'We are not going to allow another million African-American votes to go uncounted'

[argentine soccer fan]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040912/ap_on_el_pr/kerry&cid=536&ncid=536

According to AP, Senator Kerry said yesterday:

We are not going to stand by and allow another million African-American votes to go uncounted

Is the senator accusing republicans of being responsible for a million African-American votes not being counted in the last election?

Because if that was to be true, and he has evidence, then it should be brought forth. It is a very serious charge.

If there is evidence of a million votes being suppressed due to race, why are we wasting time arguing about swift boats and fake memos? And if there is not, then why is he saying it?

As a new American citizen, I'd like some answers.

[Ian McCracken]

He has no evidence. All he has is hearsay evidence from the race pimps in the Democratic Party. Kerry, like most Democrats when they fall desperately behind, becomes a demagogue on the race issue.

[Mel Brennan]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/20/ING2976LG61.DTL

[christopher d]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/20/ING2976LG61.DTL
Yeah, and it's a bitch about what happened to Palast after reporting this, too... Or was it his reporting on the smear campaign against Rep. McKinney? Whatever. That has to be so cool... to be able to do anything you want, and have control over the reputations of people who call you on it in the "free press".

Ian, are you looking for a memo from Jeb to Kathy saying "this is how we make sure them liberal-lovin' (fill in your favorite ethnic slur)s are kept off the ballot"? Even if you saw it, you'd call it a forgery.

[Garcia]

Yeah, and it's a bitch about what happened to Palast after reporting this, too... Or was it his reporting on the smear campaign against Rep. McKinney? Whatever. That has to be so cool... to be able to do anything you want, and have control over the reputations of people who call you on it in the "free press".

Ian, are you looking for a memo from Jeb to Kathy saying "this is how we make sure them liberal-lovin' (fill in your favorite ethnic slur)s are kept off the ballot"? Even if you saw it, you'd call it a forgery.


But let's not get smug about Florida's Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.


Doesn't make it right, but it is easy to make this all about Bush.

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation's worst spoilage rates. That's not surprising. Boss Daley's Democratic machine, now his son's, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago's black vote.

Can the US govt take away the election powers from the states, local level and ensure one national voting cell?

In Peru, they have party symbols, names and candidate's picture on one line for each candidate on one huge cell. All you have to do is mark an X on the face of the candidate. One national ballot with public information months before each election. But, what do those 3rd world, banana republic people know?

[Northcal19]

He has no evidence. All he has is hearsay evidence from the race pimps in the Democratic Party. Kerry, like most Democrats when they fall desperately behind, becomes a demagogue on the race issue.

Ian, you should read the article in Mel's link. You are completely wrong.

[Yankee_Blue]

Ian, you should read the article in Mel's link. You are completely wrong.

[quote=Kerry]
We are not going to stand by and allow another million African-American votes to go uncounted
[quote]

If you had read the article you would realize Kerry is lying. One million votes were "spoiled" according to the article. Half, 500,000 were African-American. Mods? we have more lying!

[Ian McCracken]

Ian, you should read the article in Mel's link. You are completely wrong.

The Florida Myth (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/kirsanow200310150822.asp)

An urban legend to fire up the base.

By Peter Kirsanow

Political myths can overcome facts through sheer repetition: The New Deal ended the Depression, tax cuts caused budget deficits in the Eighties, etc. These myths serve vital partisan imperatives — especially when the policy cupboards of the partisans are bare or vermin-infested.

One of the myths already resurrected for the 2004 presidential election cycle is that blacks in Florida were systematically harassed, intimidated, and prevented from voting in the 2000 presidential election — the "stolen" election.

Even before the last vote had been cast, activists had descended upon Florida, claiming a widespread conspiracy to disenfranchise black voters. Allegations that state troopers put up roadblocks and checkpoints to prevent blacks from voting were rampant. Dogs and hoses were allegedly used to drive black voters from the polls. Bull Connor's heirs had been unleashed — all at the direction of Governor Bush and his sidekick, Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigated these allegations over a six-month period beginning in January 2001. Its 200-page majority report, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election, excoriates Florida's election officials for various acts of misfeasance. But the conclusions drawn by the report often bore little relationship to the facts contained therein. And media descriptions of the report did little to dispel the widespread belief among the black electorate that blacks had been systematically targeted for harassment, intimidation, and disenfranchisement.

Of course, almost no one actually read the report. But the handful that did (especially the incisive dissent authored by Commissioners Abigail Thernstrom and Russell Redenbaugh) discovered the astonishing mendacity underlying the myth.

There's absolutely no evidence that a single person was intimidated, harassed, or prevented from voting by Florida law-enforcement officials.

[Mel Brennan]

...If you had read the article you would realize Kerry is lying. One million votes were "spoiled" according to the article. Half, 500,000 were African-American. Mods? we have more lying!

In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them -- half of the rejected ballots -- were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate...

Go lie down before you hurt yourself.


In other news:
This is not just about Florida. This is not discussable. This cannot happen again, regardless of the melanin content of the citizen. A wholesale examination of what it means to be a citizen and to shape a vital democracy, everyday, would, as almost an aside, generate measures to essentially eliminate disenfranchisement.

Note to self:

Diebold-ed computer ballots with no paper trail (http://www.invisibleballots.com/iballot.cfm?x=home&player=realbig) is moving in the opposite direction of the above citizenship considerations...

[argentine soccer fan]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/20/ING2976LG61.DTL

Mel, was this an opinion piece or a news story? Is there concrete proof that so many votes were purposely not counted due to a republican conspiracy?

I remember a few years back in Orange County, California a republican called Dorman (or something like that) lost a seat in the house of representatives to democrat Loretta Sanchez, and he claimed that he only lost because the democrats conspired to get illegal immigrants to illegaly vote for Sanchez. He sued in court, and an investigation was done. While it was concluded that some illegals had in fact voted, the investigation did not indict the democratic party, and it concluded that there was no proof of a conspiracy by the democrats.

I wonder, was a suit like that ever filed against the Republicans and was an investigation ever conducted about the claims and allegations about Republicans trying to suppress the black votes? And if so, what were the results of the investigation?

[bright]

If you had read the article you would realize Kerry is lying. One million votes were "spoiled" according to the article. Half, 500,000 were African-American. Mods? we have more lying!

Actually, if you read the article, you will find that 1.9 million votes were spoiled, and 53% of them were from black voters ... hence 1 million spoiled votes from black voters. Mods? We have more illiteracy.

- Paul

[argentine soccer fan]

Actually, if you read the article, you will find that 1.9 million votes were spoiled, and 53% of them were from black voters ... hence 1 million spoiled votes from black voters.

- Paul

My question remains. Is the article an opinion piece, or a news story which offers concrete proof that 1 million votes by African Americans went uncounted? And if such was the case and there is proof, is there also proof that it was it due to a Republican effort to suppress the vote? This is a very serious issue, and surely there must be backup proof for Mr. Greg Palast, (the guy who wrote the article), and senator Kerry to make such serious allegations. I'd like to see it.

[bright]

My question remains. Is the article an opinion piece, or a news story which offers concrete proof that 1 million votes by African Americans went uncounted. And if there is proof, was it due to a Republican effort? This is a serious issue, and surely there must be backup proof for the guy who wrote the article and senator Kerry to make the allegations. I'd like to see it.

I was just responding to Yankee Blue's knee-jerkism.

As far as the article goes, I think it has less to do with Republican conspiracies and more to do with racial conspiracies. You haven't lived in this country for very long, have you.

- Paul

[argentine soccer fan]

I was just responding to Yankee Blue's knee-jerkism.

As far as the article goes, I think it has less to do with Republican conspiracies and more to do with racial conspiracies. You haven't lived in this country for very long, have you.

- Paul

Amazingly, it is going to be fourteen years soon, since I came here in the hopes of starting a small business. But sometimes I think all this time I was living in a vacuum. I am learning a lot in these forums.:D

[Mel Brennan]

...I wonder, was a suit like that ever filed against the Republicans and was an investigation ever conducted about the claims and allegations about Republicans trying to suppress the black votes? And if so, what were the results of the investigation?

Investigations can, in this case, be conducted by two bodies; the media, and the government. Media can be corporatised, and, as a consequence, decide that the cost of doing investigative journalism (and not just reporting what sources tell them) is prohibitive for their corporate media mission, and it just does not get done anymore. That is why Palast is unique...in a sad, bout-to-be-extinct dinosaur sort of way.

Government, while not yet fully corporatised, can certainly be politicised. Reading the report itself on Florida (http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/main.htm) tells you that:

"After carefully and fully examining all the evidence, the Commission found a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) occurred in Florida. The VRA was enacted in 1965 to enforce the 15th Amendment’s proscription against voting discrimination. It is aimed at both subtle and overt state action that has the effect of denying a citizen the right to vote because of his or her race. Although the VRA originally focused on enfranchising African Americans, the law has been amended several times to also include American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan Natives, and people of Spanish heritage. Additionally, the VRA includes a provision that recognizes the need for multilingual assistance for non-English speakers.

The VRA does not require intent to discriminate. Neither does it require proof of a conspiracy. Violations of the VRA can be established by evidence that the action or inaction of responsible officials and other evidence constitute a “totality of the circumstances” that denied citizens their right to vote. For example, if there are differences in voting procedures and voting technologies and the result of those differences is to advantage white voters and disadvantage minority voters, then the laws, the procedures, and the decisions that produced those results, viewed in the context of social and historical factors, can be discriminatory, and a violation of the VRA.

The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities. The state’s highest officials responsible for ensuring efficiency, uniformity, and fairness in the election failed to fulfill their responsibilities and were subsequently unwilling to take responsibility...

This is, to me, a polticised response. "Something bad happened, and people are responsible, but it was all an accident...nothing intentful about it at all."

Doesn't this sound like nearly every report you've ever heard by the US government ON the US government when smething goes wrong?

THAT's where we need the media to do its ********ing job. But very few journalists see the need to investigate. Palast hits it on the head right here:

"...Take this story of the list of Florida's faux felons that cost Al Gore the election. Shortly after the UK and Salon stories hit the worldwide web, I was contacted by a CBS network news producer ready to run their own version of the story. The CBS hotshot was happy to pump me for information: names, phone numbers, all the items one needs for a quickie TV story.

I also freely offered up to CBS this information: The office of the governor of Florida, brother of the Republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls — real felons, but with the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, thousands of these legal voters, almost all Democrats, would not be allowed to vote.

One problem: I had not quite completed my own investigation on this matter. Therefore CBS would have to do some actual work, reviewing documents and law, and obtaining statements. The next day I received a call from the producer, who said, "I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up." Well, how did the multibillion-dollar CBS network determine this? Why, "we called Jeb Bush's office."

Oh.

And that was it.

I wasn't surprised by this type of "investigation." It is, in fact, standard operating procedure for the little lambs of American journalism. One good, slick explanation from a politician or corporate chieftain and it's case closed, investigation over. The story ran anyway: on BBC-TV. Let's understand the pressures on the CBS producer that led her to kill the story on the basis of a denial by the target of the allegations. (Though let's not confuse understanding with forgiveness):

First, the story is difficult to tell in the usual 90 seconds allotted for national reports. The BBC gave me a 14-minute slot to explain it.

Second, the story required massive and quick review of documents, hundreds of phone calls and interviews, hardly a winner in the slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am school of U.S. journalism. The BBC gave me two weeks to develop the story.

Third, the revelations in the story required a reporter to stand up and say the big name politicians, their lawyers and their PR people were freaking liars. It would be much easier, and a heck of a lot cheaper, to wait for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to do the work, then cover the Commission's canned report and press conference. Wait! You've watched "Murphy Brown," so you think reporters hanker every day to uncover the big scandal. ****************. Remember, "All the President's Men" was so unusual they had to make a movie out of it.

Fourth, investigative reports require taking a chance. Fraudsters and vote-riggers don't reveal all their evidence. And they lie. Make the allegation and you are open to attack, or unknown information that may prove you wrong. No one ever lost their job writing canned statements from a press conference.

Fifth — and this is no small matter — no one ever got sued for not running an investigative story. Let me give you an example close to home. The companion report to my investigation of the theft of the election in Florida was a story about Bush family finances. I wrote in the Guardian and Observer of London about the gold-mining company for which the first President George Bush worked after he left the White House. Oh, you didn't know that George H. W. Bush worked for a gold-mining company after he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992? Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that this company has a long history of suing every paper that breathes a word it does not like — in fact, it has now sued my papers. I've gotten awards and thousands of letters for these stories, but, honey, that don't pay the legal bills.

Finally, there's another little matter working against U.S. reporters running after the hard stories, papers printing them or TV broadcasting the good stuff. I'll explain by way of my phone call with a great reporter, Mike Isikoff of Newsweek. Just before the elections, Isikoff handed me some exceptionally important information about President Clinton, material suggesting corruption in office — the real stuff, not the interns-under-the-desk stuff. I said, "Mike, why the hell don't you run it yourself?" and he said, "Because no one gives a shit!" Isikoff was expressing his exasperation with the news chiefs who kill or bury these stories on page 200 on the belief that the public really doesn't want to hear all this bad and very un-sexy news. These lambchop editors believe the public just doesn't care.

But they're wrong.

Damn skippy they are.

[Benito]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040912/ap_on_el_pr/kerry&cid=536&ncid=536

According to AP, Senator Kerry said yesterday:



Is the senator accusing republicans of being responsible for a million African-American votes not being counted in the last election?

Because if that was to be true, and he has evidence, then it should be brought forth. It is a very serious charge.

If there is evidence of a million votes being suppressed due to race, why are we wasting time arguing about swift boats and fake memos? And if there is not, then why is he saying it?

As a new American citizen, I'd like some answers.

He was talking about the inmates on felony charges in Prison who were not allowed to vote. He wants them to be allowed to vote regardless this time.

He also wants the dead black vote to be given a chance to vote. He wants volunteers to vote for them.

[bright]

He was talking about the inmates on felony charges in Prison who were not allowed to vote.

See, Argentine Soccer Fan. When you live in this country, you have to put up with this kind of racism from all kinds of people, even your fellow immigrants. There is a pervasive meme in this country that programs everyone to believe that black people are sub-human.

- Paul

[argentine soccer fan]

See, Argentine Soccer Fan. When you live in this country, you have to put up with this kind of racism from all kinds of people, even your fellow immigrants. There is a pervasive meme in this country that programs everyone to believe that black people are sub-human.

- Paul

I don't know if those comments are evidence of racism, but it is a relevant subject to discuss. I haven't seen racism in America except on rare occasions and very indirectly. I personally have been treated very well at every turn, since moving here. But I grant that it is easy to live in a bit of a vacuum in that respect, when you are a foreigner, and talk like a foreigner, but dont really look like a foreigner.

Perhaps somebody should open a thread about racism in today's America, and people can share their experiences.

[argentine soccer fan]

Investigations can, in this case, be conducted by two bodies; the media, and the government. Media can be corporatised, and, as a consequence, decide that the cost of doing investigative journalism (and not just reporting what sources tell them) is prohibitive for their corporate media mission, and it just does not get done anymore. That is why Palast is unique...in a sad, bout-to-be-extinct dinosaur sort of way.

Government, while not yet fully corporatised, can certainly be politicised. Reading the report itself on Florida (http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/main.htm) tells you that:

"After carefully and fully examining all the evidence, the Commission found a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) occurred in Florida. The VRA was enacted in 1965 to enforce the 15th Amendment’s proscription against voting discrimination. It is aimed at both subtle and overt state action that has the effect of denying a citizen the right to vote because of his or her race. Although the VRA originally focused on enfranchising African Americans, the law has been amended several times to also include American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan Natives, and people of Spanish heritage. Additionally, the VRA includes a provision that recognizes the need for multilingual assistance for non-English speakers.

The VRA does not require intent to discriminate. Neither does it require proof of a conspiracy. Violations of the VRA can be established by evidence that the action or inaction of responsible officials and other evidence constitute a “totality of the circumstances” that denied citizens their right to vote. For example, if there are differences in voting procedures and voting technologies and the result of those differences is to advantage white voters and disadvantage minority voters, then the laws, the procedures, and the decisions that produced those results, viewed in the context of social and historical factors, can be discriminatory, and a violation of the VRA.

The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities. The state’s highest officials responsible for ensuring efficiency, uniformity, and fairness in the election failed to fulfill their responsibilities and were subsequently unwilling to take responsibility...

This is, to me, a polticised response. "Something bad happened, and people are responsible, but it was all an accident...nothing intentful about it at all."

Doesn't this sound like nearly every report you've ever heard by the US government ON the US government when smething goes wrong?

THAT's where we need the media to do its ********ing job. But very few journalists see the need to investigate. Palast hits it on the head right here:

"...Take this story of the list of Florida's faux felons that cost Al Gore the election. Shortly after the UK and Salon stories hit the worldwide web, I was contacted by a CBS network news producer ready to run their own version of the story. The CBS hotshot was happy to pump me for information: names, phone numbers, all the items one needs for a quickie TV story.

I also freely offered up to CBS this information: The office of the governor of Florida, brother of the Republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls — real felons, but with the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, thousands of these legal voters, almost all Democrats, would not be allowed to vote.

One problem: I had not quite completed my own investigation on this matter. Therefore CBS would have to do some actual work, reviewing documents and law, and obtaining statements. The next day I received a call from the producer, who said, "I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up." Well, how did the multibillion-dollar CBS network determine this? Why, "we called Jeb Bush's office."

Oh.

And that was it.

I wasn't surprised by this type of "investigation." It is, in fact, standard operating procedure for the little lambs of American journalism. One good, slick explanation from a politician or corporate chieftain and it's case closed, investigation over. The story ran anyway: on BBC-TV. Let's understand the pressures on the CBS producer that led her to kill the story on the basis of a denial by the target of the allegations. (Though let's not confuse understanding with forgiveness):

First, the story is difficult to tell in the usual 90 seconds allotted for national reports. The BBC gave me a 14-minute slot to explain it.

Second, the story required massive and quick review of documents, hundreds of phone calls and interviews, hardly a winner in the slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am school of U.S. journalism. The BBC gave me two weeks to develop the story.

Third, the revelations in the story required a reporter to stand up and say the big name politicians, their lawyers and their PR people were freaking liars. It would be much easier, and a heck of a lot cheaper, to wait for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to do the work, then cover the Commission's canned report and press conference. Wait! You've watched "Murphy Brown," so you think reporters hanker every day to uncover the big scandal. ****************. Remember, "All the President's Men" was so unusual they had to make a movie out of it.

Fourth, investigative reports require taking a chance. Fraudsters and vote-riggers don't reveal all their evidence. And they lie. Make the allegation and you are open to attack, or unknown information that may prove you wrong. No one ever lost their job writing canned statements from a press conference.

Fifth — and this is no small matter — no one ever got sued for not running an investigative story. Let me give you an example close to home. The companion report to my investigation of the theft of the election in Florida was a story about Bush family finances. I wrote in the Guardian and Observer of London about the gold-mining company for which the first President George Bush worked after he left the White House. Oh, you didn't know that George H. W. Bush worked for a gold-mining company after he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992? Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that this company has a long history of suing every paper that breathes a word it does not like — in fact, it has now sued my papers. I've gotten awards and thousands of letters for these stories, but, honey, that don't pay the legal bills.

Finally, there's another little matter working against U.S. reporters running after the hard stories, papers printing them or TV broadcasting the good stuff. I'll explain by way of my phone call with a great reporter, Mike Isikoff of Newsweek. Just before the elections, Isikoff handed me some exceptionally important information about President Clinton, material suggesting corruption in office — the real stuff, not the interns-under-the-desk stuff. I said, "Mike, why the hell don't you run it yourself?" and he said, "Because no one gives a shit!" Isikoff was expressing his exasperation with the news chiefs who kill or bury these stories on page 200 on the belief that the public really doesn't want to hear all this bad and very un-sexy news. These lambchop editors believe the public just doesn't care.

But they're wrong.

Damn skippy they are.

Mel, if we go by your quote of the report, it doesn't seem to support Senator Kerry's contention. But I suppose you give valid reasons why in your opinion it doesn't support it. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the media would not run with such an important story if they really had the facts on their side to prove it.

But perhaps you are right. I don't have friends in the media who call me, like you do, so maybe I am being naive.

[DJPoopypants]

He was talking about the inmates on felony charges in Prison who were not allowed to vote. He wants them to be allowed to vote regardless this time.

He also wants the dead black vote to be given a chance to vote. He wants volunteers to vote for them.

Mods -

is the above an example of

a) a lie (2 to be precise)
b) hysterical hyperbole
c) somewhat true because O'Reilly said it
d) the most pathetic attempt at humor or trolling ever, that should be carded on principle?