Vote news

Greg Palast has the latest from old Mexico:

The official count of the ruling party is: 36.38% for the ruling party and 35.34% for the challenger.

Or, to put names and numbers to it: The Bush-o-philiac candidate, Felipe Calderon, collected 402,000 more votes than Bush-bashed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But the big winner was Mr. Blank -- the 827,000 ballots without a mark for president.

I smell something rotten… eau d'Ohio, vintage 2004. In that state, as in Mexico this week, the presidential "winner," George Bush, had victory margin smaller than the combined "undercount" (blank ballots) and rejected and mangled ballots.

Blank ballots are rarely random - in the USA, nearly 88% were cast in 2004, notably, in minority areas, the result of bad voting machines. That is, Democrats' ballots "spoil" and "blank out" a heck of a lot more often than Republican ballots. What about in Mexico?

I intend to find out. As soon as I saw the "official" vote count, I booked a plane to Mexico City. I'll be there to tomorrow to join our investigators on the ground - and to fill in the blanks.

And what about the "spoiled" vote - ballots rejected, lost, mangled? Well, some are sitting in dumpsters in Veracruz State which is controlled by the old ruling PRI. (There's a darn good chance that the PRI, hoping to stave off its extinction, played a bigger role than Calderon's PAN in shoplifting votes from challenger Lopez Obrador.)

Almost needless to say, no sane person should believe that so many ballots would indicate no preference for the top spot.

I would add that vote manipulation is nothing new in Mexico. We all recall how the populist Cardenas was deep-sixed in '88. The only thing that has changed in Mexico is Washington's affections: America now favors PAN over PRI.

(Ever visit a Mexican city during an election? The ruling party candidate's name appears on every, and I mean every available wall space. Nowhere else does democracy look so Orwellian.)

Catherine Crier of CourtTV has broadcast a blistering attack on the current state of our elections. See it here.

Hand job. Looks like there will be a hand recount of the paper ballots in the disputed CA-50 election -- the one where all those all-too-hackable election machines were kept stored in private homes. Two problems:

1. The recount is expensive -- $130,000 or so. Double-checking democracy commands a steeper price in San Diego than elsewhere because. Why? Because. That's why.

2. Recounting the paper ballots is not the same thing as recounting the machine ballots.

(Thanks, as always, to the inestimable BradBlog.)

Truth is All, of DU fame, made an appearance on Mike Malloy's show. I haven't heard the interview yet, but I will soon. If you want to check it out, go here (the White Rose archives Malloy's shows) and fire up the Thursday, June 6, 2006 broadcast. I understand TiA shows up toward the end.

(I've also been warned that an infamous piece by yours truly, unrelated to vote fraud, gets a mention on that broadcast. I've written to Malloy about this, but have so far received no response.)

Finally: I recommend this piece by John Washburn, who attempted to get Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver to recognise that the ES&S machines are unverifiable -- that is, one cannot verify whether the software used to run an actual election is the same software that received official verification. Culver, of course, remains fearlessly obtuse. Exchanges of this sort always remind me of the Parrot sketch: "It's not dead. It's just pining for the fjords."