Palast defends claim that Kerry won but the GOP stole the election

[BurtWorm]

<day pass or subscription required to read full article, which includes a response from skeptic and Palast critic Farhad Manjoo>

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/11/16/palast/print.html

Presidential debate
Reporter Greg Palast and Salon's Farhad Manjoo debate the election results in Ohio.

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Nov. 16, 2004 |

Greg Palast:


...

Most voters in Ohio cast their ballots for John Kerry, which should, in accordance with Mrs. Gordon's civics lessons from sixth grade, have given Kerry the Electoral College majority and the White House. Trouble is, those votes won't be counted.

So where are these uncounted, but winning, votes? When I went to sleep the night of Nov. 2, Kerry was down in Ohio by 136,000 votes. But over a quarter million ballots had yet to be counted. Those abandoned ballots, overwhelmingly Democratic, sit in two piles, one called "spoiled" and the other "provisional."

...

Last Tuesday, in Ohio, Republicans played the spoilage game for all it was worth. Over 93,000 ballots were chucked on the spoilage pile, almost all of them generated by those infernal chad-making punch-card machines.

Whose votes were lost in the chad blizzard? According to a recent ACLU analysis of Ohio's system, votes stolen away by punch-card machine error are "overwhelmingly" found in African-American -- read "Democratic" -- precincts.

After the swindle of 2000, who would have the nerve to keep these machines in operation? Answer: the co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who also happens to have the convenient post of Ohio secretary of state. Blackwell, who makes Katherine Harris look like Thomas Jefferson, concedes the racially bent effects of punch-card voting; but in spite of this -- or because of this -- he refused to replace or fix these machines for the 2004 election....

[Cheswick2.0]

1. I agree but Kerry will do nothing about it... just like in 2000

it is more important to continue to be the less wealthy minority party than to lose control to people who might actually make voters powerful in the process again. Democrats want people to just shut up and vote while they continue to take home the spoils.

[The Flaming Red Head]

2. kick