| LYNCHING BY LAPTOP
by Greg Palast and Ina Howard
opednews.com
At the dais, Martin Luther King spoke with the marchers:
“We ask a simple question. Do African Americans have the right to vote
in the United States of America?”
We have to blink. Speaking is Martin Luther King THE
THIRD, son of the late Nobel Laureate—and the year is 2003. Meeting in
Birmingham in May, in the run-up to the 40th anniversary celebration of
his daddy's "I Have a Dream" speech, King was warning that the
man in the White House was hacking the computers - and the result is a
legalized attack on the Black voter that could steal away 40 years of
blood, sweat, tears and civil rights victories.
In 2002, with little public notice, Congress passed and
the president signed the “Help America Vote Act.” When the Bush family
wants to "help" us vote, look out. Hidden behind the
apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time-bomb.
The new law to “Help America Vote” will eat up $3.9
billion of taxpayers’ money, partly to tempt states and counties to
adopt computerized ‘touch-screen’ voting. Why is King worried? The
first elections with computers produced vote-count horror shows that make
one yearn for hanging chads. In 2002, Comal County, Texas, tried out new
computer voting machines—and three Republican candidates each won their
respective offices with exactly 18,181 votes. “Isn’t that the weirdest
thing?" County Clerk Joy Treater asked at the time. “We noticed it
right away, but it is just a big coincidence.”
Just down the road in Scurry County, Texas, two
unexpected landslide wins for Republican candidates struck election clerks
as just one coincidence too many. That county’s clerk, Joan Bunch,
investigated and found that a "faulty" computer chip had caused
the county’s optical scanner to record Democratic votes as Republican
instead. After two manual recounts and one electronic recount using a
replacement chip in the scanner, the Democratic candidates were found to
have won by large margins and the original results were overturned.
King is not so naïve as to believe vote-count errors
are race neutral. In the presidential election of 2000, 1.9 million
ballots cast were NEVER COUNTED by tally machines—“spoiled” in the
language of elections officials. But the spoilage rate has a distinctly
racial profile: The massive Harvard University Civil Rights Project study
released last year found that it was 50 percent more likely for a black
vote to be “spoiled” than a white vote. In Florida, the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission found that a black vote was nearly 10 times as likely as
a white vote to be rejected.
Machinery, computerized or otherwise, has made the
racial bend of lost votes worse. In our investigations in Florida for BBC
television of London we found that in 2000 paper ballots read by optical
scanners in the county with the highest black population were 25 times as
likely to be rejected as those cast in the neighboring majority white
county, using the same paper ballots—but a different automated counting
system.
Unlike paper ballots, there’s no “audit” trail on
touch screen computers. If the machine is messed with, or even crashes of
its own volition (that’s happened a few times with computers), there is
no way to tell how people actually voted.
And it's not just the computers in the voting booths
that gives civil rights leaders the jitters. More frightening still is the
"Help America Vote" law requirement that every state in the USA
imitate Florida's system of computerizing and "purging" voter
rolls of suspect voters.
King knows darn well the color of the voters that will
be purged - because he saw how the operation worked in Florida. In the
five months leading up to the 2000 presidential election, Florida Governor
Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal
of 57,700 voters from Florida’s vote registries.
The official reason? Those they targeted were felons,
ex-cons who had illegally registered to vote. The truth? Virtually every
voter they “scrubbed” from the voter rolls is innocent of any crime—except
that the majority were guilty of Voting While Black. There’s no guessing
about this; Florida voter registrations include each citizen’s race.
Most of us have become lazy about civil rights. But the
old lions of the 60's marches have remained vigilant. The road they have
traveled is long and the sacrifices too many to let down their guard.
The ethnic cleansing of black voters from the Florida
registries, and the new plan to infect the nation with the Bush
Administration's Jim Crow computer scheme, is the wake-up call for a new
activism that must be fought in the Birminghams and Selmas of cyberspace.
Now it’s your turn. Click in, sign on … to ML King’s voting rights
petition at http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/petition.cfm?itemid=14993
Get a printable, mail-in version of King’s voting
rights petition at http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=228&row=1
Greg Palast is the author of The New York Times
bestseller "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Ina Howard is
coordinating the petition drive. Sign up for Palast’s investigative
reports at http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm
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