kennedy, a professor of law.)
It comes down to this: Can the margin of trickery, vote suppression and ballot destruction – three to six million votes – be overcome? Yes. Because they can’t steal all the votes all the time. Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in some polls. But these are polls of “likely” voters. They exclude first-time and many low-income voters.
So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to happen – for the “unlikely” voters to simply overwhelm the statistical assumption of their laziness. As I’m sure Mr. Obama, a professor of constitutional law, could tell you: the best legal response to systematic vote suppression is to get off yo’ ass!
——–
Greg Palast is the co-author of “Block the Vote,” in this month’s Rolling Stone Magazine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast and Kennedy are also co-authors of the investigative comic book, “Steal Back Your Vote.” Palast, who reports on election fraud for BBC Television, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation fellow for investigative reporting. Prior to his becoming a journalist, Palast was a forensic economist, fraud investigator and taught economics and statistics at Indiana University.
palast@gregpalast.net
MAIS:
Is the Election About to Be Stolen in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Elsewhere?

"05 de Novembro. O país está em choque. Dentro da cabine, o eleitor americano se tornou "Homem da Klan" e Obama recebeu 6 milhões de votos menos…"

“… que o previsto nas pesquisas de intenção de voto ( … )”.

Pois bem, assim começa o desesperado artigo “Como pôde McCain vencer?” ( “How McCain Could Win” ) , assinado por Greg Palast – o jornalista que, há anos, denuncia a maracutaia para perpetuar os republicanos no poder – e publicado no site Truth.out, em 03 de Novembro. Perceba que ele inicia o artigo datando como 05 de Novembro, ou seja, como se fosse o dia seguinte à eleição americana. Por quê? Um simples exercício de futurologia macabra, com base em seu próprio trabalho.
Como pôde, então, McCain vencer?
Simplesmente desapareceram da base de dados com os eleitores negros ou hispânicos que se inscreveram para votar, em estados como Flórida ( 2000 ) e, da última vez, em Ohio ( 2004 ). Como o eleitor negro e pobre costuma votar em democratas, a supressão do voto atinge de morte este partido. O sujeito aparece na seção e descobre que, simplesmente, seu nome não está lá.
( Aliás, vocês têm lido os jornais, nem que seja uma passada de olhos? Não sei em qual, saiu ontem uma matéria extensa, acho que no Folhão: simplesmente não se parece atinar para o absurdo que tomou conta. Não se deixa de mencionar os “erros”, os “eleitores desaparecidos por engano”, mas como se falasse de uma República de Bananas acostumada com fraudes escancaradas. Simples assim. Tipo: “dez mil eleitores negros sumiram das listas no Arizona. TSK, TSK… Que pena. Ainda bem que o Brasil dá lições ao mundo. Ah, sim, antes que esqueçamos de informar: McCain venceu por 100 votos, tá?”.
Leia o artigo, Palast dá números apavorantes. Por exemplo: no Colorado, dois secretários estaduais ( os Estados são responsáveis pela sua listagem de eleitores ) Republicanos excluíram 19.4% dos eleitores inscritos ( 1 em cada 5 ). Em certos estados, o camarada que for se inscrever para poder votar, tem ainda que declarar sua preferência partidária. Na Wikipédia, em que pese a quase certa presença de erros, dá para se ter uma idéia de como se dá o processo eleitoral norte-americano ( em inglês ). Diz ainda Palast que, desde a eleição passada, 10 milhões de eleitores americanos foram abduzidos pelo Governo Republitiliano e simplesmente foram despachados para o espaço sideral ( os números são esses, a fantasia à Arquivo X é cortesia minha ).
Infelizmente, o texto de onde extraí e reproduzi o trecho também está em inglês, e eu não estou com tempo para tentar, da forma que eu conseguisse ( free-style ), traduzir o texto inteiro.
Se você tem familiaridade com o idioma, e quer saber mais sobre o processo de branqueamento do eleitorado norte-americano, que resultou na eleição surpreendente do ancião McCain ( que, após a divulgação do resultado sofreu um enfarte fulminante, levando a Vice-Presidente Sarah Palin a assumir a cadeira de Presidente da única potência mundial ), veja a seguir:

How McCain Could Win
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t Perspective

Two Obama canvassers prepare their pitch before knocking on registered Republicans’ doors in Arvada, Colorado. (Photo: Kevin Moloney / The New York Times)

.
It’s November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the “Bradley effect”: Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats’ Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
That’s the nightmare. Here’s the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado.
Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire
voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year’s Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they’re still “disappeared” from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year’s primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state’s new voter ID law. They had drivers’ licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they’d let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn’t cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don’t have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state’s Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new “verification” process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here’s an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don’t count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: “spoiled,” unreadable and blank ballots; “provisional” ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That’s what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation’s vote registries. And that’s just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn’t matter. But it’s not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter’s ballot will “spoil” or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter’s.
Does that mean the election’s stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot ( there’s a link at the end ).
How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
Here’s how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.
Step One:
The “Dumpster” Vote – Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls?
The answer is the GOP’s secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he’s going to help us vote, look out. But Democrats didn’t. They signed on to the GOP bill, believing this “reform” law would prevent “another Florida.” Instead, “Help America Vote” Floridated the entire nation.
Here’s how: Help America Vote empowered secretaries of state to remove fraudulent and suspicious voters from the voter registries. It was the trick used by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 when she purged “felon” voters. Except they weren’t felons. And now her GOP confrères are doing it in dozens of states, calling folks felon voters, “inactive” voters, suspect voters, whatever.
Take Colorado. The GOP didn’t exactly trumpet it’s erasing 19.4 percent of voters’ names. It was, as detectives say, “hidden in plain sight,” buried deep inside a US Elections Assistance Commission administrative report, among tables of mind-numbing stats through which I was trawling some months ago. (I used to teach statistics at Indiana University, so I enjoy reading matrices like others enjoy novels.)
For BBC TV and Rolling Stone, I asked the current Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, “Why all the purging?” No answer, not a word, stonewalled even when I flew into Denver and stood outside his door. He was, I guess, too busy preparing to count his own votes as Republican candidate for Congress.
So, where are the Democrats? That’s the really scary part. I spoke with Paul Hultin, appointed by Colorado’s Democratic governor to the state’s Election Reform Commission. Hultin’s a terrific attorney. He knows, and says, that Help America Vote was a law “born in corruption,” but he’s spent his time on Colorado’s voting machines, which he knows are busted. He’s the Democrats’ expert, and he didn’t know that a fifth of his state’s voters had vanished from the voter rolls.
Well, don’t worry. Hultin’s official committee will be holding hearings on the voting debacle in Colorado … on November 19.
Then there’s New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
The company and state choose the purging “algorithms,” those mathematical formulae that, depending on how you tweak them, can go through a voter roll like a hot knife through cream cheese.
So, what happens to the purged voters? They’re told to scram when they arrive to vote or, if they squawk, they get a “provisional” ballot on which they can pretend to vote.
Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don’t get counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the 2004 election was that there were more than three million voters shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That’s what caused Kerry to lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of provisionals will rise, as will rejections.
Whatever keeps you from getting a real ballot – purged name, for example – keeps you from having the provisional counted as well. That’s because Democrats won the right of every voter to get a provisional ballot, but not the right to have that ballot counted. And how many will go uncounted? Double the 1.1 million loss in 2004 – not just because of the GOP’s purge-mania, but because of a vicious little codicil in Help America Vote that went into effect since the last election …
Step Two: “Verification” (and Elimination) of New Voters
For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new obstacles to voting. When we say “new” voters, let’s be clear – we mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).
So, the Republican game plan is simple: don’t let new voters vote. There are three steps to this block-and-steal tactic. First, under the new law, states can deny new voters registration on the grounds their names can’t be verified against government data files. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not, because we don’t have Soviet-style citizenship files in the US. The Social Security Administration is rejecting nearly half of the names submitted because there is no multi-state compatible tracking system. Of course, the Republicans know that.
New voter verification losses are huge. In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations, a trick discovered by his Democratic successor, Debra Bowen. She told me most of the rejected vote applicants had Hispanic, Vietnamese, Islamic and other “odd” names – odd, that is, for Republicans.
It used to be that you filled out a registration card and, bingo, you were registered. Not any more. That’s also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants. They were victims of strict “matching” algorithms. Other states are also playing the “match” game. The result is voters will find themselves simply missing (or in some states, required to show extra ID – another horror show we’ll discuss below). But don’t worry, a of couple million new voters will get provisional ballots. That way, they can practice filling out their ballots for the day when democracy returns to America.
Step Three: New ID Laws
Karl Rove said, “I go to the grocery store and I wanna cash a check to pay for my groceries I gotta show a little bit of ID. Why should it not be reasonable … at the voting place they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID.” And so, while buying his Pampers, Rove came up with a game-winner for the GOP.
Karl, let me answer your question. The reason, according to several studies by the Bush administration itself, is that lots of folks don’t have government ID. Some are nuns, some are poor, lots are brown or old. I was on Fox TV with Lady Rothschild a couple of weeks ago. The lady, a McCain supporter, approved of the ID requirement – and was truly surprised to find out that some poorer Americans don’t have passports. “Why don’t they?” her Fox-mates asked, incredulous. Well, not every barrio kid has just returned from his estate outside London.
Rove knows that. He certainly knows that, for example, Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don’t have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it’s about double – 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million – and that’s way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana’s.
Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn’t like your touch. Or, your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.
In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, “spoiled,” because the machines lost them, couldn’t read them, mangled them or simply didn’t register them. But it’s not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts – a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican “victory” margin in that state.
Another study shows that Hispanics’ vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots.
In the primaries and in 2006, the “spoilage” and blank (“undervote”) totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the “spoilage” total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. (“Spoilage” is not the same as vote tampering. There is the concern that “black-box” computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That’s another matter completely – and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I’m not including here.)
Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
You’ve mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked.
This time, the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn’t know that. They’re counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope – Got that? – or your vote is toast. I’ve spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes – though he only received one. (Have a mail-in ballot in hand? Then, for God’s sake, walk it in to the polling place or local board of elections. Sign, seal and deliver it in person.)
You may get it right, but historic data suggest that, when combining the FTF games with the usual mail-in cock-ups, Obama will lose another million votes to mail-in disqualifications.
Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems
These millions of uncounted ballots – spoiled ballots, provisional ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified – fully explain the difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in 2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” They never ask, and can’t know, “Did your vote count?”
How would they get away with it? Well, they begin explaining away how the “pollsters” get it wrong, how pollsters didn’t figure the “Bradley Effect” of lying, racist voters. They’ll tell us the new, young and Black Obamaniacs gave money, went to rallies – but never bothered to vote. But the real reason will never be whispered: They cast votes that just weren’t counted.
Will the election be stolen on Tuesday? No, it’s already been stolen. That is, several million voters are doomed to lose their ballots; most won’t even know it. Overwhelmingly, they are the poor, minorities, new voters – Obama voters. Does that mean McCain’s got it in the bag and you’re helpless? Not at all.
Don’t Steal Your Own Vote
In 2004, I and other investigators wrote, long before Election Day, “Ohio’s stolen.” We were deadly right.
It’s happening again. For six years, the Democratic Party has been snoozing through a quiet, brilliantly executed Republican operation to block, stop and purge voters by the millions. As New Mexico voting rights attorney John Boyd put it, “I don’t think the Democrats get it. 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.”
Karl Rove once said, “We have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored glasses.” He wasn’t complaining; he was boasting.
I know that the Obama campaign is not happy that I bring up the issue of a possible theft of the election. They fear voters will be “discouraged” by the possibility that the election is fixed.
Well, frankly, if you’re too bummed out by this recitation of facts and statistics to vote, then maybe you don’t deserve to vote, or to drive or to reproduce. Did Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream … so I’m going back to sleep”?
Votes can’t be saved by “hope” alone. There are simple ways to protect your own vote, from walking in your “mail-in” to refusing a provisional ballot. (You can download the list at
StealBackYourVote.org, written with Bobby Kennedy, a professor of law.)
It comes down to this: Can the margin of trickery, vote suppression and ballot destruction – three to six million votes – be overcome? Yes. Because they can’t steal all the votes all the time. Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in some polls. But these are polls of “likely” voters. They exclude first-time and many low-income voters.
So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to happen – for the “unlikely” voters to simply overwhelm the statistical assumption of their laziness. As I’m sure Mr. Obama, a professor of constitutional law, could tell you: the best legal response to systematic vote suppression is to get off yo’ ass!
——–
Greg Palast is the co-author of “Block the Vote,” in this month’s Rolling Stone Magazine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast and Kennedy are also co-authors of the investigative comic book, “Steal Back Your Vote.” Palast, who reports on election fraud for BBC Television, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation fellow for investigative reporting. Prior to his becoming a journalist, Palast was a forensic economist, fraud investigator and taught economics and statistics at Indiana University.
palast@gregpalast.net
MAIS:
Is the Election About to Be Stolen in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Elsewhere?

"05 de Novembro. O país está em choque. Dentro da cabine, o eleitor americano se tornou "Homem da Klan" e Obama recebeu 6 milhões de votos menos…"

“… que o previsto nas pesquisas de intenção de voto ( … )”.

Pois bem, assim começa o desesperado artigo “Como pôde McCain vencer?” ( “How McCain Could Win” ) , assinado por Greg Palast – o jornalista que, há anos, denuncia a maracutaia para perpetuar os republicanos no poder – e publicado no site Truth.out, em 03 de Novembro. Perceba que ele inicia o artigo datando como 05 de Novembro, ou seja, como se fosse o dia seguinte à eleição americana. Por quê? Um simples exercício de futurologia macabra, com base em seu próprio trabalho.
Como pôde, então, McCain vencer?
Simplesmente desapareceram da base de dados com os eleitores negros ou hispânicos que se inscreveram para votar, em estados como Flórida ( 2000 ) e, da última vez, em Ohio ( 2004 ). Como o eleitor negro e pobre costuma votar em democratas, a supressão do voto atinge de morte este partido. O sujeito aparece na seção e descobre que, simplesmente, seu nome não está lá.
( Aliás, vocês têm lido os jornais, nem que seja uma passada de olhos? Não sei em qual, saiu ontem uma matéria extensa, acho que no Folhão: simplesmente não se parece atinar para o absurdo que tomou conta. Não se deixa de mencionar os “erros”, os “eleitores desaparecidos por engano”, mas como se falasse de uma República de Bananas acostumada com fraudes escancaradas. Simples assim. Tipo: “dez mil eleitores negros sumiram das listas no Arizona. TSK, TSK… Que pena. Ainda bem que o Brasil dá lições ao mundo. Ah, sim, antes que esqueçamos de informar: McCain venceu por 100 votos, tá?”.
Leia o artigo, Palast dá números apavorantes. Por exemplo: no Colorado, dois secretários estaduais ( os Estados são responsáveis pela sua listagem de eleitores ) Republicanos excluíram 19.4% dos eleitores inscritos ( 1 em cada 5 ). Em certos estados, o camarada que for se inscrever para poder votar, tem ainda que declarar sua preferência partidária. Na Wikipédia, em que pese a quase certa presença de erros, dá para se ter uma idéia de como se dá o processo eleitoral norte-americano ( em inglês ). Diz ainda Palast que, desde a eleição passada, 10 milhões de eleitores americanos foram abduzidos pelo Governo Republitiliano e simplesmente foram despachados para o espaço sideral ( os números são esses, a fantasia à Arquivo X é cortesia minha ).
Infelizmente, o texto de onde extraí e reproduzi o trecho também está em inglês, e eu não estou com tempo para tentar, da forma que eu conseguisse ( free-style ), traduzir o texto inteiro.
Se você tem familiaridade com o idioma, e quer saber mais sobre o processo de branqueamento do eleitorado norte-americano, que resultou na eleição surpreendente do ancião McCain ( que, após a divulgação do resultado sofreu um enfarte fulminante, levando a Vice-Presidente Sarah Palin a assumir a cadeira de Presidente da única potência mundial ), veja a seguir:

How McCain Could Win
Monday 03 November 2008
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t Perspective

Two Obama canvassers prepare their pitch before knocking on registered Republicans’ doors in Arvada, Colorado. (Photo: Kevin Moloney / The New York Times)

.
It’s November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the “Bradley effect”: Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats’ Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
That’s the nightmare. Here’s the cold reality.
Swing state Colorado.
Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire
voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year’s Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they’re still “disappeared” from the lists this week.
Swing state Indiana. In this year’s primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state’s new voter ID law. They had drivers’ licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they’d let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn’t cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don’t have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state’s Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new “verification” process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
The Ugly Secret
Here’s an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don’t count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: “spoiled,” unreadable and blank ballots; “provisional” ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That’s what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation’s vote registries. And that’s just the start of the steal.
If the noncount were random, it wouldn’t matter. But it’s not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter’s ballot will “spoil” or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter’s.
Does that mean the election’s stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot ( there’s a link at the end ).
How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
Here’s how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.
Step One:
The “Dumpster” Vote – Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls?
The answer is the GOP’s secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he’s going to help us vote, look out. But Democrats didn’t. They signed on to the GOP bill, believing this “reform” law would prevent “another Florida.” Instead, “Help America Vote” Floridated the entire nation.
Here’s how: Help America Vote empowered secretaries of state to remove fraudulent and suspicious voters from the voter registries. It was the trick used by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 when she purged “felon” voters. Except they weren’t felons. And now her GOP confrères are doing it in dozens of states, calling folks felon voters, “inactive” voters, suspect voters, whatever.
Take Colorado. The GOP didn’t exactly trumpet it’s erasing 19.4 percent of voters’ names. It was, as detectives say, “hidden in plain sight,” buried deep inside a US Elections Assistance Commission administrative report, among tables of mind-numbing stats through which I was trawling some months ago. (I used to teach statistics at Indiana University, so I enjoy reading matrices like others enjoy novels.)
For BBC TV and Rolling Stone, I asked the current Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, “Why all the purging?” No answer, not a word, stonewalled even when I flew into Denver and stood outside his door. He was, I guess, too busy preparing to count his own votes as Republican candidate for Congress.
So, where are the Democrats? That’s the really scary part. I spoke with Paul Hultin, appointed by Colorado’s Democratic governor to the state’s Election Reform Commission. Hultin’s a terrific attorney. He knows, and says, that Help America Vote was a law “born in corruption,” but he’s spent his time on Colorado’s voting machines, which he knows are busted. He’s the Democrats’ expert, and he didn’t know that a fifth of his state’s voters had vanished from the voter rolls.
Well, don’t worry. Hultin’s official committee will be holding hearings on the voting debacle in Colorado … on November 19.
Then there’s New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
The company and state choose the purging “algorithms,” those mathematical formulae that, depending on how you tweak them, can go through a voter roll like a hot knife through cream cheese.
So, what happens to the purged voters? They’re told to scram when they arrive to vote or, if they squawk, they get a “provisional” ballot on which they can pretend to vote.
Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don’t get counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the 2004 election was that there were more than three million voters shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That’s what caused Kerry to lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of provisionals will rise, as will rejections.
Whatever keeps you from getting a real ballot – purged name, for example – keeps you from having the provisional counted as well. That’s because Democrats won the right of every voter to get a provisional ballot, but not the right to have that ballot counted. And how many will go uncounted? Double the 1.1 million loss in 2004 – not just because of the GOP’s purge-mania, but because of a vicious little codicil in Help America Vote that went into effect since the last election …
Step Two: “Verification” (and Elimination) of New Voters
For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new obstacles to voting. When we say “new” voters, let’s be clear – we mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).
So, the Republican game plan is simple: don’t let new voters vote. There are three steps to this block-and-steal tactic. First, under the new law, states can deny new voters registration on the grounds their names can’t be verified against government data files. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not, because we don’t have Soviet-style citizenship files in the US. The Social Security Administration is rejecting nearly half of the names submitted because there is no multi-state compatible tracking system. Of course, the Republicans know that.
New voter verification losses are huge. In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations, a trick discovered by his Democratic successor, Debra Bowen. She told me most of the rejected vote applicants had Hispanic, Vietnamese, Islamic and other “odd” names – odd, that is, for Republicans.
It used to be that you filled out a registration card and, bingo, you were registered. Not any more. That’s also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants. They were victims of strict “matching” algorithms. Other states are also playing the “match” game. The result is voters will find themselves simply missing (or in some states, required to show extra ID – another horror show we’ll discuss below). But don’t worry, a of couple million new voters will get provisional ballots. That way, they can practice filling out their ballots for the day when democracy returns to America.
Step Three: New ID Laws
Karl Rove said, “I go to the grocery store and I wanna cash a check to pay for my groceries I gotta show a little bit of ID. Why should it not be reasonable … at the voting place they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID.” And so, while buying his Pampers, Rove came up with a game-winner for the GOP.
Karl, let me answer your question. The reason, according to several studies by the Bush administration itself, is that lots of folks don’t have government ID. Some are nuns, some are poor, lots are brown or old. I was on Fox TV with Lady Rothschild a couple of weeks ago. The lady, a McCain supporter, approved of the ID requirement – and was truly surprised to find out that some poorer Americans don’t have passports. “Why don’t they?” her Fox-mates asked, incredulous. Well, not every barrio kid has just returned from his estate outside London.
Rove knows that. He certainly knows that, for example, Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don’t have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it’s about double – 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million – and that’s way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana’s.
Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn’t like your touch. Or, your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.
In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, “spoiled,” because the machines lost them, couldn’t read them, mangled them or simply didn’t register them. But it’s not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts – a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican “victory” margin in that state.
Another study shows that Hispanics’ vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots.
In the primaries and in 2006, the “spoilage” and blank (“undervote”) totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the “spoilage” total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. (“Spoilage” is not the same as vote tampering. There is the concern that “black-box” computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That’s another matter completely – and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I’m not including here.)
Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
You’ve mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked.
This time, the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn’t know that. They’re counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope – Got that? – or your vote is toast. I’ve spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes – though he only received one. (Have a mail-in ballot in hand? Then, for God’s sake, walk it in to the polling place or local board of elections. Sign, seal and deliver it in person.)
You may get it right, but historic data suggest that, when combining the FTF games with the usual mail-in cock-ups, Obama will lose another million votes to mail-in disqualifications.
Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems
These millions of uncounted ballots – spoiled ballots, provisional ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified – fully explain the difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in 2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” They never ask, and can’t know, “Did your vote count?”
How would they get away with it? Well, they begin explaining away how the “pollsters” get it wrong, how pollsters didn’t figure the “Bradley Effect” of lying, racist voters. They’ll tell us the new, young and Black Obamaniacs gave money, went to rallies – but never bothered to vote. But the real reason will never be whispered: They cast votes that just weren’t counted.
Will the election be stolen on Tuesday? No, it’s already been stolen. That is, several million voters are doomed to lose their ballots; most won’t even know it. Overwhelmingly, they are the poor, minorities, new voters – Obama voters. Does that mean McCain’s got it in the bag and you’re helpless? Not at all.
Don’t Steal Your Own Vote
In 2004, I and other investigators wrote, long before Election Day, “Ohio’s stolen.” We were deadly right.
It’s happening again. For six years, the Democratic Party has been snoozing through a quiet, brilliantly executed Republican operation to block, stop and purge voters by the millions. As New Mexico voting rights attorney John Boyd put it, “I don’t think the Democrats get it. 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.”
Karl Rove once said, “We have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored glasses.” He wasn’t complaining; he was boasting.
I know that the Obama campaign is not happy that I bring up the issue of a possible theft of the election. They fear voters will be “discouraged” by the possibility that the election is fixed.
Well, frankly, if you’re too bummed out by this recitation of facts and statistics to vote, then maybe you don’t deserve to vote, or to drive or to reproduce. Did Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream … so I’m going back to sleep”?
Votes can’t be saved by “hope” alone. There are simple ways to protect your own vote, from walking in your “mail-in” to refusing a provisional ballot. (You can download the list at
StealBackYourVote.org, written with Bobby Kennedy, a professor of law.)
It comes down to this: Can the margin of trickery, vote suppression and ballot destruction – three to six million votes – be overcome? Yes. Because they can’t steal all the votes all the time. Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in some polls. But these are polls of “likely” voters. They exclude first-time and many low-income voters.
So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to happen – for the “unlikely” voters to simply overwhelm the statistical assumption of their laziness. As I’m sure Mr. Obama, a professor of constitutional law, could tell you: the best legal response to systematic vote suppression is to get off yo’ ass!
——–
Greg Palast is the co-author of “Block the Vote,” in this month’s Rolling Stone Magazine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast and Kennedy are also co-authors of the investigative comic book, “Steal Back Your Vote.” Palast, who reports on election fraud for BBC Television, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation fellow for investigative reporting. Prior to his becoming a journalist, Palast was a forensic economist, fraud investigator and taught economics and statistics at Indiana University.
palast@gregpalast.net
MAIS:
Is the Election About to Be Stolen in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Elsewhere?

novembro 1, 2008

Eleições nos EUA: Golpe para empossar McCain não deixa de ser aguardado, dizem analistas.

Essa matéria saiu no JB de sexta-feira ( hoje ) e eu descolei no site dos brasileiros residentes na Florida. Menos mal.
Bom, esse é o título que eu preferi colocar. Essa tal “surpresa”, se viesse, não seria considerada “surpresa”, já que “historicamente” ( isso quer dizer, nas últimas duas disputas ), a bruxa do Halloween apareceu na última semana trazendo, em seu saco de maldades, uma travessura republicana. O McCain, que não deve assistir ao canal Fox, diz que a mídia é pró-Obama ( uai, que seja ); o Olavo diz a mesma coisa e adverte sobre os amigos terroristas do Obama (o tal Bill Ayers, cidadão que pertencia ao grupo Weather Underground na década de 60 ). O Dom Betrand, trineto ou coisa parecida do Dom Pedro escreveu um artigo que saiu hoje publicado na Folha de São Paulo, sobre o antiamericanismo e aproveitou para culpar os pacifistas e ativistas hippies pela derrota ( aliás, nem considerou como derrota ) americana no Vietnã ( é engraçado imaginar uma “esquerda” americana. O Partido Comunista de lá jamais chegou perto sequer do poder. O Partido Democrata é que é considerado a “esquerda”. Pensemos no PT, a esquerda daqui: leia a vEJA, o Estadão, a Folha. O Reinaldo e o Mainardi. Eles parecem brincar de assustar a classe-média. Esta deve, todo dia antes de dormir, olhar debaixo da cama para ver se o Zé Dirceu não está lá, tramando a subversão.
Leia um jornal do PCO ou o carioca a Nova Democracia. O que estes pensam a respeito do PT? eles acham, no mínimo, que o Zé Dirceu não está debaixo da cama, mas sim, dorme em uma bem confortável, com lençóis de cetim burgueses; eu sei que houve uma extrema balbúrdia na convenção Democrata de 68 em Chicago. Até onde sei, os “esquerdistas” foram lá para bagunçar o coreto. O MC5 tocou lá. O que pensavam os radicais de 68 sobre os líderes nacionais do Partido Democrata? Alguém acha, realmente, que a vitória de Obama seria a vitória do bolchevismo internacional no centro capitalista? Só a classe-média para se assustar com essa possibilidade… ).
Melhor seria ao Obama que David Duke o apoiasse, não é?
Bom, voltando: a mídia, de um modo geral, mais as pesquisas garantindo que o triunfo de Barack é questão de horas; o McCain se queixando da mídia democrata-liberal; tudo parece dirigir o espírito do americano para aceitar o inevitável. Tudo muito “favas contadas”.
A “surpresa histórica” vem aí.

Analistas não descartam histórica surpresa dos últimos dias
Pode já ser tarde demais para a tão discutida “surpresa de outubro”, mas Obama e McCain estão atentos para o fatídico “último fim de semana”. Nas duas últimas eleições presidenciais, a reta final teve fatos inesperados, que influenciaram o resultado em disputas apertadas. A cinco dias da eleição presidencial americana, o democrata Barack Obama abriu sete pontos de vantagem sobre o republicano John McCain, segundo pesquisa Reuters/C-Span/Zogby, divulgada ontem. Obama tem 50% da preferência dos prováveis eleitores, contra 43% de McCain, aumentando a vantagem de 5 pontos que tinha na véspera. Ainda assim, a história recente aponta que pode ser cedo demais para cantar vitória.– O último fim de semana tende a ser um período muito esquisito – disse Steven Schier, analista político da Faculdade Carleton, em Minnesota. – É quando os últimos eleitores que não estavam prestando atenção se ligam, e os últimos indecisos se decidem. Coisas estranhas podem acontecer. Em 2004, Osama bin Laden, líder da Al Qaeda, fez um pronunciamento na sexta-feira prévia à eleição, deslocando a discussão para a ameaça terrorista, possivelmente ajudando na reeleição de George Bush – como seu adversário John Kerry admitiria posteriormente. Em 2000, a última polêmica da campanha surgiu na quinta-feira prévia ao pleito. Bush, então governador do Texas, havia sido preso em 1976 por dirigir embriagado, e nunca revelara publicamente o fato, até que ele vazou à mídia. Pesquisas de boca-de-urna indicaram que a revelação do fato afetara a votação de Bush na reta final. Em momento de desconsideração à cautela, Obama disse ontem que se ganhar a eleição na próxima terça-feira, poderá convidar republicanos para participar de seu governo O democrata também afirmou ter “algumas idéias bastante boas” sobre ocupantes do primeiro escalão do governo.ConclusãoEnquanto McCain passa os últimos dias da campanha em regiões do Sul e Oeste, onde os republicanos são mais fortes, Obama convidou o ex-presidente Bill Clinton para aparecer com ele em comícios na Flórida para uma passagem simbólica da tocha do último presidente democrata para o homem que espera ser o próximo.O ex-vice-presidente dos EUA Al Gore também faz campanha pelo candidato democrata no Estado da Flórida, onde foi derrotado na corrida à Casa Branca oito anos atrás, pelo presidente Bush.Gore e sua esposa participam hoje de eventos em Fort Lauderdale e West Palm Beach, dois condados que entraram na história do país por causa da polêmica sobre a recontagem dos votos, que deu a vitória a Bush por uma margem de apenas 537 votos.É a primeira vez desde 2000 que Gore retorna à Flórida para fazer campanha por um candidato à Casa Branca. O discurso final de Obama tem sido cauteloso, a fim de cimentar as estradas que construiu com os eleitores cujo nível de aceitação em relação a ele cresceu. Obama tenta acabar com qualquer incerteza no que diz respeito a eleger um senador em seu primeiro mandato e dissipar as críticas de que é um líder inexperiente, que aumentaria os impostos, redistribuiria a renda e pegaria leve com os terroristas.

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