A buddy of mine interviewed Greg Palast re Mexico's election, wrote this

[Guaranteed]

Enjoy!

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Martin Markovits | TDJ Staff Mexico City
'Florida con Salsa'


Greg Palast, the investigative muckraking reporter for U.K.'s Guardian, has struck again After gaining acclaim with his uncovering of the purging of African American voters in Florida in the 2000 presidential elections, Palast has now made the case that the Mexican presidential election was also a deeply fraudulent affair.
Palast claims that the election was full of discrepancies and deliberate attempts by right wing and U.S. forces to deliver the election to the conservative, Felípe Calderón over leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In this exclusive interview with the TDJ, Palast offers his insights and analysis on what really happened on election day in Mexico, and how eerily similar the Mexican and the 2000 Florida elections really were.


TDJ: The first question is the obvious one: The parallels between the Mexican presidential election and what happened in Florida in 2000.

Greg Palast: Too many parallels. Mexico is Florida con salsa and there is a frightening repetition. For example, and this happened in Ohio in 2004, nearly a million votes, 904,000 which are blanks were not counted, and yet Calderón claims victory with a margin of 243,000 votes. The blank votes are four times more than the supposed margin of Calderón's victory.

TDJ: But aren't blank ballots unreadable?

Palast: What they call a "blank a ballot" is ballot you can read, someone has marked it, but it wasn't read properly the first time or it was ignored because of machine problems. If you look at the ballot manually it should be easy to see the choice the voter made. López Obrador is asking for something really simple – a recount – just like Al Gore which was to count all the votes.
In Florida there were 179,000 ballots that weren't counted, that were labeled as "blank", which meant you couldn't read them well. If you looked at all of them manually, Gore would have won, and it is pretty clear if you go through these blank ballots in the Mexican election, López Obrador would have won. That's why they (Calderón campaign) don't want to count them.
Obviously they would want to count them if they had nothing to fear.
The reason is blank ballots are usually never random. If they showed randomly no one would have an advantage. Blank ballots that go bad or blank usually come from poor areas, usually where there is no voter protection.
Another thing that is astonishing is that there are 3,000 ballots that are missing. This is something that has not been reported, which is something called "negative drop off", which is when you have more people voting for the deputy or senator here in Mexico than the president.
So did people forget to vote for the President, when they walked into the voting booth in a big presidential election? I don't think so. The main thing people are interested in is the presidential election. It is very suspicious that all these people did not vote for president.

TDJ: How were they able to make so many ballots disappear?

Palast: How it works in Mexico that is there are three separate pieces of paper for senator, deputy and president, as a result it is very easy to throw out votes and say they are missing, and no one counts the unused ballots literally.
I've never seen anything like it, ballots can be marked and taken out of the voting booths and there is no control over these unused ballots. It's absolutely astonishing, there are literally 3 million votes floating. Anyone could have marked those ballots or lost them.
Some votes were actually found in the trash, but people who get rid of ballots are usually smarter than that.
So we lost a lot of votes that will never be found. So in a way even if you do a full recount, López Obrador might lose because of all of these factors. However, I am quite certain if we count all the blank ballots, and certainly all the ballots cast, the election will produce a higher total for López Obrador. In fact the few tally sheets that were recounted, gave the edge to López Obrador. And there is another suspicious thing, in Guerrero state there was a suspiciously low turnout, which is one of the strongest López Obrador areas (where Acapulco is located).
What happen is all over Mexico especially Mexico City you have a 68 percent turnout which is very high. However only 44 percent, half of the eligible voters showed up in Guerrero state. That just unbelievable, it can't be, there has to be some votes missing; López Obrador won the state 3 to 1, so if votes are missing they are his votes

TDJ: Do you think this is the new method the U.S is using to stop leftist governments from taking power? Basically by manipulated democratic elections?

Palast: Yes, and unfortunately that includes the United States itself.
Don't forget the method they used here, they practiced in Ohio and Florida. I was just investigating the methods they used in New Mexico in 2004 U.S presidential election and the parallels between New Mexico and Mexico is astonishing.
Missing votes, lots of blank ballots, etc Always in areas where progressive candidates have the edge. So what López Obrador is asking for, is counting all the votes is exactly like Al Gore wanted and what unfortunately John Kerry didn't do in 2004.

TDJ: One thing I noticed, at grassroots level, the Mexican people are very organized; they have organized massive rallies and have conducted civil resistance. Why do you think these kinds of manifestations didn't happen in Florida or in the U.S.? And what is the future?
Should we in the U.S. mobilize? What do we do, what is the next step?

Palast:Well, yeah, we should get angry and we should mobilize, and more important, we should demand from our candidates to count every vote. Al Gore demanded that the votes be recounted, but then of course he gave up. He did fight it, but he didn't take people to the streets.
The Republican Party did. They were very aggressive in their attempt to stop the vote.
And 2004 was a terrible shame because there was no attempt to count the votes that weren't counted, especially in places like New Mexico where there were 3,000 votes that were not counted. We aren't making counting the ballots a priority, we can't just demand it from our politicians; we have to demand it from all political parties. It's got to be no vote uncounted.

"It's pretty clear if you go through these blank ballots in the Mexican election López Obrador would of won, that's why they (Calderón
campaign) don't want to count them. Obviously they would want to count them if they had nothing to fear."

"We aren't making counting the ballots a priority, we can't just demand it from our politicians; we have to demand it from all political parties."


interview

ChoicePoint:
A mysterious company

Rodale Healthy Living

One of the biggest similarities between the Florida and the Mexican elections is the role of the U.S. firm ChoicePoint. Choice-Point is a company that according to their website "is the leading provider of identification and credential verification services for business and government agencies." In 2000, ChoicePoint was contracted by Governor Jeb Bush to have special access to Florida's voter database to root out possible felons from the voter rolls. Under Florida state law felons do not have the right to vote in any elections. However, thousands of people who had similar names to felons found themselves not registered when they went to the polls to vote in the 2000 presidential elections. Greg Palast, who uncovered this story, said this was a strategic maneuver by Governor Bush to deliver the election to his brother George W. Bush. Most of the people whose names were removed were African-American, who disproportionably votes for Democratic candidates; as a result of those people's names being kept off the list, which was in the thousands, Bush won with a margin of less than 500 votes.

After 9/11 Choice Point was given a "war on terror" contract by the Bush administration to look for possible terrorists in voter rolls outside of U.S. borders. Choice Point was able to access voter information from Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico. As Palast notes, all four countries had either leftist presidents or popular leftist presidential candidates However, earlier this year the Mexican justice department ruled that Choice Point access to voter rolls were illegal and ordered them to destroy all their voter information files. According to Palast that didn't necessarily mean they didn't give a copy of George W. Bush or to Calderón's political party, the PAN. Palast claims that with this information (license, job history, political affiliation, city, etc) on each voter, names could be systematically taken off from the voters' rolls that were left leaning or from a López Obradór stronghold. As a result, in several states, particularly in the state of Guerrero which went 3 to 1 for López Obrador, thousands of registered voters claimed they were not allowed to vote because their names were not on the rolls. Hence the mystery continues.

[bananas]

1. k&r nt

[Judi Lynn]

2. Good info., thank you. n/t