Bekijk Volledige Versie : Verkiezingen VS: Bananenrepubliek toestanden
AMSTERDAM - De registratie van miljoenen nieuwe kiezers in Amerika, gaat gepaard met steeds meer beschuldigingen van fraude. In de staat Ohio bijvoorbeeld vechten de Republikeinen de registratie van 35.000 nieuwe kiezers aan.
Volgens de Republikeinen is in Ohio gebleken dat de gegevens van veel nieuw ingeschreven kiezers niet kloppen. Zo zou post, geadresseerd aan deze personen, zijn geretourneerd omdat de adressen niet bekend waren.
De Republikeinen verdenken de Democraten, of Democratisch georiënteerde groepen, ervan te frauderen door mensen naar de stembus te sturen die daartoe niet gerechtigd zijn. Ze hebben al aangekondigd op 2 november massaal aanwezig te zullen zijn in de stemlokalen, om eventuele illegale stemmers te ontmaskeren.
De Democraten zien dat als een poging om nieuwe stemmers - met name zwarten in de grote steden - te intimideren. Volgens The Los Angeles Times van vandaag dreigen controverses over de registratie de verkiezingen dit jaar net zo te verlammen als de omstreden stembiljetten in Florida dat vier jaar geleden deden.
De Help America Vote-wet, die in 2002 werd aangenomen, had aan dergelijke toestanden een einde moeten maken, onder meer door een standaard-computerprogramma voor kiezersregistratie. Maar 37 staten zijn er niet in geslaagd dat programma in te voeren en hebben bij de federale overheid ontheffing moeten aanvragen.
In verschillende staten hebben partijen en actiegroepen tijdelijke krachten ingehuurd om kiezers te registreren. Zij krijgen vaak betaald per binnengebrachte kiezer, waardoor de verleiding tot frauderen groot is. Overigens wordt, mede dankzij de registratie-inspanningen, verwacht dat de opkomst dit jaar veel hoger zal zijn dan in 2000. Volgens Curtis Gans, directeur van een centrum voor verkiezingsonderzoek, zullen 118 tot 121 miljoen kiezers hun stem uitbrengen, tegen 105 miljoen vier jaar geleden. Daarmee zou de opkomst op 60 procent uitkomen, het hoogste percentage in jaren.
Het probleem is eerder dat in veel staten veroordeelden standaard hun stemrecht wordt afgenomen. Needless to say, zijn dat vooral AfroAmis die op de Democraten zouden stemmen. Als ze al van plan zouden zijn te gaan stemmen.
~Panthera~
28-10-04, 00:49
so it's rigged again. :moe:
what else is new?
truste allen. :zwaai:
Geplaatst door ~Panthera~
so it's rigged again. :moe:
what else is new?
truste allen. :zwaai:
Slaap lekker. Niet van ginseng dromen, dat brengt ongeluk.
"Do you vote Bush?"
"No"
"You are not allowed to vote, sorry"
Doet me denken aan de knokploegen die Bush invloog na Florida met de privee jet van Enron om daar al het verzet tegen Bush verkiezing de kop in te drukken. :)
Zag gisteren nog een item op de VRT over al dan niet illegale Hispanic tomatenplukkers in Florida, die daar worden uitgebuit. Bush ging ze paaien met de belofte van een minimumloon-verhoging. Had zich alleen niet gerealiseerd dat ze geen stemrecht hebben. :hihi: 'The future will be better tomorrow.'
Geplaatst door mark61
Zag gisteren nog een item op de VRT over al dan niet illegale Hispanic tomatenplukkers in Florida, die daar worden uitgebuit. Bush ging ze paaien met de belofte van een minimumloon-verhoging. Had zich alleen niet gerealiseerd dat ze geen stemrecht hebben. :hihi: 'The future will be better tomorrow.' En met naturalisatie tot Amerikaanse staatsburgers.
Alleen was de Latijnse gemeenschap alles behalve blij, met de ze verkiezingsbelofte van Bush.
Ze hadden kennelijk baat, bij het handhaven van de iligale status van hun cladestiene medeburgers.
Geplaatst door Al Sawt
En met naturalisatie tot Amerikaanse staatsburgers.
Alleen was de Latijnse gemeenschap alles behalve blij, met de ze verkiezingsbelofte van Bush.
Ze hadden kennelijk baat, bij het handhaven van de iligale status van hun cladestiene medeburgers.
:hihi: Die mentaliteit zie je soms bij immigranten: 'na mij de deur dicht'.
Maar jij bedoelt natuurlijk dat die kwekerijen van andere Latinos / Cubanen zijn.
Ha Wizdom, grappig dat je de USA een bananenrepubliek noemt, dat doe ik nl. ook. Geregeerd door bananenrepubliekeinen.
VOTING AND COUNTING
by Paul Krugman
from the New York Times
October 22, 2004 - If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.
... Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000 election, reported recently in Harper's, which conclusively shows that Florida was thrown to Mr Bush by a combination of factors that disenfranchised black voters. These included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck thousands of people from the voter rolls, and defective voting machines, which disproportionately failed to record votes in poor, black districts.
One might have expected Florida's government to fix these problems during the intervening four years. But most of those wrongly denied voting rights in 2000 still haven't had those rights restored - and the replacement of punch-card machines has created new problems.
After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush recommended that the state adopt a robust voting technology that would greatly reduce the number of spoiled ballots and provide a paper trail for recounts: paper ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters to problems. This system is in use in some affluent, mainly white Florida counties.
But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he ignored state officials who urged him to "pull the plug" on a new felon list - which was quickly discredited once a judge forced the state to make it public - just days before he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much of the state will vote using touch-screen machines that are unreliable and subject to hacking, and leave no paper trail. Mr. Palast estimates that this will disenfranchise 27,000 voters - disproportionately poor and black.
A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win convincingly. But we must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a narrow Bush win, especially if it depends on Florida, rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters. And the media must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of skewed reporting that has consistently overstated Mr. Bush's popular support.
Excerpted from the New York Times. See Palast's entire report in this month's Harper's Magazine. Greg Palast, author of the New York Times bestseller, the Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is investigating the vote in Florida for BBC Television Newsnight and Harper's. Palast's documentary of his BBC investigations, "Bush Family Fortunes," has just been released in DVD. For more information on the film or the voting investigation, go to www.GregPalast.com.
CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT!
FLORIDA'S COMPUTERS HAVE ALREADY COUNTED THOUSANDS OF VOTES FOR ROGUE W. M. D. BUSH
Before one vote was cast in early voting this week in Florida, the new touch-screen computer voting machines of Florida started out with a several-thousand vote lead for Rogue W. M. D. Bush. That is, the mechanics of thenew digital democracy boxes "spoil" votes at a predictably high rate in African-American precincts, effectively voiding enough votes cast for John Kerry to in a tight race, keep the White House safe from the will of the voters.
Excerpted from the current (November) issue of Harper's Magazine
by Greg Palast
To understand the fiasco in progress in Florida, we need to revisit the 2000 model, starting with a lesson from Dick Carlberg, acting elections supervisor in Duval County until this week. "Some voters are strange," Carlberg told me recently. He was attempting to explain why, in the last presidential election, five thousand Duvalians trudged to the polls and, having arrived there, voted for no one for president. Carlberg did concede that, after he ran these punch cards through the counting machines a second time, some partly punched holes
shook loose, gaining Al Gore 160 votes or so, Bush roughly 80.
"So, if you ran the 'blank' ballots through a few more times, we'd have a different president," I noted. Carlberg, a Republican, answered with a grin.
So it was throughout the state - in certain precincts, at least. In Jacksonville, for example, in Duval precincts 7 through 10, nearly one in five ballots, or 11,200 votes in all, went uncounted, rejected as either an 'under-vote' (a blank ballot) or 'over-vote' (a ballot with extra markings). In those precincts, 72 percent of the residents are African-American; ballots that did make the count went four to one for Al Gore. All in all, a staggering 179,855 votes were "spoiled" (i.e., cast but not counted) in the 2000 election in Florida. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission matched the ballots with census stats and estimated that 54 percent of all the under- and over-voted ballots had been cast by blacks, for whom the likelihood of having a vote discarded exceeded that of a white voter by 900 percent.
Votes don't "spoil" because they are left out of the fridge. Vote spoilage, at root, is a class problem. Just as poor and minority districts wind up with shoddy schools and shoddy hospitals, they are stuck with shoddy ballot machines. In Gadsden, the only black-majority county in Florida, one in eight votes spoiled in 2000, the worst countywide record in the state. Next door in Leon County (Tallahassee), which used the same paper ballot, the mostly white, wealthier county lost almost no votes. The difference was that in mostly-white Leon, each voting booth was equipped with its own optical scanner, with which voters could check their own ballots. In the black county, absent such "second-chance" equipment, any error would void a vote.
The best solution for vote spoilage, whether from blank ballots or from hanging chads, is Leon County's: paper ballots, together with scanners in the voting booths. In fact, this is precisely what Governor Bush's own experts recommended in 2001 for the entire state. His Select Task Force on Elections Procedures, appointed by the Governor to soothe public distrust after the 2000 race, chose paper ballots with scanners over the trendier option -- the touch-screen computer.
Although the computer rigs cost eight times as much as paper with scanners, they result in many more spoiled votes. In this year's presidential primary in Florida, the computers had a spoilage rate of more than 1 percent, as compared to one-tenth of a percent for the double-checked paper ballots.
Apparently some Bush boosters were not keen on a fix so inexpensive and effective. In particular, Sandra Mortham - a founder of Women for Jeb Bush, the Governor's re-election operation - successfully lobbied on behalf of the Florida Association of Counties to stop the state the legislature from blocking the purchase of touch-screen voting systems. Mortham, coincidentally, was also a paid lobbyist for Election Systems & Strategies, a computer voting-machine manufacturer. Fifteen of Florida's sixty-seven counties chose the pricey computers, twelve of them ordered from ES&S which, in turn, paid Mortham's County Association a percentage on sales.
Florida's computerization had its first mass test in 2002, in Broward County. The ES&S machines appeared to work well in white Ft. Lauderdale precincts, but in black communities, such as Lauderhill and Pompano Beach, there was wholesale disaster. Poll workers were untrained, and many places opened late. Black voters were held up in lines for hours. No one doubts that hundreds of Black votes were lost before they were cast.
Broward county commissioners had purchased the touch-screen machines from ES&S over the objection of Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant; notably, one commissioner's campaign treasurer was an ES&S lobbyist. Governor Bush responded to the Broward fiasco by firing Oliphant, an African-American, for "misfeasance."
Even when computers work, they don't work well for African-Americans. A July 2001 Congressional study found that computers spoiled votes in minority districts at three times the rate of votes lost in white districts.
Based on the measured differential in vote loss between paper and computer systems, the fifteen counties in Florida, can expect to lose at least 29,000 votes to spoilage-some 27,000 more than if the counties had used paper ballots with scanners.
Given the demographics of spoilage, this translates into a net lead of thousands for Bush before a single ballot is cast.
For the full story, read "Another Florida" in the November issue of Harper's, out now. Mr. Palast, is a contributing editor to the magazine.
internationale boycot Bush junta
STEUN HET AMERIKAANSE VOLK IN DE STRIJD TEGEN DE BUSH JUNTA
KOOP GEEN AMERIKAANSE PRODUCTEN ZOLANG DE BUSH JUNTA AAN DE MACHT IS