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By Greg Palast (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)

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But do these un-votes really turn the election? Voters from both parties used provisional or absentee ballots, and the machines can't tell if a hanging chad is Democratic or Republican, right? Not so. To see how it works, we went to New Mexico.

Dig this: In November 2004 during early voting in Precinct 13, Taos, New Mexico, John Kerry took 73 votes. George Bush got three. On election day, 216 in that precinct voted Kerry. Bush got 25 votes, and came in third.

Third? Taking second place in the precinct, with 40 votes, was no one at all.

Or, at least, that's what the machines said.

Precinct 13 is better known as the Taos Pueblo. Every single voter there is an American Native or married to one.

Precinct 13 wasn't unique. On Navajo lands, indecision struck on an epidemic scale. They walked in, they didn't vote. In nine precincts in McKinley County, New Mexico, which is 74.7 percent Navajo, fewer than one in ten voters picked a president. Those who voted on paper ballots early or absentee knew who they wanted (Kerry, overwhelmingly), but the machine-counted vote said Indians simply couldn't make up their minds or just plain didn't care.

On average, across the state, the machine printouts say that 7.3 percent - one in twelve voters - in majority Native precincts didn't vote for president. That's three times the percentage of white voters who appeared to abstain. In pueblo after pueblo, on reservation after reservation throughout the United States, the story was the same.

Nationally, one out of every 12 ballots cast by Native Americans did not contain a vote for President. Indians by the thousands drove to the voting station, walked into the booth, said, "Who cares?" and walked out without voting for president.

So we dropped in on Taos, Precinct 13. The "old" pueblo is old indeed- built 500 to 1,000 years ago. In these adobe dwellings stacked like mud condos, no electricity is allowed nor running water - nor Republicans as far as records show. Richard Archuleta, a massive man with long, gray pigtails and hands as big as fl ank steaks, is the head of tourism for the pueblo. Richard wasn't buying the indecision theory of the Native non-count. Indians were worried about their Bureau of Indian Affairs grants, their gaming licenses, and working conditions at their other big employer: the U.S. military.

On the pueblo's mud-brick walls there were several hand painted signs announcing Democratic Party powwows, none for Republicans. Indecisive? Indians are Democrats. Case closed. The color that counts It wasn't just Native Americans who couldn't seem to pick a President. Throughout New Mexico, indecisiveness was pandemic ... at least, that is, among people of color. Or so the machines said. Across the state, high-majority Hispanic precincts recorded a 7.1 percent vote for nobody for president.

We asked Dr. Philip Klinkner, the expert who ran stats for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, to look at the New Mexico data. His solid statistical analysis discovered that if you're Hispanic, the chance your vote will not record on the machine was 500% higher than if you are white. For Natives, it's off the charts. The Hispanic and Native vote is no small potatoes. Every tenth New Mexican is American Native (9.5 percent) and half the remaining population (43 percent) is Mexican-American.

Our team drove an hour across the high desert from the Taos Reservation to Espa-ola in Rio Arriba County. According to the official tallies, entire precincts of Mexican-Americans registered few or zero votes for president in the last two elections. Espa-ola is where the Los Alamos workers live, not the Ph.D.s in the white lab coats, but the women who clean the hallways and the men who bury the toxins. This was not Bush country, and the people we met with, including the leaders of the get-out-the-vote operations, knew of no Hispanics who insisted on waiting at the polling station to cast their vote for "nobody for President." The huge majority of Mexican- Americans, especially in New Mexico, and a crushing majority of Natives (over 90 percent), vote Democratic.

What if those voters weren't indecisive; what if they punched in a choice and it didn't record? Let's do the arithmetic. As minority voters cast 89 percent of the state's 21,084 blank ballots, that's 18,765 missing minority votes. Given the preferences of other voters in those pueblos and barrios, those 18,765 voters of color should have swamped Bush's 5,988 vote "majority" with Kerry votes. But that would have required those votes be counted.

The voting-industrial complex

New Mexico's Secretary of State, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, seemed curiously uncurious about Hispanic and Native precincts where nearly one in ten voters couldn't be bothered to choose a president.

Vigil-Giron, along with Governor Bill Richardson, not only stopped any attempt at a recount directly following the election, but demanded that all the machines be wiped clean. This not only concealed evidence of potential fraud but destroyed it. In 2006, New Mexico's Supreme Court ruled the Secretary of State's machine-cleaning job illegal - too late to change the outcome of the election, of course.

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http://www.gregpalast.com

Greg Palast, winner of the George Orwell Courage-In-Journalism Prize, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and "ARMED MADHOUSE: (more...)

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