Matt Pascarella in Mexico City Greg Palast in London
Monday, 3 July
Gore v. Bush. Kerry v. Bush. Obrador v. Calderon.
As in Florida in 2000, as in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls show the voters voted for the progressive candidate, but the race is "officially" too close to call.
But they will call it -- after they steal it. Reuters News agency reports that, as of 8pm Eastern time, as voting concluded in Mexico, exit polls show Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the "left-wing" Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) leading in exit polls over Felipe Calderon of the ruling conservative National Action Party (PAN).
We've told you again and again: Exit polls tell us how voters say they voted, but the voters can't tell pollsters if their vote will be counted. In Mexico, counting the vote is an art, not a science -- and Calderon's ruling crew is very artful indeed. The PAN-controlled official electoral commission, not surprisingly, has announced that the presidential tally is too close to call.
Calderon's election is openly supported by the Bush Administration.
On the ground in Mexico City, our news team reports accusations from inside the Obrador campaign that operatives of the PAN had access to voter files which are supposed to be the sole property of the nation's electoral commission.
We are not surprised.
This past Friday, we reported that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had obtained Mexico's voter files under a secret "counterterrorism" contract with database company ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. (See BUSH TEAM HELPS RULING PARTY "FLORIDIZE" MEXICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION)
The FBI's contractor states that, following the arrest of ChoicePoint agents by the Mexican government, the company returned or destroyed its files. The firm claims not to have known collecting this information violated Mexican law. Such files can be useful in challenging a voter's right to cast a ballot or in preventing that vote from counting.
It is, of course, impossible to know if the FBI destroyed its own copy of the files of Mexico's voter rolls obtained by Choicepoint or if these were then used to illegally assist the Calderon candidacy. But we can see the results: as in the US, first in Florida then in Ohio, the exit polls are at odds with "official" polls.
In November 2004, US Republican Senator Richard Lugar, in Kiev, cited the divergence of exit polls and official polls as solid evidence of "blatant fraud" in the vote count in Ukraine. As a result, the Bush Administration refused to recognize the Ukraine government's official vote tally ... which proves once again that Republicans are incapable of irony.
The foreign mainstream press has already announced, despite the polling discrepancies, that Mexico's elections were fair and clean -- which would be a first for that country where Obrador's party has seen its candidates defeated by "blatant fraud" before. The change this time is that the fraud is simply less blatant.
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: 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."
The article is titled "An Apology of Sorts" and deals with Lou Dobbs' CNN (7/7/06) farce of a program decrying New Mexico's use of SmartMatic/Sequoia e-voting machines. These were the same type of electronic voting machines used in Venezuela's last Presidential Election -- the 2004 ballot ("recall") proposition of Hugo Chavez.
You can compare and contrast CNN's, Lou Dobbs's, and Kitty Pilgrim's commitment to honest journalism. That is -- ff they have any left.
We know about the trouble we have with machines used in voting troughout the US. Dobbs and Pilgrim tried to tar SmartMatic/Sequoia's equipment with an even worse brush.
Venezuelan voting machines are made by Olivetti at their Rome factory. They are sold under the names Smartmatic and Sequoia in the US. Dobbs and Pilgrim wanted the Treasury Department to start a investigation of voter fraud in New Mexico -- so they could bar the importation of the Venezuelan company's equipment into the US.
The Pilgrim report story was actually a repeat airing of an earlier report. It was timed to coincide with the CA-50 election -- where pollwatchers were allowed to take voting machines home with them on the eve of the election.
I know Palast's and Pascarella's story is more about wholesale disqualification of votes, not the voting equipment. Still, I wonder what make of electronic voting machines were used for the Mexican election and if the voter had a paper trail record of his or her votes.
The National Endowment for Democracy -- the "civilian" branch of the CIA -- is said to have provided the funds for a firm known as Penn, Schoen & Berland to "survey" the Venezuelan Recall Election in 2004. [This may be just a rumor; what is more certain is that the NED has tried to play a heavy hand in Venezuelan politics on numerous occasions -- including the abortive coup attempt in 2002.]
A Harvard "mathematician" -- Ricardo Hausmann -- was used to verify the "results" of Penn, Schoen, & Berland's findings. [This] has all the makings of an inside job.
Hausmann, from Venezuela's elite (and no longer) ruling class, was Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank from 1994 to 2000. He was also Venezuelan Finance Minister and a Board Member of Venezuela' Central Bank in the years before Raphael Caldera Rodriguez formed a new political party and won the Presidency in 1993.
Hausmann's political fortunes in Venezuela's government survived the coup attempt by Chavez in 1992. However, he was out of a job with Calder Rodriguez's election the following year. In the interim, the government of Caldera Rodríguez basically ran the Venezuelan economy into the ground, according to several critics.
A few months after his "study" of the Chavez recall, Hausmann was promoted to head Harvard's Center for International Development at the JFK School of Government.
That the US government is conducting an on-going campaign of harrassment, lies, and slanted news coverage of Hugo Chavez is obvious. However, even the media of other members of the "Coalition of the Willing" have been critical of the US government's vendetta against Chavez.
This is what Common Dreams had to say about Penn, Shoen, and Berland's exit polling survey of the Chavez recall vote:
"As Venezuelan opposition groups continue to dispute President Hugo Chavez' landslide victory in last Sunday's referendum, they have relied heavily on an exit poll by Penn, Shoen, Berland and Associates. This poll of 20,000 voters, released Sunday evening at 8 p.m., showed President Chavez losing by a margin of 59-41 percent -- almost the exact opposite of the official results, which were certified by international observers from the Carter Center and the Organization of American States.
CEPR's analysis shows that, given the certified result, the odds of finding a random sample of voters as Penn, Shoen, and Berland reported were less than 1 in 10 to the 490th power. This is less than the odds of winning the lottery every week consecutively for an entire year. The methodology of this poll must therefore be called into question. CEPR's analysis further shows that the result -- that Chavez would win -- was easily predictable from pre-election polling.
"Many press accounts had reported the election as "too close to call," but the probability of getting a random sample of 2000 respondents that would fall within the margin of error -- i.e. too close to call -- were less than one in 50 million. And in fact the most recent (Aug. 4-8) poll by Evans/McDonough Company (EMC) and Varianzas Opinion of a nationwide sample of 2000 accurately predicted the results of the referendum."
Penn, Schoen, & Berland used a biased source with an "ax to grind" to verify their results.
And we STILL don't know -- as far as CNN can tell us -- whether the Venezuelan voting machines in question are accurate or not -- until they're used in a US election. Not that the Bushies want to bias anyone. However, New Mexico thought the most accurate equipment they could get was SmartMatic/Seqoia's
That's because Antonio Mujica, CEO of Smartmatic, was denied a tourist visa by the US Embassy in Venezuela last October -- i.e., he's a persona non grata in the US -- despite the fact that he's providing voting equipment for use in US elections.
Sr. Mujica has produced documentable verification of his equipment far and above that produced by Diebold, E & S, and others used in the US. If the US Government has a case against Mujica -- they should make it. They won't -- because the "idea" is (again) to constantly smear and harrass the Chavez government.
Look for the National Endowment for Democracy to appear somewhere out of the woodwork in the Mexican Presidential Election. Look, too, for the Bush Administration to smear SmartMatic/Sequoia if the company's equipment was used in Mexico.
The neo-cons will stop at nothing to corrupt the vote anywhere it feels like it; to get the results they want.
Greg's right. GOPers are "incapable of irony." And that's the GOOD news.
by
lindbergh (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 6 diaries, 20 comments)
on Monday, July 3, 2006 at 1:53:43 PM
I agree with Jim Prues ; looks like the gang that brought «democracy» to Iraq has decided to spread the graces and help the Mexicans with theirs (not that they don't have a certain amount of experience on their own). What I wonder is whether, in case Calderon is officially declared winner despite the exit polls which point to the contrary, PRD members and sympathisers will take it lying down, as did the Democratic voters north of the border in both 2000 and 2004. Democracy has never been won without a struggle, nor can it be maintained without the willingness to engage in one....
by
mhenriday (0 articles, 11 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 150 comments)
on Tuesday, July 4, 2006 at 4:31:47 PM
3 comments
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