Greg Palast: "Ambushing The Vote"

Regular reader Kat, who sends me a whole load of stuff I would otherwise miss and who I should thank far more often, just sent me a link to Greg Palast's latest article for the Guardian on the stealing of the Mexican election.

Here's the conundrum: The nation's tens of thousands of polling stations report to the capital in random order after the polls close. Therefore, statistically, you'd expect the results to remain roughly unchanged as vote totals come in. As expected, AMLO was ahead of the right-wing candidate Calderon all night by an unchanging margin - until after midnight. Suddenly, precincts began reporting wins for Calderon of five to one, then ten to one, then as polling nearly ended, of a hundred to one.

How odd. I checked my concerns with Victor Romero, a professor at Mexico's National University, who concluded that the reported results must have been a "miracle". As he put it, a "religious event" but a statistical impossibility.

There were two explanations, said the professor: either the Lord was fixing the outcome, or operatives of the ruling party were cranking in a massive number of ballots when they realized their man was about to lose.

How could they do it? "Easy peasy," as my kids would say. In Mexico, the choices for president are on their own ballot with no other offices listed. Those who don't want to vote for the president just discard the ballot. There is no real ballot security. In areas without reliable opposition observers (about a third of the nation), anyone can stuff ballots into the loosely-guarded cardboard boxes. (AMLO showed a tape of one of these ballot-stuffing operations caught in the act.)

It's also absurdly easy to remove paper ballots, disqualify them or simply mark them "nulo" ("null," unreadable).

The Trife, the official electoral centurions, rejected AMLO's request to review those precincts that reported the miracle numbers. Nor would the tribunal open and count the nearly one million "null" votes - allegedly "uncountable" votes which totaled four times Calderon's putative plurality.

Mexico's paper ballot, I would note, is the model of clarity - with large images of each party which need only be crossed through. The ruling party would have us believe that a million voters waited in line, took a ballot, made no mark, then deliberately folded the ballot and placed it in the ballot box, pretending they'd voted. Maybe, as in Florida in 2000, those "unreadable" ballots were quite readable. Indeed, the few boxes re-counted showed the "null" ballots marked for AMLO. The Tribunal chose to check no further.

The only precincts the Trife ordered re-counted are those where the tally sheets literally don't tally - precincts in which the arithmetic is off. They refuse even to investigate those precincts where ballot boxes were found in city dumps.

Which suggests that even getting rid of those incerdibly hackable voting machines made by the Republican's friend at Diebold wouldn't necessarily solve problems north of the border. Still, it is still better than the current craziness in America:

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.

...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.