Audio: Larry David On How Kerry Won In '04

Hear Larry David, auteur of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and principal writer of the "Seinfeld" series reading Palast's new book, Armed Madhouse,
http://www.gregpalast.com/podcasting/ArmedMadhouse3-16.mp3
and…
here Greg Palast reading Palast's new book, Armed Madhouse, Chapter 4: The Con-Kerry Won.
PART 1 - http://www.gregpalast.com/podcasting/ArmedMadhouse3-15.mp3
PART 2 - http://www.gregpalast.com/podcasting/ArmedMadhouse3-17.mp3

...because they're putting '08 in their pocket. Republicans just seem to have that winning spirit. They also have caging lists, felons of the future, rotting ballots, snuffed canaries, and a lock on the votes of Kissinger-Americans and the undead.

WARNING! There are cranks and kooks and crazies out there on the Internet who say that George Bush lost the 2004 election, like one titled, "Kerry Won" published on the TomPaine.com web site two days after the election. I wrote it.

On November 11, a week after TomPaine.com published it, I received an e-mail from The New York Times Washington Bureau. Hot on the investigation of the veracity of the vote, The Times reporter asked me pointed questions:

Question #1: Are you a "sore loser"?

Question #2: Are you a "conspiracy nut"?

There was no third question. Investigation of the vote was, for The Times at any rate, complete. The next day, the paper's thorough analysis of the evidence yielded this front-page story, "VOTE FRAUD THEORIES, SPREAD BY BLOGS, ARE QUICKLY BURIED."

As America's self-proclaimed Paper of Record had no space for the facts, I thought I'd share some with you here.

"Kerry Won" was not a two-day inquiry à la Times. It was the latest in a series of investigative reports coming out of a four-year team examination, begun for BBC Television's Newsnight, Britain's Guardian papers and Harper's Magazine, dissecting that greasy sausage called American electoral democracy.

And, by the way, the answer to Question #1: I didn't lose, so I'm not sore. This investigation isn't about John Kerry. As a journalist, I don't give a toss which rich white kid won the game. But I'm not so blasé that I don't care about the disappearance of American democracy. And I really wanted to know how the Bushes swallowed the sausage.

How'd they do it? Again. And how will they do it in '08? The answer arrived just after midnight on October 8, 2004, three weeks before the official voting, in a series of extraordinary e-mails. The e-mails were intended for the chieftains of the President's re-election campaign in Washington. Strangely enough, they were misaddressed and ended up in my mailbox. Such things happen.

But the e-mails and their technical attachments won't mean a thing unless you understand some arcane facts about elections American-style.

First, consider CNN's Ohio exit polls broadcast just after midnight after the voting ended on Election Day. They show John Kerry defeated George Bush among women voters by 53% to 47%. And among men voters, Kerry defeated Bush 51% to 49%.

So here's your question, class: What third sex put George Bush over the top in Ohio and gave him the White House?

Answer: The Uncounted.

In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush "victory" margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was fives times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush's triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government's Election's Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn't locate to tote up.

Why doesn't your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It's right there in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election -- in a footnote to the report on voter turn -- out. The Census tabulation of voters voting "differs," from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes.

This is the hidden presidential count which, excepting the Census' whispered footnote, has not been reported.

Unfortunately, that's not all. In addition to the 3 million ballots uncounted due to technical "glitches," millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.

In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called "spoilage." Spoilage, not the voters, picked our president for us.

Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, "It's not the people who vote that count; it's the people who count the votes." That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the U.S.A, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don't get counted decides our winners.

In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines, "black boxes," that could flip your vote from John Kerry to George Bush. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney's bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that's not how it went down. The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The new black boxes played their role, albeit minor, but the principal means of the election heist-voiding ballots, overwhelmingly of the poor and Black-went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale in 2008.

I went to sleep election night with the exit polls showing Kerry ahead in swing states. But between 1:05 am and 6:41 am the next morning, goblins went to work. By dawn, the network's exit poll for Ohio showed Kerry dead even with Bush among women, and down by five percentage points among men.

What happened? Were thousands of Bush voters locked in the voting booths, released at 2am, then queried about their choices? Not quite. The network's polling company applied a fancy "algorithm," a mathematical magic wand, to slowly transform the exit polls to match the official count.

And that's bad. By deliberately contaminating the exit polls, the networks snuffed the canary that would signal that something was deeply wrong about the vote count.

Hunting for a Democrat to defend the Twilight Zone between the exit polls and the "official" polls, media grabbed on Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's old advisor. An expert at walking that fine line between minor criminality and psychopathic ambition, Morris knows which way his next client's wind blows.

Morris said:

"Exit polls are almost never wrong. So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they're used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World Countries. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible."

His opening was promising, but then he switches into full Morris: "It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

So, Dick, you're telling us there was an evil cabal among six pollsters, competitors who don't even like each other, conspiring one dark night to make George Bush look like a vote thief.

There's another explanation: Kerry won.

We've got the body (the wounded elections), we've got the bullet holes (the missing votes), now where are the smoking guns? How does the GOP disappear the vote? And why do Democratic ballots spoil so much more readily than Republican ballots? How's it done?

But that little Bill O'Reilly in your head is screaming, Get over it; let's move on already. What they tested in 2000 and practiced in 2004, they are preparing to roll out in 2008 big time.

http://www.gregpalast.com/armedmadhouse/preorder.html

Get the rest of the nasty truth about the election of 2004 and the program to steal '08 -- from Republican "caging lists," the "disappearing Democrats of Area 51," 50 illustrations and even weirder stuff in ARMED MADHOUSE: WHOSE AFRAID OF OSAMA WOLF?, CHINA FLOATS BUSH SINKS, THE SCHEME TO STEAL 2008, NO CHILD'S BEHIND LEFT AND OTHER DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE CLASS WAR, Greg Palast's newest expose of war, oil, elections and class.

http://www.gregpalast.com/armedmadhouse/preorder.html

Or get the 5 CD ARMED MADHOUSE audio book: Read by Larry David, Randi Rhodes, Janeane Garofalo, Randy Credico, Brad Friedman, Mark Crispin Miller, Jerry Quickley , Amy Goodman, Ed Asner, Brod Bagert, Medea Benjamin, Kevin Danaher, Jim Hightower, and Shiva Rose.

"No one has uncovered more about the Bush Dynasty than Greg Palast ... and lived to write about it." - Baltimore Chronicle

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