In other words, despite the right to paper ballots, the election was fiddled, finagled and fixed.
Does this mean US activists should give up on the fight for paper ballots and give in to robo-voting, computerized democracy in a box. Hell, no! Lopez Obrador has put hundreds of thousands in the street week after week demanding, "vota por vota" -- recount every vote. But AMLO's supporters can only demand a re-count because the paper ballot makes a recount possible. Were Mexico's elections held on a Diebold special, there would be no way to recount the electrons floating in cyberspace.
Paper ballots make democracy possible, but hardly guarantee it. "Null" votes, not voters, have chosen Mexico's president. The only other nation I know of with such a poisonously high percentage of "null" votes is the "Estados Unidos," the USA.
And just as in Mexico, the "null" vote, the trashed, spoiled, rejected ballots, overrode the voters' choice, so it was north of the Rio Grande in 2000 and 2004. Ballot spoilage, not computer manipulation, stole Ohio and Florida in those elections -- and will steal Colorado and New Mexico in the 2008 election.
In other words, my fellow gringo activists, we'd better stop fixating on laptop legerdemain and pledge our lives and fortunes to stopping the games played with registration rolls, provisional ballots, absentee ballots, voter ID demands and the less glamorous, yet horribly effective, methods used to suppress, invalidate and otherwise ambush the vote.
*****
Greg Palast is the author of the just-released New York Times bestseller, "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." Go to www.GregPalast.com. See Palast's July 12 investigation of the Mexican election on Democracy Now!
Does this mean US activists should give up on the fight for paper ballots and give in to robo-voting, computerized democracy in a box. Hell, no! Lopez Obrador has put hundreds of thousands in the street week after week demanding, "vota por vota" -- recount every vote. But AMLO's supporters can only demand a re-count because the paper ballot makes a recount possible. Were Mexico's elections held on a Diebold special, there would be no way to recount the electrons floating in cyberspace.
Paper ballots make democracy possible, but hardly guarantee it. "Null" votes, not voters, have chosen Mexico's president. The only other nation I know of with such a poisonously high percentage of "null" votes is the "Estados Unidos," the USA.
And just as in Mexico, the "null" vote, the trashed, spoiled, rejected ballots, overrode the voters' choice, so it was north of the Rio Grande in 2000 and 2004. Ballot spoilage, not computer manipulation, stole Ohio and Florida in those elections -- and will steal Colorado and New Mexico in the 2008 election.
*****
Greg Palast is the author of the just-released New York Times bestseller, "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." Go to www.GregPalast.com. See Palast's July 12 investigation of the Mexican election on Democracy Now!
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