Why Democrats Don’t Count. Lessons from the Un-Gore of Mexico

By Greg Palast

The Exit polls said he won, but the "official" tally
took his victory away. His supporters found they were
scrubbed off voter rolls. Violence and intimidation
kept even more of his voters away from the polls.
Hundreds of thousands of ballots supposedly showed no
choice for president — like ballots with hanging chads.

And the officials in charge of this suspect election
refused to re-count those votes in public. Everyone
knew full well a fair count would certainly change the
outcome.

You’ve heard this story before: Gore 2000. Kerry 2004.

But Lopez Obrador 2006 is made out of very different
stuff than the scarecrow candidates who, oddly, call
themselves "Democrats."

For six years now, I’ve had this crazy fantasy in my
head. In it, an election is stolen and the guy who’s
declared the loser stands up in front of the White House
and says three magic words: "Count the votes."

This past Saturday, my dream came true. Unfortunately,
it was in Spanish — but I’ll take what I can get.
There was Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential
challenger, standing in the "Zocalo" — the square in
front of Mexico’s White House, telling the ruling clique
inside, "Count the votes!"

Most important, his simple demand was echoed by half a
million pissed-off, activated voters chanting with him,
"Vota por vota!" — vote by vote.

And you know what? I think they are going to have to
listen. I suspect that the rulers of Mexico, a vicious,
puffed-up, arrogant elite, may well have to count those
votes. But, for that to happen, someone had to ask them
to do it — in no uncertain terms.

Traveling the USA, I’m asked again and again ’Why don’t
Democrats stand up when their elections are stolen?’

The answer: for the same reason jellyfish don’t stand
up... they’re invertebrates.

I’m beginning to find that answer a bit too glib (though
darn funny). Because it’s not about electoral cojones;
it’s about a devotion to democracy deep in the bone.
Yet weirdly, candidates that call themselves "Democrats"
seem kind of, well, indifferent to democracy.

Why? Elections are the radical tool of the working
class — the great leveler of the powerless against the
too-powerful. But the candidates themselves, both
Republican and Democrat, tend to come from the
privileged and pampered class. Votes are just the
surfboards on which their ambitions ride.

Right now in Mexico’s capitol, nearly a million ballots
sit in tied bundles uncounted. That’s four times the
"official" margin of victory of the ruling party over
Lopez Obrador. Supposedly, they’re "votos nulos" —
null votes, unreadable. But, not surprisingly, when a
few packets were opened, the majority of these
supposedly unreadable votes were Lopez Obrador’s.

If you think that’s a Mexican game, think again.
Because that’s exactly what happened in Florida and
Ohio.

In Florida, 179,855 ballots supposedly showed no vote
for President. A closer look by the US Civil Rights
Commission statisticians showed that 54% of those
Florida "votos nulos" were cast by African-Americans.
Did Black folk forget to vote for President, couldn’t
make up their minds or, as one TV network implied, were
too dumb to figure out the ballot? Not at all.
Machines can’t count some ballots. But people can. For
example, several voters wrote in, "Al Gore," which the
machines rejected as his name was already printed on the
ballot. The write-in could fool a machine but a human
has no problem figuring out that voter’s intent.

The National Opinion Research Center at the University
of Chicago reviewed all 179,855 "uncountable" votes and
found the majority attempted to choose Gore. And they
would have been counted — but Florida’s Secretary of
State, Katherine Harris, ordered a halt.

So Bush was elected not by counting the votes but by
preventing their count. And he was reelected the same
way in 2004 when a quarter million votes were nullified
in Ohio.

But why fixate on Florida and Ohio? Here’s a nasty
little fact about voting in the Land of the Free not
reported in your newspapers: 3,600,380 ballots were cast
in the November 2004 presidential election that were
never counted. In 2000, the uncounted ballots totaled
just under two million.

And where were the Democrats? In 2004, behind the huge
jump in uncounted votes was a mass challenge campaign
aimed at poor, Black and Hispanic voters by the
Republican Party — pushing these voters, mostly
Democrats, to "provisional ballots." They could have
been counted, if someone had fought for it. Hundreds
of lawyers were on stand-by but the head of the biggest
legal team told me in confidence — and in frustration
— that the Kerry campaign told them to stand down.

Recently, Al Gore was asked if the election of 2000 was
stolen. "There may come a time when I speak on that,
but it’s not now," said the beta dog. (I suspect that
if Al Gore were found bleeding in an alley, he’d answer
the question, Who shot you? with "There may come a time
when I speak on that...").

Lopez Obrador is of a different breed. At the rally
last Saturday in Mexico City, he played video and audio
tapes of the evidence of fraud on a screen eighty feet
tall. Imagine if Gore had projected the "scrub sheets"
of purged Black voters on a ten-story-high screen in
front of the White House.

Lopez Obrador put political force behind his legal
demands by calling on voters from every state in Mexico
to march to the capital. Two million are expected to
arrive this Sunday. The result: the word among the
political classes is that the election may be annulled.
Even the conservative Financial Times has warned
Mexico’s elite not to "fool itself" by ignoring the
demand for a full vote count.

North-of-the-Border Democrats just don’t get it. The
Republican Party is pushing "provisional" ballots,
pushing voter ID requirements, compiling secret
challenge lists, scrubbing voter registries and selling
us vote-nullifying ballot boxes: they get it completely.
The GOP knows the key to their electoral domination is
not in winning over their opponents’ votes, but in not
counting them.

The un-Gore of Mexico City has a lesson for the Blue-
party gringos. Either the Democrats demand that all
votes count, or the Democrats will count for nothing.

**********

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times
bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Who’s Afraid of Osama
Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ’08,
No Child’s Behind Left and other Dispatches from the
Front Lines of the Class War." Go to
www.GregPalast.com.

Palast’s report, "Florida con Salsa? Vote Fraud in
Mexico" was filmed and produced by Rick Rowley and
Jacquie Soohen (Big Noise Films). Matt Pascarella, in
Mexico, contributed to this investigation.

http://www.gregpalast.com/section/articles