Buzzflash have a new interview with Greg Palast up, including this bombshell. (to me anyway)
I have a new chapter called "Oil Slick Jim, the Third Ring, and One Million Missing Ballots," and a whole bunch of new stories. The big story is that there were over a million missing ballots from African-American voters across the U.S. in the 2000 election -- even this kind of knocked me out.
I've been working with the statisticians from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and Harvard Law School. In the year 2000, 1.9 million votes were cast and not counted across this country –- 1.9 million votes. And of those 1.9 million votes, about a million were cast by African-Americans. This investigation was conducted by Harvard and the Civil Rights Commission, and I grabbed the material. There's a 1965 Voting Rights Act that gave black people the right to vote, but not the right to have their votes counted.
All this came out of my first investigation in Florida. I brought it to the attention of the Civil Rights Commission that the so-called "spoilage rate" seemed to be different among black people than with white people. What that means is that, if you make a mistake on a ballot, or if there's some problem with reading your ballot, your vote doesn't count.
In Florida, the researchers went precinct by precinct and determined that if you are a black person, you are 10 times more likely to have your vote marked spoiled and voided than if you're a white voter –- 10 times! And what's disgusting is that that is the national average. So we basically have a big black thumbprint on the electoral scale in our election, and it's going to be worse in 2004.http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/05/int04026.htmlGobsmacking. Like his new nick for chimp too, Osama bin WalMart. :D
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