Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 2. november 2004 / Timeline November 2, 2004
Version 3.51. November 2004, 3. November 2004
11/02/2004
Stephen Hawking to Lead Anti-War Protest on Election Day
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=577860
Stephen Hawking, Britain's most eminent scientist, has
become the latest prominent opponent of the Iraq war by agreeing to
take the lead role in a ceremonial protest to coincide with the
United States presidential election. Peace protesters will gather
in Trafalgar Square at 5pm on Tuesday, where they will read out the
names of 5,000 Iraqi men, women and children known to have died in
the conflict.
11/02/2004
Præsidentvalg og valg
til senatet i USA
Demokraten John Kerry taber præsidentvalget.
En valgmaskine i Ohio tildeler næsten 3.900 stemmer til
Præsident Bush, selv om der kun er 800 vælgere i
valgkredsen.
VANISHING VOTES
Nation Magazine, May 17, 2004 Issue
On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote
Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a
nasty civil rights time bomb...
First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000
presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris,
in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election
supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly
ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of
those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights,
are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are black
or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately
purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom
ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older
brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty
states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against
vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004
election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files.
The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine
Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.
The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December
2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper,
NAACP lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written
promise from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return
wrongly scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records
given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the
computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably
tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I
caught up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital.
Steen's case was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a
criminal record. (My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con
named O'Steen, close enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The
NAACP held up Steen's case to the court as a prime example of the
voter purge evil.
The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP
won his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under
suspicion? What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb
called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four
years in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on
his record: Steen remains an African-American.
If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First,
there's the chance your registration card will simply be thrown
out. Millions of minority citizens registered to vote using what
are called motor-voter forms. And Republicans know it. You would
not be surprised to learn that the Commission on Civil Rights found
widespread failures to add these voters to the registers. My
sources report piles of dust-covered applications stacked up in
election offices.
Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a
felon. In Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub
sheets, some 600,000 residents are legally barred from voting
because they have a criminal record in the state. That's one state.
In the entire nation 1.4 million black men with sentences served
can't vote, 13 percent of the nation's black male population.
At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of
1965 guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote--but it did not
guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in
seven cases, they aren't.
Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has
the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has
the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on
technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door
to Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every
vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).
How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will
do it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking
his name. Their votes did not count.
Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the
Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those
spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep
in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent
of black votes--one in seven--were "invalidated," i.e., never
counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots
were spoiled.
Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida
refused to count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high
school algebra applied to commission numbers indicates that 54
percent, or 97,000, of the votes "spoiled" were cast by black folk,
of whom more than 90 percent chose Gore. The nonblack vote divided
about evenly between Gore and Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed
the counting of these ballots, Al Gore would have racked up a
plurality of about 87,000 votes in Florida--162 times Bush's
official margin of victory.
That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election,
1.9 million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical
reasons, like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so
on. The reasons for ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious
shading to the ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of
Harvard experts discovered that just as in Florida, the number of
ballots spoiled was--county by county, precinct by precinct--in
direct proportion to the local black voting population.
Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--both in the
percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the
voters whose ballots don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in
Florida was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled--not
counted--as a white voter," explains political scientist Philip
Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report. "National figures
indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the
proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears
that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1
million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters."
So there you have it. In the last presidential election,
approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their
ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November
2004, efficiently, by computer--because HAVA and other bogus reform
measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not
address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted
vote.
One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And
when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their
political careers in the light of the ballot bonfire.
* based on the new expanded election edition of Best Democracy
Money Can Buy.
Litteratur: Bundgaard, Bente: Der klages allerede over
valgsvindel. I: Berlingske Tidende, 10/24/2004.
Ritzaus Bureau: Fejl [sic] ved optælling i Ohio. I:
Berlingske Tidende, 11/07/2004.
Added later by the editor:
The Cleveland
Massacre
In Cleveland three separate incidents were recorded of poll workers
who called the police to arrest neighbors who accompanied blind
voters to the polls among the multiple incidents of the elderly and
handicapped being refused the right to vote.
The collected information reveals why political parties are wedded
to the electoral winner-take-all system. The 2004 election, decided
by slim margins, capitalized on old-time techniques perfected in
the racist south joined by modern technology. Without the
winner-take-all electoral system these types of abuses would be far
less effective.
Observers documented incidents including:
* Election officials deleted registered voters from rolls
* Voters labeled as felons with no criminal record.
* Poll workers denying registered voters the right to vote even
when they appear on lists.
* Poorly trained and abusive poll workers.
* Duplicate absentee ballots sent to some voters and none to
others
* Multiple voter registrations for the same individual
* Too few machines for anticipated voters
* Broken and outdated polling machines
* Incorrect ballots and in some cases no ballots
* Police cruisers parked in front of or near polling locations
* Ballot boxes not secured
* Television, radio, telephone, and print campaigns to mislead
voters on dates and locations.
* Doors locked and entrances changed to the back of buildings.
* Poll workers, police, party representatives and others illegally
requiring minority and other voters to show identification.
The strategy of focused intimidation and voting rights denials in
only a few heavily minority neighorhoods proved very effective in
getting George Bush re-elected.
Source:
https://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapNation&tab=ED04
Voters Report Problems with Computer Systems
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1103-03.htm
by Andy Sullivan, Reuters
WASHINGTON - Voters across the United States reported problems with
electronic touch-screen systems on Tuesday in what critics said
could be a sign that the machines used by one-third of the
population were prone to error.
Voters calling in to an election-day hotline reported more than
1,100 problems with the ATM-like machines, from improperly tallied
choices to frozen screens that left their votes in limbo.
Volunteer John Kramer processes complaints to the voter hotline,
1-866-MYVOTE1, which is based at the National Constitution Center
in Philadelphia, November 2, 2004. The hotline, which recorded
calls and logged voters complaints, processed more than 50,000
calls from voters. (Tim Shaffer/Reuters) Voters in Maryland said
congressional candidates were left off ballots, while some in
Florida told hotline volunteers that their ballots had already been
filled out when they stepped up to vote, watchdogs said.
Machines in New Orleans, Miami and suburban Philadelphia failed to
start punctually in the morning, leading to long lines at polling
places and prompting some to turn away from the polls, according to
activists with the Election Protection Coalition.
The nonpartisan group said it had received 1,166 complaints as of
late evening involving a wide array of machines.
11/02/2004
CIA Chief Seeks Change in Inspector's 9/11 Report
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/02/politics/02intel.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
By Douglas Jehl
WASHINGTON, - The director of central intelligence has asked the
C.I.A.'s inspector general to modify a draft report on the Sept. 11
attacks to avoid drawing conclusions about whether individual
C.I.A. officers should be held accountable for any failures,
Congressional and intelligence officials said Monday.
The request by Porter J. Goss, the intelligence chief, would affect
an 800-page report that is the result of nearly two years of work.
Congressional officials said they were reviewing Mr. Goss's
request, spelled out in an Oct. 27 memorandum to the inspector
general, John Helgerson, to determine whether it was consistent
with a request by the joint Congressional committee that looked
into the Sept. 11 attacks.
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