Reprinted from us4.campaign-archive2.com
Greg Palast investigated vote suppression in the 2016 election for Rolling Stone. The film of his investigation, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, was released by Cinema Libre Studios in September.
There's
been so much complete nonsense since I first broke the news that the
Green Party would file for a recount of the presidential vote, I am
compelled to write a short guide to flush out the BS and get to just the
facts, ma'am.
Clip from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast
Nope, they're not hunting for Russian hackers
To begin with, the main work of the recount
hasn't a damn thing to do with finding out if the software programs for
the voting machines have been hacked, whether by Putin's agents or some
guy in a cave flipping your vote from Hillary to The Donald.
The ballots in the electoral "dumpster"
The nasty little secret of US elections, is that we don't count all the votes.
In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania--and all over America--there were a massive number of votes that were simply rejected, invalidated, and spoiled. They were simply, not counted. Officially, in a typical presidential election, at least three million votes end up rejected, often for picayune, absurd reasons.
The rejects fall into three big categories: provisional ballots rejected, absentee and mail-in ballots invalidated and in-precinct votes "spoiled," spit out by a machine or thrown out by a human reader as unreadable or mis-marked.
So, as Robert Fitrakis, lead lawyer for the recount tells me, their first job is to pull the votes out of the electoral dumpster--and, one by one, make the case for counting a rejected provisional, absentee or "spoiled" ballot.
Spoiled: over-votes and under-votes
How does a vote spoil? Most fall in the categories of "over-votes" and "under-votes."
In Michigan, the Green team has found a whole lot of people who voted for TWO candidates for President. These are the "over-vote"--votes that will count for neither candidate.
How odd. While the schools in Detroit are not stellar, its graduates do know that they can only have one president.
Then, some folks didn't vote at all. They are the "under-voter."
But, Fitrakis and team suspect, many of these under- and over-voters meant to vote for a candidate but the robot reader couldn't understand their choice.
Here's how it happens. Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin fill in bubbles next to their choice. The cards, filled up with darkened bubbles for each race, are gathered and fed through an "optical scanner." These robotic eyeballs mess up all the time.
This is what Fitrakis, an old hand at vote-machine failures (both deliberate and benign), calls "the calibration problem."
Are machines calibrated with a Republican or Democratic bias? No, that's not how it works. But just as poor areas get the worst schools and hospitals, they also get the worst voting machines.
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