Palast email: Excerpt from "Billionaires and Ballot Bandits" Alarming numbers!
Here are the facts, ma'am: In the 2008 election, no less than:
767,023 provisional ballots were cast and not counted;
1,451,116 ballots were "spoiled," not counted;
488,136 absentee ballots were mailed in, but not counted.
Add it up: in the last presidential election, no less than 2,706,275 ballots were cast—and never counted. I have not included a quarter million (251,936) provisional ballots counted only in part (that is, for some offices). That's the official number I've calculated from the records of the US Election Assistance Commission. Approximately three million votes flushed away are ugly enough. But it gets worse. In addition to the roughly three million ballots cast and not counted, no less than:
2,383,587 would-be voters had their registrations rejected;
491,952 voters already registered were wrongly purged from the rolls; and
320,000 properly registered voters were simply turned away from the polls when they tried to vote, mostly for not having IDs acceptable to a poll worker.
Add it up again and total grows to no less than 5,901,814 legitimate votes and voters tossed out of the count. Let’s call it the Missing Six Million. Karl Rove, when he was senior advisor to President George W. Bush, summed it up perfectly:
“We are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses.”
MORE INFO at Palast's blog
http://ballotbandits.wordpress.com/
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