"Senor Blank-o" Wins In Mexico! by Greg Palast

[IndyOp]

Here is Greg Palast's newest article about 'spoiled ballots' in the Mexican election. If you've not read Greg's New York Times Bestselling Armed Madhouse... I've posted information about how the votes not counted also determined the results of US 2004 elections...

"Senor Blank-o" wins in Mexico
By Greg Palast

July 7, 2006 -- And the winner in Mexico's presidential contest is… Senor Blank-o!
The official count of the ruling party is: 36.38% for the ruling party and 35.34% for the challenger.

Or, to put names and numbers to it: The Bush-o-philiac candidate, Felipe Calderon, collected 402,000 more votes than Bush-bashed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But the big winner was Mr. Blank -- the 827,000 ballots without a mark for president.

I smell something rotten… eau d'Ohio, vintage 2004. In that state, as in Mexico this week, the presidential "winner," George Bush, had victory margin smaller than the combined "undercount" (blank ballots) and rejected and mangled ballots.

Blank ballots are rarely random - in the USA, nearly 88% were cast in 2004, notably, in minority areas, the result of bad voting machines. That is, Democrats' ballots "spoil" and "blank out" a heck of a lot more often than Republican ballots. What about in Mexico?

I intend to find out. As soon as I saw the "official" vote count, I booked a plane to Mexico City. I'll be there to tomorrow to join our investigators on the ground - and to fill in the blanks.

And what about the "spoiled" vote - ballots rejected, lost, mangled? Well, some are sitting in dumpsters in Veracruz State which is controlled by the old ruling PRI. (There's a darn good chance that the PRI, hoping to stave off its extinction, played a bigger role than Calderon's PAN in shoplifting votes from challenger Lopez Obrador.)

IndyOp's synopsis of important points from Armed Madhouse...

Over 3 million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. Millions more were lost because voters were prevented from casting their ballots – including those illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries. The new black boxes played their role, albeit a small one, but the principal means of the election heist – voiding ballots, overwhelmingly of the poor and Black, Native Americans and Hispanics – went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale in 2008.

Provisional Ballots Rejected: About 1.1 million. Provisional ballots are given if there are problems with the voter’s registration or ID, if there is an error in the voter rolls or if they are “challenged” by GOP. Provisional ballots should be counted unless there is evidence the voter was lying – which is extremely rare.

Spoiled Ballots: About 1.4 million punch-card, optical scan, and e-vote ballots were cast but not counted. About ¾’s of a million African-American votes were not counted, about ¼ of a million Hispanic and Native American votes were not counted. Remaining 400,000+ uncounted votes belonged overwhelming to the poor.

In New Mexico the margin of victory for the Presidential race was 5,988 votes. E-voting machines in Kerry-leaning precincts failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.

Absentee Ballots Rejected: Over half a million in 2004. In swing states, absentee ballot shredding was pandemic. (Florida conveniently labels the voter’s party on the ballot envelope).

[Poll_Blind]

1. Link please! n/t

PB

[Joanie Baloney]

2. Linky-Poo

It's at his site:

http://www.gregpalast.com/section/articles

[IndyOp]

3. Link - Sorry...

http://www.gregpalast.com/senor-blank-o-wins-in-mexico

[thereismore]

4. Shit, 50% of ballots with no vote for pres? That takes cajones! nt

[Awsi Dooger]

7. Not 50%, slightly over 2%

There were more than 40 million votes. That's still high for intentional under votes in a presidential race although I'm not familiar with Mexican voting tendencies in that regard. In 2000 some states like Florida and Georgia had numbers like 2.9% and 3.6%, intentional non votes plus undervotes due to punch card errors. Our national under vote rate was 1.9% in 2000 but was basically cut in half in 2004.

[BeFree]

5. Simple math

with a mix of common sense tells you that they stole the election.

But hey, Bev is the only one needing to be put in her place.

[Kelvin Mace]

6. I'm sure that Bev will very happy

to help out. She needs people who don't know her reputation to raise more money from.