OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Greg Palast: Kerry won in '04

First, consider CNN's Ohio exit polls broadcast just after midnight after the voting ended on Election Day. They show John Kerry defeated George Bush among women voters by 53% to 47%. And among men voters, Kerry defeated Bush 51% to 49%.

So here's your question, class: What third sex put George Bush over the top in Ohio and gave him the White House?

Answer: The Uncounted.

In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush "victory" margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was fives times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush's triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government's Election's Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn't locate to tote up.

Why doesn't your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It's right there in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election -- in a footnote to the report on voter turn -- out. The Census tabulation of voters voting "differs," from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes.

This is the hidden presidential count which, excepting the Census' whispered footnote, has not been reported.

Unfortunately, that's not all. In addition to the 3 million ballots uncounted due to technical "glitches," millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.

In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called "spoilage." Spoilage, not the voters, picked our president for us.

Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, "It's not the people who vote that count; it's the people who count the votes." That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the U.S.A, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don't get counted decides our winners.

In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines, "black boxes," that could flip your vote from John Kerry to George Bush. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney's bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that's not how it went down. The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The new black boxes played their role, albeit minor, but the principal means of the election heist-voiding ballots, overwhelmingly of the poor and Black-went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale in 2008.

I went to sleep election night with the exit polls showing Kerry ahead in swing states. But between 1:05 am and 6:41 am the next morning, goblins went to work. By dawn, the network's exit poll for Ohio showed Kerry dead even with Bush among women, and down by five percentage points among men.

What happened? Were thousands of Bush voters locked in the voting booths, released at 2am, then queried about their choices? Not quite. The network's polling company applied a fancy "algorithm," a mathematical magic wand, to slowly transform the exit polls to match the official count.

And that's bad. By deliberately contaminating the exit polls, the networks snuffed the canary that would signal that something was deeply wrong about the vote count.

Hunting for a Democrat to defend the Twilight Zone between the exit polls and the "official" polls, media grabbed on Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's old advisor. An expert at walking that fine line between minor criminality and psychopathic ambition, Morris knows which way his next client's wind blows.

Morris said:

"Exit polls are almost never wrong. So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they're used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World Countries. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible."

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